Dave Wendlinger Film/Video Production

Case in Point Video

    Here’s a little video illustrating a concept which may be difficult for many people to grasp. 

    Often, in developing countries and even in the first world, a simple task, like booking hotel rooms can be more complicated for a professional film/video crew traveling with many bulky and heavy bags, cases and bits of gear and personal belongings.
    In this example in the Russian city of Barnaul, our producers booked rooms in a “Tourist” hotel. 
    The hotel, like many abroad, occupied the upper floors of a high-rise building. The lobby of the hotel was on the thirteenth floor. Not a good omen, perhaps? The thirteenth floor was accessible by those ubiquitous narrow, tiny elevators so popular in Soviet-era Eastern European building design.
    What was not mentioned in any hotel brochure was that the many themed rooms in the hotel (Hobbit, Pirate, Cinema, apparently Mausoleum) and various other rather sickeningly brightly colored rooms were on the fourteenth and fifteenth floors of the building and were NOT serviced by any elevator! Just what a crew needs after a long, hard day of filming.
    The video below shows the path our crew needed to take to hand carry our many bulky and heavy bags, cases and bits of gear and personal belongings to our rooms.
    Lesson: maybe it doesn’t hurt to confirm that a potential hotel’s rooms are serviced by an elevator.
As an addendum to the video, twenty minutes after it was filmed, my Hobbit room was flooded by a torrent of water pouring from the wall behind the room’s armoire during a rather violent thunderstorm. I quickly moved to the “Mausoleum” room where I fell into a dead sleep for about three hours until the next day’s calltime.

What, and leave show business?