"Tanya Huff - Darkest Night 03 - Smoke and Ashes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Huff Tanya)

echoing footsteps in post, I think the scene’ll play…” The sound of large machinery revving up reduced
the rest of the director’s observation to moving lips and increasingly emphatic gestures.

Still standing on the top of the ladder from where he’d thrown the body pillow—Peter liked to be certain
about lines of sight—Tony Foster caught one of the gestures aimed at him, clambered down, and ran
over to the director’s side.

“I want one more take before we bring in Padma!” Mouth by Tony’s ear, Peter all but screamed to
make himself heard. “Deal with it, Mr. Foster!”

“How?”
“Any way that’ll get my footage!”

Any way.

Yeah. Tony headed for the construction site. Like he didn’t know what that meant.

Promoted back in August from production assistant to TAD, trainee assistant director, Tony found
himself in October still doing much the same thing he’d been doing as a PA—which surprised no one,
him least of all, since Chester Bane, the notoriously frugal head of CB Productions, hadn’t yet gotten
around to hiring someone to do his old job. Still, TAD meant he was now moving up in the Directors
Department with a raise in pay and a clear, union-sanctified path to the director’s chair. Not necessarily a
short path, but he was on it and that was the main thing. Since he’d been in the business less than a full
year, he really had nothing to complain about. Besides, CB’s penny-pinching ways ensured that he was
learning a lot more than he might have on a show with a larger personnel budget.

And on a show with a larger locations budget, he’d have never learned how to take advantage of
roadwork in order to get a normally busy Vancouver street cleared of traffic without having to go through
all the hassles at city hall or pay off-duty police officers to safely keep it that way. Half the permits. Half
the money spent. Digging for a sewer line guaranteed empty streets for blocks away from the actual
machinery and city hall had been more than willing to halve the inconvenience to Vancouver drivers.

There was, of course, a downside. They’d been working around the noise—construction seemed to
follow the same “hurry up and wait” schedule that television did—but that machine…

Backhoe, Tony realized as he drew closer.

… seemed to be settling in for a long roar. Sure, they could remove the sound in post, but Peter hated
looping dialogue. Mostly because Mason wasn’t particularly good at it, and the results always looked as
though a big rubbery monster was due to stomp Tokyo.

Any way didn’t include actually talking to the construction crew. The foreman had made it quite clear
earlier in the evening that they needn’t bother. He had a job to do and no fancy-assed, la-di-da television
show was going to put him off schedule.

With that attitude in mind, Tony stopped about six meters from the backhoe and watched the huge
bladed bucket bite through the asphalt. After a moment, he noticed that the operator worked in what was
essentially an open cab. Noticed, after a moment more, that her line of sight didn’t extend as far down as
the keys dangling off to one side of the double bank of bright yellow-and-black levers.