A Moving Experience

Okay, there was a little gap in posting there. Been so long I couldn't even remember how to log in.

So let me turn to the matter of starting a brief catch up on activities since my last post.

Spent a good chunk of the summer clearing out the warehouse where we have shot the last six Likens. I've moved a bit over the years, and it is not my favorite thing to do. This was like moving ten houses. And not just any ten houses -- ten houses that have been lived in for a hundred years each, and stuff has accumulated, and half of it when you pick it up, you wonder what it is and if you need to keep it, chuck it or try to sell it (wonder what a prehistoric hair-dresser chair goes for these days on eBay?).

Eventually, thanks to some key helpers (I hope my daughters will someday forgive me), Josh and I got it done. We cleared out the warehouse, moved all the stuff we wanted to keep into storage units that cost about a tenth of the price of the warehouse. What a workout. The units are packed to the rafters, but at least we were able to keep all the pieces that will be useful for future productions or that are just items we couldn't bear to part with (yep, we kept the Esther chair).

It was sad to say goodbye to the "studio" (so many great memories), but on the other hand, it was good to get rid of the overhead that could be put to much better use. And frankly, it wasn't a great shooting space (too small, not adequately air conditioned, bad acoustics, and only two bathrooms -- not great when you have a hundred fifty people on set and you wanna break for five minutes).

To further complicate matters, we had our offices remodeled, so we had to clear out of them for about six weeks. And where did we move in the interim? To the warehouse space that we were in the process of relocating. Very tight quarters, and pretty much chaos during that period.

But we are now back in our offices (upstairs in the same building we've been in for the past four years), and though we aren't fully settled back in (still some boxes around, pictures need to be hung, that kind of stuff), it is nice to know where you're going to be working when you go to work and to know that if you need to make a call, you can pick up a phone and there will be an actual dial tone. All told, it was the biggest move in my life, yet strangely enough, when all is said and done, I still go to work in exactly the same office I did when I started the process months ago. Weird.

As for where we are going to shoot further Likens (and yes, there WILL be further Likens), it will be much more cost-effective and practical for us to rent actual working production stages. So the memories of shooting here in our East Bay warehouse can remain fondly preserved, but let's see if we can find somewhere better to shoot going forward.

More on that later...