For the producers and actors: what was your worst recording session like?

[Stuck_Cat]

This is for anyone involved in the quicksand fetish business. Whether you're an actor, a producer, a cameraman, or anyone else in the business described in the first sentence of this message, I've got a question for y'all.

What was your worst recording session like? Mishaps happen, and I want as many details of them as possible.

[dlodoski]

Here are the important details:

I got treated like shit.

Model releases were signed.

The scenes still sell very well ten years later (insert last laugh here).

[Fred588]

The shoot itself went very well. Then, a day later I got a frantic phone call from one of the models. Had I found her passport? She needed it urgently as ID for a hotel reservation. Hang on, let me look around. Two minutes later. Yep, I just found it under the bed you used. Two hours later I was at FedEx with a package. $60.00. All was well - I even got the 60.00 back a few months later. If you asked her the same question I expect you might get the same answer.

[Duncan Edwards]

Worst ever, with MPV, Studio 588, myself, or anywhere, was better than any day at my day job. And I have a nice day job. There are a few, we happy few, who are supremely blessed by exertion and fortune to get to do this. In the final analysis there are no "worst" sessions.

[Nessie]

My worst shoot ever was my first shoot ever (that wasn't featuring me, myself and I).

After I:

Thoroughly reviewed her portfolio (lots of wetlook and underwater stuff) --

spent a few emails making sure this girl was good with all this --

I then picked her up at her house--

and bought her a bikini--

and I drove over 30 miles to the site--

she even changed clothes -- then --

She backed out of signing the modeling agreement. I drove her all the way back home in grumpy silence.

Maybe this isn't the worst shoot ever since technically it never actually happened but forever after, the modeling release was presented as soon as I could make it happen.

Nessie

[QuicksandMania]

Best, worst, and only weekend as a crew member took place in 2000 with MPV (thanks again Dave! ♥️) when snipping vines for props that were actually poison sumac. ☣️ Think of me when you see the hanging Q symbols in MPV's parody of "The Blair Witch Project"!

P.S. Dave's wife's excellent cooking offered plenty of compensation!

[Nessie]

when snipping vines for props that were actually poison sumac.

Yeeeow! I feel your pain.

They say online that this is a rare plant but I had one site that was overrun with it. Rare my eye. It was growing as dense as dandelions.

Fortunately I caught it myself BEFORE taking an actress there. It wasn't the end of shooting at that site, but there were strict rules to follow.

Nessie

[TK421]

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I haven’t done too much QS stuff except for the time I worked with Michael over at what was once was Damsels in Distress so I’ll just pick on my overall experience from least to greatest.

-Mud splatter on my rig, ALWAYS. Luckily my lenses are weather sealed

-When we had Bella Luxx and Calisa over for oil and mud wrestling, I had 2tb which typically is more than enough for 6 hours of shooting. Issue was, I somehow got less than half that and was quickly running out of memory midway through the shoot. Come to find out, I forgot to switch my bitrate over to 8:1 and was shooting in the highest possible bitrate at 6K

-Had a model no show for our first mud wrestling shoot. She literally went to Vegas instead and posted stories on Instagram thinking I wouldn’t see it. Luckily, a model stepped up at zero hour and the shoot went in as planned. That young lady would be Cora who would shoot with us a few times.

-before we adopted recording on a Hyperdeck, I was running camera for a production in Boston and we were doing memory swaps midway through. Director gave me my CFast card and I popped it in…

…except he handed me the wrong one and it was memory from a previous event that has yet to be exported. The entire card was lost.

-was running an ATEM video mixer for an event and camera 3 was a shoulder rig. Unfortunately, the operator failed to lock down the camera on its base and we watched helplessly as a 8,000.00 Blackmagic Ursa with a 12k Canon Servo lens slide off the shoulder rig onto the floor

[TK421]

Worst ever, with MPV, Studio 588, myself, or anywhere, was better than any day at my day job. And I have a nice day job. There are a few, we happy few, who are supremely blessed by exertion and fortune to get to do this. In the final analysis there are no "worst" sessions.

This^. For all the headaches that come with the job, there is a miserable guy staring at PDF and Excel docs for a living, so I can’t complain. It’s fun, it’s exciting and there is always something new lurking around the corner. The true blessing is when the final product is out and people dig the work you and the ladies put into it. That’s typically why we keep coming back

[Jumpoff_Joe]

A model took to scratching her face before the shoot began, causing it to bleed profusely, saying that she started using meth again. Yikes! I was instantly watching her every move to make sure she didn't steal anything and paid her a quick cancellation fee to leave immediately (she refused to unless I gave her something).

I have had my share of models try to change the terms (ask for more money), refuse to sign agreements, refuse to complete the shoot, and in one case, start openly cursing me out during the shoot. I have had models not show up. I have been in situations where models' escorts try to take photos of their own (including photos of me!) or try to fly drones or do something similarly disruptive.

I haven't had a lot of outside people interrupt the shoots themselves but a few have come up to models that were off changing clothes and have offered "help" or some other similar harassment. The one time I remember most was chasing off an older (60s?) shirtless jogger who was following both Litty LeRouge and my assistant around through the forest, asking if they were "lost." As soon as I approached he got lost, himself.