Injury Reflections

Injuries are a time to take stock I reckon. As a lot of you probably know, I well and truly stuffed myself last month by being a dumb ass and trying to run down a train, while wearing jandals. Which taught me a couple of important lessons. Firstly, trains only stop for people running after them in the movies. Also, that 51-year-old Graeme can’t – or shouldn’t – run like 21-year-old Graeme could. And lastly, with a pair of partially ruptured Achilles tendons, it’ll probably be at least a couple of months before I’m ready to set boot on a film set again. My chances of running back to the truck for a crate of wedges anytime before Spring are pretty much nil.

The only upside to all this is that maybe I’m feeling the current downturn a bit less than most of you. Even if there was work out there, I wouldn’t be available to do it. Not that it makes the days of stressing about the bills any easier. If this downturn had happened last year, I could have picked up some truck driving work until the lull had passed. With both ankles in bandages that’s not really an option.

So, like many of you I’m spending my time doing what I can to earn and wondering when it might all come right.

The short answer is...September. From then on we should mostly be working again and quite probably turning down gigs because we are booked on others. But after a very quiet Autumn and Winter, it’ll be a familiar frustration of too many productions cranking up at once. So, again, how do we sort this?

Do we petition the commish to stagger funding decisions across the year? Do we ask the producers to communicate with each other so that they’re not all competing for crew and studios in the same months? Or do we just resign ourselves to working in a seasonal industry, even though a lot of what we do is studio-based and not weather dependent?

Answers on the back of a disused logbook, please.