So my daughter (who is 11) has a really hard time whenever I go away for work. She misses me terribly and sheds a lot of tears. The only way I could think to resolve this was to bring her with me, so that’s exactly what I did. So last week, we left for La Ronge on Monday and didn’t return until Friday. She slept for about half of the drive there and most of the drive back. But I enjoyed her company when she was awake, and also when she was asleep because just her presence alone put a smile on my face.
She handled the monotony of a lot of sitting around on set well. Most of the work I do happens before we leave for the trip. All the arranging basically. So when we’re there, I usually just get people to sign release forms, take notes, do the camera logs and deal with things as they come up. But I am always busy working on other things in the meantime, but this time around I spent a lot of time entertaining my daughter, which was okay because there wasn’t a whole lot going on. It happens. Things often change on the fly when you are shooting a documentary, so you just gotta make the best of it, which we did.
So I taught my daughter how to do the camera logs and she caught on to that really fast and one of our DOP’s (Director of Photography) taught her how to do a form of what looked like cross stitching to me. It was really sweet and she sewed a little red heart onto a piece of fabric and it turned out really well! She also made some home-made word search puzzles. Two that I did and one that our other DOP did. It was quite the challenge as it took him at least 45 minutes! Ha!
So despite the slow days, she enjoyed herself and was happy she came and I’m happy I brought her.