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I have a cousin, third or second I think, that works in camera and lighting who said they put in a good word for me and so today I was working as a runner for a shoot that’s going to be on TV.

It’s only an insert piece and I wasn’t doing anything important but it’s a step in the right direction.

The piece was for something called “Science Slam” and it was an outdoor youth competitions ‘to bring science to the streets’. It consisted of two teams of three, one for physics and one for chemistry and they were given tasks they had to complete use their sciences. For example, the fist task was to cook scrambled eggs. The physics team used a battery to make a spark that set fire to some steel wool to cook the eggs while the chemistry team mixed two chemicals together to make an exothermic reaction (it got hot).

Another example is when they had to blow up balloons. The chemistry students used a mixture of bicarbonate of soda and citric acid to produce enough carbon dioxide to blow them up while the physics team built a pump.

Other experiments included; separating a mixture of pepper and salt, hitting a target with a carrot and making bottle rockets.

It was an interesting day.

It was good to see that a professional shoot can be a lot like an amateur one (though with a higher budget). Of course in some ways it was a lot like some of the amateur shoots I’ve been on, down to the rush to get everything on schedule, the public being a nuisance and the inability to find extras.

Though, to be fair, the general public was pretty ok for the most part, it was just a few that were annoying. And the fact we didn’t have the amount of crowd they wanted is because they moved the day from yesterday because of the weather so apparently a lot of people couldn’t make it. (They needed to move the day though. It was wonderfully sunny today but yesterday was all rain and tomorrow looks like it will be as well.)

It was a long day, started at 8am and finished at 530pm, and I was standing for all of it so I tired now.

But at least I can now say I’ve worked for RTE.