That really is a new one ! I think the last time I saw an odd apple box color was black. Oh, and over at PIX, a local photo equipment rental house, they stain their boxes with a wood finish-look. Not sure why they even did it but sure looks unusual.
Over the years, I've seen apple boxes in all sorts of colors -- red, brown, gray, blue, black, and green, but until now, never a Pepto-Bismol pink apple box.
Apple boxes are very useful items, though, and those with an undistinctive/generic appearance tend to get wander and get "lost" -- so those who bring their own on the job (mostly grips, but occasionally special effects) have good reason for painting them in unusual colors.
I keep a couple of apple boxes around the apartment and two more back on the home planet, because they come in handy all the time. Personally, I favor a nice wood stain finish, but there's one thing that pink apple box has going for it: nobody is going to walk off with it by mistake...
We used to use pink apple boxes all the time when I was gaffing visual FX. It kept them from turning up in the greenscreen matte when someone left one behind on the spaceship set or in the miniature cityscape because it was the one color that never blended in or got overlooked. We also had some greenscreen ones for stepups and stuff. There was no worse feeling than to spend 17 hours doing passes for a yeeping yo yo, only to discover the key matte was useless because of a forgotten apple box in frame.
I made my own apple boxes, not just because I'm cheap, but because I thought the UPS rates for 6 sets was unreasonable. I gave three sides a clear sealer and three side are flat black. Made sense to extend they useful life.
Born and raised in a rural pocket of the San Francisco Bay Area, I graduated from UC Santa Cruz clutching a degree in Aesthetic Studies. Armed with this paper sword, boundless ignorance, and a vision of Hollywood heavily influenced by the movie “Shampoo” (and seriously, what guy didn’t want to be Warren Beatty back then?), I proceeded to march on Hollywood in the spirit of a young man seeking adventure, a living -- and if Lady Luck deigned to smile upon me, perhaps a small fortune. Adventure, I found. A living, I made, but although Lady Luck has thus far kept me safe from harm on the road-raging freeways and bullet-riddled streets of Los Angeles, that elusive fortune remains but a shiny mirage on the road ahead.
I'm now playing out the string on a thirty year career in set lighting, trying to hang on until the bitter end.
7 comments:
That really is a new one ! I think the last time I saw an odd apple box color was black. Oh, and over at PIX, a local photo equipment rental house, they stain their boxes with a wood finish-look. Not sure why they even did it but sure looks unusual.
Whenever I work in Boston, I run across apple boxes with the Blake logo (fading). I built many of those almost 30 years ago!
And it's not just that the one you shot is pink, it's that it's a particularly vile shade of pink. It must be indestructible to still be in one piece.
if you're going to stand out it might as well be with a oil' style. Pink apple boxes are the new black. Spielberg just ordered 30 of em.
That's supposed to read "a lil' style" not "oil" style
Over the years, I've seen apple boxes in all sorts of colors -- red, brown, gray, blue, black, and green, but until now, never a Pepto-Bismol pink apple box.
Apple boxes are very useful items, though, and those with an undistinctive/generic appearance tend to get wander and get "lost" -- so those who bring their own on the job (mostly grips, but occasionally special effects) have good reason for painting them in unusual colors.
I keep a couple of apple boxes around the apartment and two more back on the home planet, because they come in handy all the time. Personally, I favor a nice wood stain finish, but there's one thing that pink apple box has going for it: nobody is going to walk off with it by mistake...
We used to use pink apple boxes all the time when I was gaffing visual FX. It kept them from turning up in the greenscreen matte when someone left one behind on the spaceship set or in the miniature cityscape because it was the one color that never blended in or got overlooked. We also had some greenscreen ones for stepups and stuff. There was no worse feeling than to spend 17 hours doing passes for a yeeping yo yo, only to discover the key matte was useless because of a forgotten apple box in frame.
I made my own apple boxes, not just because I'm cheap, but because I thought the UPS rates for 6 sets was unreasonable. I gave three sides a clear sealer and three side are flat black. Made sense to extend they useful life.
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