Dirty Jobs with Mark Brinker

Pretty much the first paying job I had when I moved to Los Angeles was this concert sponsored by Nokia at the art museum The Getty Center. Nokia has this phone with a high resolution camera on it. What Nokia wanted to do was have representatives use the camera to take people's pictures and then e-mail the pictures from the phone to a Flickr page, and on top of one of the Getty Center buildings we set up a laptop and a projector, so the pictures taken on the phone were projected onto the side of one of the Getty Center buildings. Our crew spent the afternoon setting up the projector and building a tent in which the photos would be taken, and then once the concert started everybody left the roof to go eat hot dogs and listen to the music. Except for me.

It turned out that the computer's screen saver went on automatically if the computer sat still for more than 5 minutes. And because the computer was a Nokia corporate issued computer, that setting couldn't be changed. So my job was to sit on the roof of the Getty Center throughout the concert, moving the mouse slightly every few minutes so the computer didn't go to sleep.

Then, a few weeks later, I was at my boss's house working on Halloween. I get paid a flat rate for 12 hour day, so sometimes if we finish what we're doing early, my boss will have me hang around to see if anything else comes up. After the work was done on Halloween, my boss said "You know what? I've got some stuff to work on in the other room. Could you sit by the door and answer it for Trick or Treaters?" So I did.

Probably the highest profile job I've had so far was on a photo shoot with Jessica Simpson for a line of hair extensions sponsored by her and her stylist, Ken Paves. The theme of all the photos was a single Ken Paves interacting with several Jessica Simpsons.



In one of the photos Ken was a store owner and all the mannequins were Jessica Simpsons. The director decided at the last minute that it would be funny to have Ken carrying Jessica under his arm like she was light and stiff and in a mannequin pose. The solution we came up with was to have Jessica lay on a board that two people held, and have Ken pretend to hold her, and later photoshop out the board and the people holding it.

I was on the head-end of the board. Jessica Simpson said "I'm sorry you guys. This is probably so heavy!"
I said "Don't worry about it."

So it's clear that these jobs have been tests where the importance of my role has increased as they've checked off the list the things I can be trusted to do, such as Mouse Moving, Door Answering, and Celebrity Lifting (for Aquatic Leaf Moving, see The Wetsuit Story). And it's all been building up to this:


FLOOR MAKING! That saltillo tile floor is actually a photo printout, based on a tile that I made in photoshop and then tiled in illustrator. That floor is the culmination of everything I learned at RISD. It's by far the biggest job, both in terms of importance, and physically, that I've done in Los Angeles. Who is Mark Brinker? That floor is Mark Brinker.

Needless to say, I may have hit my peak, and I can only assume that a cocaine addiction and subsequent downfall is right around the corner. When you're this high, there's really only one direction you can go.

Mo Money Mo Problems

I walk by this sign a lot and finally took a picture of it. Now that it's looking like we'll probably have a border relaxing Democrat in the White House, I think we'll all be needing a little Mexican insurance.

Yesterday I turned in all my receipts for the expenses accrued on the recent Ikea job, like food, gas, and supplies I had to buy. This morning I got a semi-angry call from my boss saying that I had included a receipt for a 24oz Sapporo Draft beer from 7-11. I said "Are you being serious?" and my boss said "Yes." I said "Do they even sell beer at 7-11?" and he said "Of course they do." I said "I don't know what happened. They must have given me the wrong receipt or something," and he said "I'm taking it out of the folder. Just make sure it doesn't happen again." So now my boss thinks that I drink the big 24oz cans of beer while on the clock and then try to get reimbursed for them.

Also on this job I had to buy a bunch of faceplates for light switches and outlets (which are apparently technically called "receptacles") that amounted to about $150, though we only ended up using about $18 worth. After the shoot I couldn't find the unused ones to return them, but when I asked the guy I thought might know where they were, he said "Oh I returned them for you." He then gave me 3 Home Depot Gift Cards. He said "One of these has your money on it. Just take them in and figure out which one is yours, and then give the other two back to me, because one of them has like 400 dollars on it that I'm going to use to remodel my kitchen."

So I took the gift cards in and priced them. One has $190 on it, one has $44 on it, and one has $0 on it. 190 is more than the initial purchase, but 44 dollars is $116 less. And it appears that $400 dollars of the other guy's money is missing.

I told my boss about the whole thing, and he said that I should just use all of the cards to buy a bunch of stuff from Home Depot to teach this guy a lesson about repaying people in Gift Cards.

But there are 2 catches. For one, if this guy thinks he has 400 dollars on one of the cards, and I say I spent all the cards, he thinks I've stolen 400 dollars from him. The second catch is that this guy is in a motorcycle "some call it a club, some call it a gang" called Los Vagos. So the question becomes do I assume that the 44 dollar card is mine and give the other two back, do I spend all of the money and tell this guy that my boss told me to, "and by the way the card you thought had a lot of money on it actually had no money on it, swear to god," or do I move out of California with no forwarding address? If I disappear, at least you guys will know the reason why.

Also, has anyone else seen this Taco Bell advertising campaign?:



Christians be lovin they Caramel Apple Empanadas!

The Wetsuit Story

I was working on a Domino's commercial, and the night before they e-mailed me the call sheet with the names and phone numbers of the crew. There was a note at the bottom. It said "Note: There will be a 7 foot alligator on set tomorrow. All untrained crew are to remain at least 15 feet away from the alligator at all times."

This was probably the third job I had worked with these people, and I was trying really hard not to ask too many questions, especially since I knew so little about the tools, techniques, and behaviors necessary for the job, and hoped that if I just jumped in to things people would think I knew what I was doing. So I didn't ask questions when the first thing to do at work was to sink black tarps to the bottom of a swimming pool, and then to fill the pool with branches and dirt and lily pads so that it looked like a swamp.

The morning passed with no sign of the alligator and with little incident. Except shortly before lunch, my boss walked up to me holding a wetsuit. He held it up to me. "You look like about a large, right?" he said.

Since I was so new to this job the other people in the art department had decided it was really funny to give me fake requests and see how I dealt with them, especially when told to do things that don't need to be done, or find things that don't exist (apparently "sandwich clamps" mean your hands, and there is no such thing as a "left handed smoke-shifter.") So I was a little skeptical about the wetsuit.

Until about an hour later, when my boss looked at his watch and then said, "Okay, put on the wetsuit."
"Seriously?" I said.
"Yeah," he said.
"I don't have a bathing suit or anything."
"Darren has a bathing suit you can borrow."
"Can Darren just put on the wetsuit instead?" I didn't actually say that, because I was trying not to ask too many questions.

Instead I borrowed Darren's bathing suit and walked down the block to the mobile home bathrooms to change into it. As I came out, a minivan drove past me and parked in front of the house we were shooting in. As I got closer I saw that it said "Cinema Critters" on the side.

I'd imagined something along the lines of a metal trailer attached to a truck, like something out of Jurassic Park, or at least something like the kind of trailer that horses and sheep are driven around in. Instead, the alligator showed up in the back of a minivan with its mouth duct-taped shut.

I went back to the pool to double check that this wetsuit thing wasn't a joke. I was wearing the bathing suit under my jeans, and if it all turned out to be a joke, I could just manage with those for the rest of the day, but once the wetsuit went on there'd be no taking it off.
"What are you waiting for," my boss said. "Get to it."

Being from the land-locked midwest I've only had the opportunity to put on a wetsuit once before in my life, and that was under strict SCUBA instructor supervision. So in my haste to get the thing on, like putting on a wetsuit next to a swampy pool with a 7 foot alligator waiting in the back of a nearby minivan was just part of the job, I put the wetsuit on backwards (it zips up the front, just like a coat, was my thinking.) So I turned to my boss and said "Now what," and he started laughing, and then took a picture on his iphone, and then told me it was on backwards, then pointed it out to the rest of the art department. So I hastily took it off and put it back on with the zipper in the back, and stood to the side and tried to look inconspicuous, the only guy in a wetsuit near a pool surrounded by people wearing normal clothes.

Until some other crew member walked by me and said, "You know you've got that thing on inside out?"
"You're kidding," I said. "Really?"
"Yeah," he said. "I know. I used to be a SCUBA instructor."
"I used to be SCUBA Certified," I said, peeling off the wetsuit as fast as possible.
"Well a lot's changed since then," he said.
Then Darren walked by as I was putting the wetsuit on the right way, and told me that the bathing suit was also on backwards.

What it turned out they needed me to do was go into the pool and adjust the leaves and branches slightly, and later, if the alligator ended up going in the pool, I might have to readjust the branches that it moved away while sliding in. Apparently nobody knew for sure if the alligator would go in the pool.

Meanwhile, I still had to do my job as part of the art department, which meant sprinkling leaves all around the concrete side of the pool, and then hosing those leaves away when the director changed his mind and decided he didn't like them. Someone handed me the hose to coil up. "Leave it turned on," he said, "in case we need to spray the side of the pool again." So I left the water on and coiled the hose up and dropped it on the ground, not taking into account the nozzle on the end, which clicked on as soon as the hose hit the concrete, and sprayed water directly at the camera. "WHOA!" the camera department yelled, and I turned the water off, and they started trying to dry off the camera. Somehow nobody in the art department saw that, and I'm hoping none of them read this, because I know I probably would have fired me for that.

After that I just stood to the side, having decided that in my frazzled, wet-suited state, anything I touched would get messed up. I had been in the water already to move some leaves around, and was getting cold wearing a now wet wetsuit. My shoes and coat I had set aside by the pool, and I was just about to go get them when the 1st Assistant Director called "Alligator's coming through!" and 4 guys from Cinema Critters carried the alligator through the garage and into the back yard, setting it down next to the pool, directly between me and my shoes. "Everybody stand back, we're untaping her mouth," they said, and then did.

I wish for the sake of the story I could say that I somehow ended up having to be in the water at the same time as the alligator, but that climax wasn't to be. Instead, the alligator just sat still until the handlers prodded it with some poles, at which point it would slowly walk forward while the camera filmed it, and when it got within 15 feet of the director, the handlers would jump on it and drag it back to a safe distance, where it would sit until they prodded it again. At one point they tried to make it go in the water, but the alligator continued walking forwards and one of the handlers said "No way she's going in there!"

Eventually she left, and there was little point in my ever having put on the wetsuit, except that at the end of the shoot I had to get in the pool to fish out the tarps we had dropped in at the beginning of the day.

I got to keep the wetsuit. I've been debating things I can do with it, besides practicing putting it on. The best idea I've come up with is to take a shower while wearing it, and zip a bar of soap inside the wetsuit, and let the water permeate until the soap is all gone. I like to think this will give me a deeper clean.

An Adventure of Cosmic Proportions

My name is Mark Brinker and I live in Los Angeles. Now we're all on the same page. I'm starting this blog mostly to post the ridiculous artwork I end up making for my job as a graphic designer on commercials.

So I was working on this Ikea commercial, and after a 12 hour day my boss told me he needed more set dressings for the next day's shoot, specifically rock band posters and "Star Wars-type posters."



So this was my first attempt. I printed it out and my boss said "Absolutely not." He said "I'm looking for something with like Yoda on it. Something more along the lines of... you know. Like Yoda."

A part of my job is making sure that all artwork used on the walls of the set is cleared, so that George Lucas doesn't see Yoda in the background when he's watching an Ikea commercial and sue Ikea and the production company and my boss and me. And rolling into the fifteenth hour now, I couldn't think what was similar to Yoda but royalty free. Until I had this epiphany: Yoda's basically just an old man with green skin and crazy ears. I'll just do that. I can make my own Yoda!



I showed this to my boss. He said "You know what? Fuck it. I think let's call it a night," and then, sort of under his breath, "Looks like fuckin Ghandi with Elf Ears."
So the moral of the story is once again Yoda has helped me get to sleep. Thanks for reading.