SEPTEMBER 2015
Vol 217
A Bad Day at the Office A crew on a recent shoot in Auckland was interrupted by a lot of armed police. Yes, Auckland – not Cairo. To tell us the story, one of the crew, Michael Engelbrecht: Ed: What were you doing at the time Michael? Michael: I was on a music video shoot operating a DJI Ronin camera stabilisation rig from Staples Productions – we get all our gear from there. The thing about these rigs is that they’re kind of complicated to set up. Generally, we set them up the night before and then take them to the set the next day, ready to go. We were driving to location with it Michael’s not really a poster boy for “Armed and Dangerous Monthly” I would say. ready to go in the front seat. So it was there rigged up with the camera on it, sitting on my lap in the passenger seat maybe not too much to do, just seeing what these vans as we drove to set. This would have been about 6.00am are up to”, that’s cool. So we arrive at the location, we on a Sunday morning – 2 unmarked vans driving in start unpacking the vans and look up again and find the convoy in Mt Wellington to an empty office building. guy’s gone. “Ok, he’s checked us out and he’s not Admittedly, it must have looked a bit suspicious, because concerned”. an undercover cop started following us. About 15 minutes later, we were still unloading the vans; We noticed straightaway – he wasn’t too low key. We were just like “oh, that looks like a cop, but it’s 6.00am on a Sunday morning, he must be a little bit bored,
I’m in the back of one van pulling out this light stand and I hear “Turn around and put your hands in the air.” Just like an episode of Cops, I turned around and this