Thursday, August 08, 2002

DAY TWO "Honda/Japan"-Today we shot in Bellflower, CA. It was hot as could be and I really felt it. For me, it got interesting really early. We were only on about the second shot of the day and I started feeling a little weird. Now I'm not a "False Alarm Frank" type, if you hear me complain, it's for real.

So we're in the middle of this shot, they are shooting print as well as film so it's taking some time. This feeling came over me and my life went into slow motion. All of the sudden I thought I was going to faint. No REALLY faint!! As in fall on my face and wake up with a bloody nose. I started thinking about how embarrassed I would be if I had to interrupt the shot. Ten seconds later the shot was still going. We were getting directions to laugh and joke around. I was ready to collapse. I kinda made a motion to the producer that I needed water, but he didn't see or hear me. Then I tried to laugh to keep myself alert just to get through the shot. All that was really doing was using my last bit of energy. At this point I felt like I was going to black out.
This is all happening in about 2-3 minutes. Mind you, the last thing I wanted to do was to interrupt the job that 40-50 people on the film crew were doing. Again my life was in slow motion and going slower. I could not believe that I couldn't make it to the end of this take. I was starting to sway on my feet.

As embarrassed as I was going to be for stopping in the middle of a take, it would have been worse if I actually collapsed and fell on my face and started bleeding. This was the last straw. If we didn't cut in the next 5-10 seconds I would just have to stop.

Now I became two different people, lethargic Stephon and another guy who was watching this all happen. I mumbled to the producer "Ron, I need water......no, I need it now." They immediately cut and I fell back towards the mini-van and slid to the ground. Right away there were 10-12 people around me with water, a smoothie, and shade just trying to cool me down. I could not believe this was happening to me. We broke for about 30 minutes and the set paramedic kept an eye on me to make sure I was cool to start working again. It was at this moment that I found out that I was not invincible. WHAT!!! Drink lots water kids!! Anyway the rest of the day went on without a hitch.

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