Random 10 Mar 2005 03:32 pm
Melbourne, Texas
Yesterday, when I left for work, all the cars parked in our block of the street had Texas license plates. Which, considering that we are half a world away from Texas, is a little peculiar. The reason for this is the filming of the Ghost Rider movie, currently happening here in Melbourne. When I got back home in the afternoon, our street was a piece of Texas: all commercial buildings had new signs in front, most of them in Spanish, and there were even newspaper boxes selling the Houston Chronicle (dated Feb. 5th).
At night, the actual filming was interesting and spectacular. The scene they did has a character riding a motorbike (presumably the Ghost Rider) down the street, and all parked cars blowing up as he passes by them, as if he were creating a sonic boom. The rider was filmed separately from the explosions; he went down the street four or five times (plus rehearsals), but the cars exploded only once, for obvious reasons. And we watched it all from our apartment; it’s not every day that you have cars exploding and stores going up in flames right under your window.
The bad part was that it took them most of the night to clean the street up, which made it a little hard to sleep. And they’re coming back: there’s more filming next Sunday, and the street is going to be closed from noon on Saturday until 7am on Monday. I’ll let you know if they blow up anything interesting.
