There's a first time for everything, right? Corporate blogging. Try that one on for size.
I'm Julie Mills, Sales Adviser at Hammer Lighting and Grip in Indianapolis. My job is to help customers find and acquire the rental equipment needed for their next TV or film production. Sometimes this is as easy as loading up a generator or HMI into the back of a SUV. Other times, it requires coordinating an overnight shipment with Mole-Richardson in order to get a new piece of gear on the grip truck for a job the next day. Whatever the job is, I'm up for the challenge.
In addition to working here in the lighting rental house, I am fortunate enough to be able to go out and freelance as a lighting technician. This enables me to constantly be learning about both sides of the business. It also allows me to represent Hammer Lighting and Grip on set when clients or crew have questions or requests.
The day has finally come! We are having a new phone system installed at Hammer Lighting and Grip today and it is brilliant! This will improve all aspects of communication at our lighting rental house. We will be a quicker and more efficient team. When you call, you'll be able to immediately connect with the person you need to speak with. You can go directly to Sean if you have a question about a piece of gear on a truck that he is loading for you. Or, you can hit Derek's extension if you have already been working with him about an upcoming job. Or, you can dial Alyssa if you need to schedule a truck or if you have questions about the type of insurance you need. Finally, you can punch my number to speak about purchasing new or used equipment. These extensions will ring us at our desk and on our cell phones simultaneously. Therefore, we will always be available for your lighting and grip rental needs!
Prepare yourself for the 20 degree days by renting the winter essentials from your favorite Indiana Lighting and Grip Rental House! We have 10'x10' and 10'x20' EZ-Up tents available for you! When requested, they come with sides to keep that cold wind at bay. You could also keep warm with our portable heaters! They are 18,000 BTU heaters that are safe to use indoors and come with 16 ounce propane tanks. Each tank lasts 3 hours and is very easy to change.
If these heaters aren't enough for you, we also have the Salamander! This beast could melt the abominable snowman in seconds! It is a 155,000 BTU propane heater that will be sure to keep your clients and crew warm in any conditions!
We feel that as a Midwest lighting and grip company, we must provide the best options for keeping you warm in the winter! Don't forget the hot chocolate!
One of the newest additions to the Hammer Lighting and Grip rental inventory is the
Chimera Triolet Convertible Omni-Directional Light (Model #9950). It's one of the most versatile lights we have! It can be used with any Video Pro Chimera or the Pancake Lantern, if you choose, with a quick release speed ring.
It comes with a 2-Pin adapter, a double contact bayonet adapter, a diffusion glass dome, and a medium household screw-in adapter. Point is, all of these accessories allow you to use this light with 1000w, 750w, 500w, 200w, or 150w bulbs!!
I've packed the light, all of the adapters, and 2 of each of these bulbs in one medium-sized Pelican case for your convenience. The only thing that's not included in this kit is a Chimera. You can pick that out when you call in your order to Alyssa at 317-547-4747!
Enjoy!
Many people don't know this but along with all of the other lighting and grip rental equipment we provide, we also have Motorola GP300 VHF radios available. As a Midwest lighting and grip rental company, we stock a good amount of these and their accessories. With the rental of this radio, you have the choice of headsets, ear buds, speaker mics, and holsters available for you at no extra cost! (Most lighting rental companies charge extra for this!)
Another item in our inventory that people often forget about is the bullhorn! Why is this item so obsolete now? Do you not need to get the attention of the crew anymore? Don't let some dazed and confused grip walk through the shot... use the bullhorn to announce "ROLLING!"
For questions about either of these items, call Hammer Lighting & Grip at (317) 547-4747!
Why am I not surprised... our cost for foamcore has risen once again! Since we last ordered it in May, it has gone up by $0.55 a sheet! It may not sound like much but when you order hundreds of sheets a year, it can add up quickly. Especially when the price increases each time you call!
OK, well it's not actually Earth Day nation wide... just for us here at Hammer Lighting & Grip! Derek purchased two Red Sunset Maples recently and we finally have time and a perfect day to plant them.
They will go in front of the building and really look beautiful on the property. I can't wait until this fall when the leaves turn that great color!
Along with maintaining the grip trucks and lighting and grip equipment, we also like to spend time on our property. We have made many improvements to our lot over the last 2 years it's really looking great!
The lighting rental equipment here at Hammer Lighting and Grip is constantly changing. It is my job to make sure that we have every bit of information on the items coming in and out of our rental inventory at our fingertips at all times. I created what I enjoy calling the "Mega Master Inventory List" many, many months ago. However, I cannot seem to complete this project. We keep finding more rental gear to add to it. I never realized how much lighting and grip equipment you must have to run a rental house like this. Even just today I found a few pieces of grip equipment in our warehouse that was not on this list. There are so many things that have been custom made or ordered for certain productions that nobody even knows about! My goal is to provide our customers with all of the information on these pieces so they can take advantage of the specialty items that exist right here in Indianapolis!
Please call us at 317-547-GRIP if there is something in particular you are looking for or visit our website at
www.hammergrip.tv! Check back often because as I said before, it is constantly being updated!
Along with our lighting and grip rentals, we also have plenty of grip equipment to sell! We recently had Steve Jensen, a local freelancer by day/carpenter by night, build us some apple boxes for our grip trucks. We decided to have him build extras for anybody who might want a set or two. Give us a call at 547-GRIP or check them out in our display room if you are interested!
In my mind, the worst thing a lighting rental house could do is stop the ebb and flow of gear. Here at
Hammer Lighting & Grip, we are always buying and selling rental equipment. We have already replaced 3
grip trucks and 2
generators in our 11 years in business. This is especially important with
HMI's. The technology is so new that we must keep buying and selling HMI's so that we are constantly improving the quality of our inventory. Manufacturers are always making changes to their lights. For example,
Kino Flo improved the design on their backplates. They have changed the 4 push pins design into a easier and safer twist lock backplate. This is a great improvement and we will soon be switching all of our heads and backplates to the new design but it will cost us about $300 per light!
Although these improvements can be expensive, we think they are very important to maintaining our top of the line lighting and grip equipment.
A customer asked me yesterday, "How do you wash this green screen?" He had just rented our 20' x 30' Chromakey green screen and hung it in a studio downtown Indianapolis.
This question made me laugh because it just so happened that we had washed it 3 times in the past week. It originally had some footprints on it and hadn't been washed in a while. So we took all of the strings off of the edges of it and called our friends at Classic Cleaners. They pick it up, wash it in one of their super-sized washers, and deliver it back to us in a plastic tote so it doesn't dry out. Then we retie all the strings on it, build a 20' x 30' frame in the shop, and carefully hang the green screen without letting it hit the floor! We hang it on a frame while it's still wet to keep the fabric from shrinking.
After doing this once, we noticed a mysterious stain right in the middle of it. So, after repeating these steps not 1, but 2 more times, we finally got the green screen spotless and ready for its next job.
This time-consuming process might explain why we like to keep it as clean as possible! Dirty grip boots are prohibited!
Did you know that we stock all of the most commonly used lighting and grip expendables right here in Indianapolis?
We have a display room filled with all kinds of globes, gel, rope, and tape (like the 2" black gaffers tape pictured here). If you venture on into our warehouse you'll find different types of showcard and foamcore amongst our lighting and grip equipment.
Why hunt these items down and ship them from L.A. when we have it right here for you? Just stop by and pick it up before your next production! Or give us a call and we can have it on your doorstep in no time.
One of the most asked about items from our lighting and grip rental inventory is the camera dolly.
We have a total of 5 riding camera dollies but 1 of them has been left in the dark! The most forgotten about dolly is the Matthews Western. It has a HUGE platform with a 1200 lb capacity. Its wide tires make it perfect for transporting equipment across rough, sandy, or super soft terrain (like astro turf fields)! If you're worried about losing the capabilities of the Fisher dolly, just throw one of our J.L. Fisher 10 or 11's on top of the Western and go! It also makes a great platform for a jib arm. So, next time you call us to order a dolly, don't forget about the Western! Yeehaw!
All of our hard work has finally paid off! The new 5 Ton grip truck is done! ...and it is the BOMB!! It is wider, taller, and longer than the last one and it has the largest lift gate I have ever seen! You could drive a Smart car right up on it. Even better, it can hold the weight of 2 Smart cars!
It has more jockey box space than I could ever have imagined. I was able to pull grip equipment down out of the hard to reach places in old truck and put it in the extra jockey boxes of this truck. Plus, since this truck is longer than the last one, all of the carts that come standard on the truck now fit snug up against the walls. This, and the fact that it was built wider, gives us a very spacious isle to work with! You could fit 2 camera dollies side by side all the way down the truck!
My favorite thing about this new truck is the lighting! It has a white, fiberglass roof that lets an abundance of natural light in. Plus, the ceiling has been lined with LED lights running straight down the middle of the truck! There will be no more whipping out flash lights or dragging crates out to the gate to find what your looking for.
The list goes on and on... there are so many great features on our new 5 Ton! My words do not do it justice so you'll just have to stop by or rent it to see for yourself!
When putting in your next lighting and grip rental order at Hammer don't forget about our Black Jack 400 HMI!
It's a 400 watt HMI fresnel that does so much more. The Black Jack is one of the most compact and lightest of its kind. It is the ideal tool to light an interior. This HMI has a selection of 2 lenses: Fresnel Spot or Fresnel Flood. Or it can be used without lenses turning it into a beam projector. Beam projectors can be used for projecting a direct beam with very sharp shadows for "streaming sunlight" effects or to accentuate atmospherc fog.
It has 4 holes on the front door to attach lightbanks or lanterns thus avoiding the need for a Speedring. The recommended lightbank for the Black Jack is a Video Pro XS or S.
NOW YOU KNOW!
There comes a time in every company's life that you have to break down and do a little inventory. For this Midwest Lighting and Grip Rental company, the time is now.
I began this thrilling task by counting all of the shot bags on the grip trucks and in the warehouse. I was amazed to discover that Hammer Lighting and Grip possesses approximately $18,400 worth of 25 pound shot bags! So you're thinking we must have thousands of bags then, right? Nope. We only have 197!
The cost to get 5 thousand pounds of bagged shot to Indianapolis from LA will bury you. We come across this problem too often. Buying and selling grip equipment as an Indiana lighting and grip rental company is much more difficult than as a Los Angeles rental house. We must ship everything and everything we must ship weighs a ton.
GRIP GEAR IN A TRAILER? BRILLIANT! 
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