Working in the film business often puts you in, shall we say, strange situations.
A few years back my buddy Chris Ingvordsen, with whom I've had countless film adventures, landed us a job to shoot some second unit footage for an upcoming Rodney Dangerfield flick, The 4th Tenor.
Second unit is exactly what it wounds like, a second, smaller filming unit that runs around getting establishing shots, close-ups of props, shots of picture cars driving by and stuff like that. For instance, shots of building exteriors in The Avengers were shot by the 2nd unit. Joss Whedon wasn't there, though the units all work under the supervision and vision of the director. (On big movies, there are often more than two units, all of them focusing on different elements that need to be captured to put the film together. There's a pile of great second unit stories in the book Bonfire of the Vanities.)