And Here we Go!

March 1. The first solid milestone in the project is the completion of the Indiegogo funding campaign. There were 38 online backers plus several people sent me personal checks outside of the website so our total is about 76% of the goal of $6200. This means I can get good quality basic equipment, but the second camera for interviews will be an older model that records to tape rather than direct to digital media. This will mean a slightly lower quality for some shots but nothing that anybody will turn up their nose at.

Speaking of equipment, here are some photographs of what I’ll be carting around with me – two cameras, two microphones, two tripods, and a whole bunch of lenses, cables, batteries, tapes, and SD cards. With some practice I’ve gotten this packed into the backpack and tripod bags shown here. I’m training myself to unpack and repack it all; thus far I’m down to about a 10 minute set up time for a sit-down interview with two cameras in place.

I’ve also come up with a mnemonic to make sure I don’t forget anything during set up: Some Large Bears Can Ingest Fishy Appetizers. Which stands for Sound, Lighting, Background, Composition, Iris, Focus, and Audio. If all of these are right, you’re going to have a good shoot.

A lot of the footage will be what the pros call “run and gun” which is chasing things as they happen and trying to capture them with a single camera. Two big challenges in run and gun are 1) pointing the camera where the action is before the action goes somewhere else and 2) keeping the camera steady enough that the viewer can tell what they’re looking at.  The latter is a problem because my hands don’t have what it takes to hold the camera steady for a long time and a shoulder mounted camera or steady cam rig costs about 10 grand. After a lot of searching I found in England a rig that will hold the camera on my shoulder and in fact let me operate at hands-free. For only a couple of hundred euros, yet. So I’ve been walking around the house and the neighborhood getting the angles and balance right on this thing, looking like some kind of cyborg man.

Then next big event is going to Fort Polk for some pre-training interviews on March 13, and then “in the box” activities will be March 14-18.

More to come,

Walt