Shooting in Snow Shoes

Late last year I was asked by the College of Professional Studies at Humboldt State University to make a promotional video for their Recreation Management Program.  In order to get the best footage of the program’s opportunities for students I chose to tag along with the Winter Adventure Leadership class on their culminating field project:  surviving four days in the winter wilderness up on the side of a mountain.  Here is the video that resulted from that field project.  The story behind the video follows beneath it.

 

I had never shot video in snow before, let alone a mountain wilderness setting, so it was a learning experience for me.  I researched the equipment that I would need and how to use it.  What I didn’t already own I had to rent, borrow, or buy.  I hired a Rec.Mgmt. student who had done the class before to be my guide.  Together we plotted out the travel/hike/shoot schedules with plenty of wiggle room for unexpected delays… except there was more wiggling than I expected.

The first delay happened on our way to the trailhead.  We were driving on a plowed, back country road looking for a poorly labeled intersection when suddenly the plowed road segued into un-plowed road and we slid straight into a 4 ft. snow drift.  We were platformed on top of 2 ft. of solid snow/ice.  It took us an hour to dig/push the car out that situation.

The second delay happened on our hike up the mountain, which took twice as long as we had planned.  This was mostly due to the fact that I was carrying 80 lbs. of camera gear, I had never snow shoed before in my life, and I may have been just a little bit out of shape (too much time sitting at my desk editing video!).

We reached base camp 2 hours behind schedule.  I had only planned on shooting for 6 hours so there was precious little time left.  After hydrating and eating a small snack, I immediately began shooting the students as they excavated their snow dwellings.  I managed to coax a few of them away from their duties to be interviewed.  I also set up a time lapse camera on the camp’s periphery in the hope that it would capture something interesting.  I didn’t want to miss anything.  It’s always better to have too much footage in the editing room than too little.

I didn’t want to stop shooting but it was getting dark and beginning to snow.  We packed up and began hiking down the mountain about 1 hour behind our now-shattered schedule.  Luckily, it took us half the time to hike down as it did for us to hike up, so we ended up reaching our car just as the last twilight left the sky.  We only had to wear our headlamps for the last 10 minutes of the hike.

Did I mention that the trail head was 4.5 hours from my front door?  We had left at 3am and we didn’t get home until well after midnight.  Boy, what a day.  And the next day was something else as well.  I could barely walk my legs being so sore from all the mountain snow shoeing.  But it was all worth it.  I got some great footage and some great stories from those students, and it turned out to be a pretty good video I think.  Just next time, I might opt to get a hotel room closer to the trail head, and I might take those back-country roads a little slower too.

Tip:  One of the challenges of shooting in the snow is that the Auto Exposure camera function will underexpose your footage if you rely on it.  This is because it uses an average value of brightness in the frame to achieve a balanced exposure, and a snowy landscape is very bright and occupies a lot of the frame area, so the camera lowers the exposure to balance it.  The result is that the snow looks greyish instead of bright white and everything else (like someone’s face) looks very dark.  The solution is to use Manual Exposure.  However, if you manually set your exposure to be perfect for someone’s face then the snow surrounding them is over-exposed.  So I set the exposure so that the snow was just under 100% luminosity.  This resulted in slightly dark faces and figures, but the detail in the snow was preserved.  Then later, while editing the footage inside Final Cut Pro, I used a Three-Wheel Color Corrector filter to raise the mid-tones so that people’s figures and faces were brighter but the snow kept its detail.

The Humboldt Film Festival

I was honored last night to see my short time lapse “The Heavens of Humboldt” screened at the 46th Annual Humboldt Film Festival.

It’s always nice to see your work up on the big screen, and to see how people react to it. I was very satisfied by the audience’s reaction last night. And what an audience it was, over 180 people, for experimental films on a Wednesday night! That’s more than we had at the festival when I was a Co-Director back in 2008. The Co-Directors this year are doing something right, something very right indeed.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the festival. Documentaries screen tonight, Thursday, and narratives screen Friday night. Saturday night all the winners of the festival screen again for “Best of the Fest Night”. I’m going to be there. Will you?

Here’s the link to the festival website: http://www.hsufilmfestival.com/

And here’s my submission in competition for Best Experimental, Best of Fest, and Audience Choice Award:

 

My Very Own Local Filmmakers Night!

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Access Humboldt and the Humboldt Film Commission have chosen to honor me with a Local Filmmakers Night event screening selections of my work. The event flyer, generously created by Access Humboldt, has all the relevant details. I hope to see many friends and to meet new friends there.

Beginnings Matter

Of all the short documentaries that I produced for the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center this is perhaps my favorite piece.

Elephant Seals: Our Window to the Ocean from Mahalo Video on Vimeo.

When I first began making documentaries at Point Reyes National Seashore I was asked to make a piece on elephant seals.  Point Reyes has long been a destination for elephant seals who like to breed and molt on its shores.  They don’t do these things just anywhere, so it’s a special characteristic of the park.  Also, elephant seals are the very definition of charismatic mega-fauna, so they make excellent video subjects.  The only problem I foresaw was collecting footage:  I began working at Point Reyes in the summer and elephant seals only breed there in winter.

The solution was to use the park’s own footage of the seals for my documentary.  Park Rangers and park biologists had been collecting elephant seal footage for years, and I had access to all of it.  However, their expertise was not in shooting video but rather in studying these animals, so the footage was rough. I began culling the copious amounts of seal footage for usable tidbits.  This process took a long time.

Once I had enough elephant seal footage I began writing a script for the documentary based on the selected footage.  Then I interviewed the park’s elephant seal experts using questions gleaned from my script.  Using this interview footage I wrote a voice over narration script to fill-in the missing pieces of the elephant seals’ story.  I then pulled all these pieces together into a rough cut of the documentary.  This rough cut was reviewed by my superiors who absolutely loved it.  Except for one thing:  they thought that the elephant seal footage was lacking a professional touch.

So they invited me to come back to the park in the winter to shoot the elephant seals myself.  I could then use my footage in the fine cut of the elephant seal documentary.  No problem.  Except for one thing:  the entire script had been written around the original footage which had been shot by the park’s biologists.

To work around this I had to recreate the same shots I used in the rough cut.  Not an altogether easy task when working with wild animals, unpredictable weather, and a very limited amount of production days.  But in the end I got my footage, I supplanted it into my final draft of the documentary, and I do believe that it turned out well.  But you just never know where a video production is going to take you once you start in on it… and beginnings matter.

Caution:  elephant seals are a territorial and unpredicable species, especially during their breeding season when they are hulled out on shore.  It may be tempting to approach them for pictures or video but please keep your distance.  Not only could you endanger yourself but you could also threaten their natural breeding behavior.  Their species is still recovering from near extinction due to human interference.  They need all the peace and protection that they can get.

Running & Gunning

Operating the Boom on location in Eureka

In the business they call it Run & Gun filmmaking.  There’s no script.  There’s no schedule.  There might not even be a Director.  There’s just what’s happening and you have to capture it on video / audio to the best of your abilities.  It occurs mostly on documentary productions, news reporting, live television, and reality shows.  You can’t be sure that you’re in the right place at the right time because there really isn’t a right place or right time.  If it looks interesting then you stay on it until something else looks more interesting.  You just “catch as catch can” and hope that what you captured pans out in post.  Let me tell you, it’s a lot of fun.

I got to do some running & gunning on a little documentary about healthcare providers and healthcare recipients.  A New York City film crew came out to our little hamlet to shoot this short doc and hired me as a local gun. It was a lean crew, just four of us total, which allowed us to fit into some tight spaces and get great shots.  There were a lot of interview setups in small medical offices which were challenging.  Then there were several large gatherings of healthcare providers & recipients where we had to run & gun it.  They also needed general around-town shots of our community so we often pulled over to the side of the road and just started shooting stuff.  It was a lot of work but also a lot of fun.

They brought their own gear which included a Sony PMW-F3 camera (so popular right now that stores can’t keep them in stock), some Kino Flo Diva lights, and a Sound Devices Mixer/Sennheiser Boom Mic package.  And I got to work with all of it.  I love it when that happens.

Tip:  a small crew is essential for documentary filmmaking.  Bringing a large crew into someone’s house or a working environment is just not feasible.  Also, having conspicuous crew members hanging around the production will alter the documentary subjects’ behavior giving the footage a falseness.  Having a light crew footprint will allow you to get some great candid footage that will make for an interesting documentary.

Sudden Lost Footage Disease

This is another science documentary that I made for Point Reyes National Seashore back in 2009.

Sudden Oak Death: Battling an Invasive Disease from Mahalo Video on Vimeo.

This documentary was the most difficult of the bunch.  Its focus is not a charismatic mega-fauna like the Tule Elk or the Elephant Seal.  It’s about a microscopic organism invisible to the naked eye.  Yes, this presented some challenges.  I recall thinking “how do I make dying trees interesting on video?”  Well, I think that you’ll see how I answered that question with the video’s opening shot.

There were some technical difficulties on this project as well.  One of our production days took place deep in the Park in a region decimated by the disease.  It took all morning and all afternoon to drive in and out of this location.  I brought along two SOD specialists to interview in and amongst the dead trees.  Because of their busy schedules I only had one shot at this dual interview.  To my relief, everything seemed to go splendidly on the shoot.  It was only on the next day when I looked at the footage that I realized that something had gone horribly wrong.  The footage was all digital garbage.  I had two hours of blinking pastel confetti on my video tape.  I was only able to salvage a single shot:  one of the specialists’ hands pointing to a severed tanoak tree trunk.  Was it the temperature differential under the forest canopy that caused condensation on my mini-DV tape?  Was it the receiver of the wireless lavalier microphones attached to the camera that caused radio interference?  Was it sun spots?  To this day I wonder why the footage was digitally garbled.  I guess some mysteries will always remain unsolved…

Recording Voice-Over Narration

Using Pro Tools to capture the voice-over narration for the Point Reyes science videos.

The science videos I made for Point Reyes National Seashore (available on their Media Webpage) needed voice-over narration for their final cuts.  Unfortunately, the Park Service did not have a sound studio to produce audio recordings. I had recorded “place holder” narrations using a consumer-grade microphone plugged into the Park’s old Canon GL2 camcorder.  This worked fine for rough cuts but would not suffice for the final product.

Luckily, with the help of Professor David Sheerer and Timothy O’Malley, we were able to record the voice-over narration in a professional sound studio on the campus of Humboldt State University.  We used Pro Tools to digitally capture the audio from our voice actor.  We used a Sennheiser 416 microphone to give the audio an in-the-field documentary feel.  The sound booth was acoustically dampened with fabrics and baffling.  It was quite an experience and the narration turned out excellent.

Tip:  use a “pop filter” in front of your microphone to dampen any hard p’s in your narration.  If you can’t afford to purchase a pop filter then you can easily construct one from common materials.  Check out this DIY link here

Point Reyes: Tule Elk

This is a short science documentary that I created in 2009 while interning for the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center which is located within Point Reyes National Seashore.

Tule Elk: California’s Legacy of Wildness from Mahalo Video on Vimeo.

I shot it using an old Canon GL2 which was owned by the park.  Remember taped-based cameras and mini-DV tape?  Did I just date myself?  Well, it was a good camera none-the-less.  It had a 20x zoom which is pretty long.  But you need long lenses for nature photography because often times the animal is very far from you (and it won’t let you get any closer).

Yes, shooting this was a lot of fun.  I had to hike in over hills and across streams to where the elk herds were roaming. I had to keep down-wind of them so that they wouldn’t smell me coming.  Then I’d hide behind a bush or rock and try to get footage while remaining unseen.  If just one elk happened to see me then in less than a minute the whole herd would be staring at me with tense nervousness.  Then they would slowly walk away from me, and keep away from me.  That’d be a wrap for the day.  But boy, what fun days they were.

FYI, hiking “off trail” to photograph the Tule Elk is illegal unless you are a Park Employee, and the Park Service takes that rule very seriously.  I don’t want anyone to get into trouble.

Dinosaur Shoot

Shooting on location near Stone Lagoon

This photo shows one of the most difficult dolly tracks that I’ve ever made.  The total length of track is about 20 ft.  The ground was comprised of a thin layer of moss covering a thousand years’ worth of pine needles.  Walking on this forest floor felt more like bouncing on a gymnastics spring board.  So laying the track was plenty difficult.  As you can see it took about two dozen apple boxes and a hundred wedges or more to make the track level.

This was last fall when I had the opportunity to work with Creative Differences, a production company out of Los Angeles, making a television show about dinosaurs to be aired on the Discovery Channel.  There were a lot of static shots (they’re called “plates” in the industry) of old forests or empty beaches.  After shooting a 30 second plate we’d “fly in” giant wooden panels painted bright blue and place them behind shrubbery, trees, or rocks.  Then we’d shoot the same plate with these blue panels in the frame.  Sometimes we shot the same plate a dozen times, moving the blue panels between each shot.  These blue panels would allow the computer animators to “paint in” CGI dinosaurs in post.  Pretty fun stuff.

Tip:  Use a yardstick style bubble leveler to make sure your track is perfectly flat.  You can buy one at any hardware store for $15.  Be sure to level your track before you put the dolly on it.

The Beginning

This site is live as of 2:40pm on Monday, July 25th, 2011.  Logo photo courtesy of Swami Stream.