We spent a whole week in Colorado shooting non-stop from early morning till late in the night for one of our customers. The whole experience taught us a few things to do with this kind of shoot (Interview shots). Anyway, after transferring all the tapes (and there were 15 tapes in all) onto the editing bay, the process of selecting the best takes begins. This is by far the most tedious aspect of being a videographer.
Anyway, once the good takes were neatly compartmentalized I needed a break, so I decided I’d try my hand at story telling. A story that had nothing to do with what the customer’s message was but rather, a story that could be told using the footage I had.
The setting is in a small town near Denver Colorado called George Town. This is a small little town with a history of mining that is now a tourist spot. We happened to be in Colorado at the perfect time for the Aspen. You see the Aspen go into full bloom for a very short time (a few days) during October. George Town also has a little train that has a history to do with coal mines and transporting coal from one location to another. The route the train takes through the mountains was quite an engineering achievement for its day. Today people ride in this train for fun. Of course with my Canon XHA1, Letus35 FE (the Letus35 Extreme was not out then) and my Libec LS 55M tripod, I was quite an attraction myself. No, I don’t mind the attention if it doesn’t get in the way (more on that later).
On this day, the idea was to get some beautiful shots of the area. These shots may eventually be used as “B Roll” in the final cut. So there wasn’t any agenda of shots per se. Heck I didn’t even know what to expect. Becky our guide for the day (the beautiful blond you see in the opening shot) was showing us around. I’d just stop and shoot a shot here, a shot there, anything that took my fancy.
We were waiting at this tiny station (the kind you see in old Westerns, I kid you not) waiting for our train to arrive. I didn’t know which direction it was coming from, nor if I’d be able to see it well before it actually got to the station. You see, I knew I wanted a few shots of the train in motion while I was NOT on the train. We hear the whistle in the distance so I started looking around to see if I could spot the train in the mountains, but I couldn’t. As the train got closer I was beginning to get very anxious. I was certain I was going to miss my opportunity, when suddenly I noticed a cut in the side of the mountains in front of me that, to me looked like it might be for tracks. So I hauled my gear and started running as fast as I could towards the (imagined) tracks. They were a hundred feet up the mountains from where we were and I wanted to get close to the moving train, hopefully right at the tracks. So started up the treacherous slope, huffing and panting making sure none of my gear was in harms way. I was about half way up, when the train appeared on the other side (the mountains behind me). From my new vantage point I could see the path the train was going to take. So down the slop, (carefully) I went and then across the parking lot and down another slope. All this time, Becky and Peg were watching me and laughing their heads off. I mean I must have looked like an idiot running around trying to catch a glimps of a train as if I’ve never seen one before. I'm pretty sure they had a side bet going as well.
Well, I couldn’t get too close to the train, given the time I had. The first shot I got was while the train was making its way across the very high bridge. I had just enough time to set up the camera before the train started its journey across the bridge from right to left. Much later, while on the train, I took a complementary shot from the train looking down at the road I was standing on. In the video you half expect to see (at least I do) someone there with a camera pointing up towards the train. Continuity, they call it in the film world.
Remember the part about being an attraction and getting in the way? Well, so we’re on the train, and there’s about 30-40 other people (tourists) each with at least one camera. You know the small digital point and shoots? Anyway, during the ride I’d constantly get up to shoot and literally the whole train got up to shoot as well. If I went to the right side, the whole train would move over to the right. I’m not sure what they saw, but I couldn’t get a single shot in that looked out towards the front, since everyone was standing up trying to get a shot of what I was trying to get a shot of. The only shots I could get were those directly to the side of the train. All the shots from the train were hand held and the train wasn’t smooth as at all. It would jerk (yes, jerk) from left to right. I used a trick to get this one shot, where you see the engine negotiation a left hand curve. This was towards the end of the ride so I had time to plan it. I got up, so now everyone got up. You should have seen it, it was like a wave where the closest to me would follow my sight and movement and then those next to them and so on, so there was a kind of delay (wave like motion). I moved across to the right side of the train and hung out with my camera. So now all of them were straining to see what I was seeing when I quickly moved back to the left side of the train, hung out and got my shot before everyone else caught on.
Before I end, I should say that I got a lot of footage but very little of it is usable for one reason or the other. I guess that’s how it’s going to be for a while.
See the Video
