Cool! the Colombia bikesharing video I shot and produced is live and available for viewing:
Overall, I’m really happy with the way this one turned out, even if the footage we got from India sucked ass (the audio of the interview is shit and they only gave us about 5 usable minutes of B-roll). I’ve even got a cameo at 3:07–that’s my leg!
I’ll write a brief rundown of my time in Bogota because if I don’t get to it now I definitely won’t do it later. I was in country to shoot video interviews with two city officials in locations I hadn’t scouted in a language I don’t speak, so I was a little nervous about the results I’d get. Luckily I had a colleague from work joining me who was familiar with the program, speaks fluent Spanish, and knows how to operate video cameras, so I had a translator who could act as a second operator with me at all times. This made the trip infinitely more successful, because she knew what we wanted to accomplish and could shoot B-roll at different vantage points wherever we went, so the sheer amount of footage we left with was more than double that of my previous trips.
My flight was direct from Dulles, so I got in late on Monday night and waited at the baggage area for Valeria to arrive. We were set up in a beautiful hotel in the northern half of the city, and early Tuesday morning (5:30 EST) we headed to the partner office in town which we used as a base of operations. From there we shot a bunch of B-roll around the central eastern section of town, pausing only for a brief lunch and shooting until 6:30PM.
Wednesday we were up at 7 to shoot our first interview and met with our subject at a park along a bike path. I found a good vantage point and we filmed him speaking, then some B-roll of him biking up and down the path. Next we returned to the partner office and shot interviews with several of the bike-riding staff (much easier than grabbing random people off the street) before heading back to the hotel to offload data to an external drive.
We spent pretty much the whole time on the ground running, and if I didn’t have a translator I would have been sunk; UBER in Bogota is illegal, and for some reason their mapping service there is terrible. We wound up in several random places where the app told us we’d reached our destination, and we had to spend time explaining where we really wanted to go to the driver.
I bought a new LowePro backpack to haul the gear around in and found it much easier to use than the ThinkTank suitcase I inherited at WRI, while being able to carry about 90% of the suitcase’s maximum load plus my laptop. This made packing once for the day feasible so I didn’t have to return multiple times to the hotel to swap out gear, although it made the pack heavy. I got skilled at keeping it to the barest load possible with enough batteries to last the day and only the lenses we’d need; only once did I regret not packing the heavy zoom lens for some good B-roll shots on the second day.
Bogota itself is a beautiful city. It sprawls at the foot of a mountain range bordering the east side, at an altitude of 2,600 feet. The architecture is an eclectic mixture of old country and modern jumbled next to each other, much like Mexico City, and I spent much of the time I spent in vehicles craning my neck to take it all in. We saw both the good and the bad, from the upscale neighborhoods where we were staying to the slum and industrial areas away from the mountains. Because the climate is often wet (think of San Francisco, but much higher) there are exotic, vibrant flowers everywhere. Calla lilies were blooming in pots outside our hotel, and across the street, brilliant purple bougainvillea draped over a residential wall.
We used a variety of cameras, with two Canon 5Ds as our primary shooters paired with a couple of key lenses, a DJI Osmo (verdict: pretty frickin’ sweet), three GoPro Sessions, and my Fuji X-T10. The 5Ds were used for all of the interviews, most of the stationary B-roll, and a few long takes for timelapse effects. We used the Osmo for traveling shots outside the windows of our cab, some pedestrian shots, and some interesting footage while riding bikes. The Sessions I used for stationary time-lapse footage in different locations and handlebar-mounted footage of our interviewees.
In the afternoon on our second day we headed north to some of the taller buildings and tried to access their observation decks but were told they were all closed until the weekend. Undeterred, we UBERed up to the side of the mountain and took a cable car up to the peak of Monserrate, a scenic overlook and tourist destination above the city (at 3,100+ feet above sea level). From here I set up the 5D and all three GoPros for an hour, shooting wide vistas and detail shots of the city. While I was there a nice police officer named Hugo came over and tried out his English on me while I tried the few Spanish words I knew.
I broke down my gear and walked around to find Valeria, and we stopped in to a cafe overlooking the city for a cappuccino and some pastries while exotic birds flitted through the flowers around us. When the sun got low in the sky, we huffed our way back up the steps and set gear back up to shoot it setting through the clouds.
Our final day on the ground began with a flurry of email as we tried to line up our final interview subject, the transportation minister of Bogota, and after nailing him down to a time, we went to the historical district and shot some B-roll of the original city square and surrounding streets. Then we jumped in a cab and headed to his office nearby. There we were faced with several lousy locations for shooting, but as I grudgingly set up in a bright and noisy hallway I glanced out into what had been a sunlit courtyard full of people and noticed it had emptied out after lunch. I grabbed my gear, told Valeria we were moving, and ten minutes later we were shooting outside with a vista of the mountains behind the minister in perfect light. Once that footage was in the can, we grabbed a steak and a beer at a restaurant across the street, toasted our success, and made plans to head back to the hotel.
My final evening was quiet, as Valeria had plans to go take a salsa class, so I transferred footage to an external drive and got all my gear packed for an early cab ride in the morning–I had to be at the gate by 7:15 the next morning. Even though I was up at 5:30 I didn’t make it through check-in, customs and security until 8, and ran to my gate. Once I was on my flight things were better, but it was scary for an hour or so there. The plane ride home was uneventful, and I was back at the house somewhere around 5PM.
Overall, despite the fact that I ran my ass off the whole time I was there and I don’t speak Spanish, I enjoyed my quick stay in Colombia tremendously. I’d consider going back there, with six months of intensive language training, for a long vacation with the girls.
There’s just way too much to catch up on posting here, even from before I left for Colombia. I’m laying in bed waiting for a melatonin to kick in so that I can be up at 5:30AM to catch an Uber (illegal here in Colombia, but not policed) to the airport. It’s been a whirlwind three days on the ground, and I’ve learned a ton of things that should come in handy for my next shooting trip. I’ve been traveling with a colleague from work who speaks fluent Spanish and that’s helped us out of a dozen jams throughout our trip. She was also handling a second camera, so we’ve got more than twice the footage I would have shot alone, and that’s an added bonus worth the price of the extra ticket.
The film we’re putting together is about the city’s attempt to put in a bikesharing system to capitalize on its miles of bike lanes. Bogota is huge, a sprawling city of eight million people nestled up the side of a mountain. The traffic is terrible, so we’ve spent about 8 hours in cars transiting from one place to another over three 12 hour days. The city wakes up early and goes to sleep late, and people are out everywhere all the time. We’ve had an excellent stay, met tons of friendly people, ate lots of delicious food, and enjoyed our brief time in the city. Now, it’s time for bed.
I’m laying in bed after a long first full day on the ground in Bogota. We got up at 6:30 (5:30 EST), had breakfast at 7, and were on the roof of a building shooting by 7:45. Apart from a half an hour for lunch, we were on our feet shooting all day, up until 6:30PM. There will be more to say about the trip (and the weekend) later, but right now, I’m going to bed.
There’s been a lot of small stuff going on around the big stuff, so I’ll just list it out here.
- Last weekend I got my first haircut since cancer. Things look MUCH better now.
- The event I shot at the National Geographic Society this past week went off without a hitch. Mae Jemison was amazing.
- I shot with a Canon 5D Mk4 at the event, and I am in love with that camera. More on that later.
- Today we washed and vacuumed both of our cars for the first time since cancer. What a difference.
- Speaking of cars, the CR-V has been off the road for weeks with sketchy brakes. It now has new calipers on the front and things are much better.
- Tomorrow my Scout friends are going to stop over and we’re going to finish up the rear drums and leak test the system. Hopefully Peer Pressure will be on the road by Sunday evening.
- I’m going in to the hospital this Wednesday for a 4-month cancer checkup, CAT scan, and general update.
- Jen is going to be my production assistant at the shoot in DC this Thursday: she’s learning how to shoot video and I will be grateful to have her there with me.
- I’m officially headed off to Colombia in two weeks to shoot video for one of the programs at WRI.
My iPhone is now over three years old and the battery life has been getting progressively worse over the last six months. It’s included in Apple’s replacement program, so I made an appointment on Tuesday to go into the store and have it swapped out. In the meantime, I had it with me in the backyard as I was raking leaves on Saturday, and stupidly placed it on top of one of the bags while I adjusted my fleece. the bag toppled over and my phone hit the sidewalk with a crunch: the screen blew up into a million pieces. Amazingly, it still worked!
At the store they were backed up so I had to leave it overnight for a screen replacement, and now that I’ve got it back, it seems to be working well. The battery feels like it’s still draining quickly but it’s got more life than it did.
I’m working on plans for shooting lots of video and photos in the next three weeks: I’ve got a dinner photo shoot followed by an early morning event shoot next week. The week after that I’ve got a full-day video shoot designed as a follow-on to the NCE video I made in London two years ago, which Jen is going to come down and help me with. The week after that I’m in Colombia shooting more video for a bike-sharing project, which should be a real adventure. I’ll have a new Canon 5D Mk4 to work with, and I’m renting a DJI Osmo to shoot crowd scenes while we’re there, and I’ll be with a co-worker who speaks Spanish so that I’ve got help with the language barrier.
In my office this afternoon, about 2/3 of my colleagues gathered in the conference center to watch a live feed of Trump announcing that he was withdrawing the US from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. I watched the first 10 minutes or so and then went back to my desk, as I’d heard enough bullshit by that point.
One of the first projects I worked on at WRI was an infographic explaining IPCC climate models and what they meant for the health of the planet; the takeaway is that we’re locked into a global 2˚ increase no matter what we do, but it’s most likely going to be 4˚ and we’ll keep getting hotter unless dramatic change is made. The Paris Agreement was the beginning of that dramatic change, and this shitstain just torpedoed it in the name of…coal? Business? I don’t even know what the fuck he was talking about because all of his talking points were half-science.
WRI was intimately involved in the Paris Agreement, from helping write the language of the actual document to shepherding individual countries through the talks to writing the actual protocol that countries use to measure greenhouse gases. We did excellent work there and it sucks to see this administration dismantle it to make a small bunch of xenophobic billionaires happy.
Here’s the slightly shortened version of my Paraguay video. I’m not 100% happy with the voiceover; I think they could have found someone with better enunciation. Maybe I can get them to re-record it…
Look what I did:
So with the exception of about 30 seconds of B-roll we had to buy, and another 15 seconds we borrowed from some other organizations, everything in here is stuff I shot in Paraguay. I’ve spent the last two weeks assembling, rewriting, reassembling, compositing, coloring, and editing, and I’m really happy with the results here.
Next week I’ll be producing a second version in English with subtitles to post on WRI’s site.
The new semester is underway, and I’ve got a crop of 16 students. They’re all new to me save two, which is a nice change, and after our fourth class I’m relatively happy with them so far. I’m teaching a slight variation on last semester’s syllabus, having tweaked the timing, assignments, and deliverables a bit based on what I learned in the last class. These students are all graduating in the spring, so I’ll be one of their last waypoints before they reach the outside world. It feels good to be teaching again, and I’ve added a couple of workshop/discussions to the schedule that should help them beyond the assignments we’re covering.
We have some friends who own a digital printing shop in Columbia, and over the break I went down to tour the shop and talk to them about taking on student work. It’s not the most glamorous work, and is realistically a money-loser for them in the short term, but the students have all been limited by what their campus print shop can and cannot do. My aim is to widen their horizons so that they realize there’s more than one place to produce their work. I’m also developing a workshop around the art of ordering a print job, so that they know what to ask for, what the language means, and what questions the print shop will ask them when they call.
Strangely, it sounds like I might not be teaching next semester due to scheduling issues at the school. I don’t know if they’re going to sort things out or not (I have been told on the sly that they will) but my hope is that they do.
I took a pair of Anker bluetooth headphones with me to Paraguay, and I really like them. They are actually wired together but don’t tether to my phone itself, which makes commuting easy–I constantly spend time untangling headphone cables around my messenger bag, so having something that’s up and out of the way while I’m transferring from car to train to office is wonderful. They are also the first noise-canceling headphones that actually stay in my ears during normal usage. I put them in on the plane ride and shut out the entire cabin around me; the only thing I had to worry about was clearing the air pressure in my ears.
After two months of searching, we hired a production manager at work to help keep my team on track and relieve some of the management pressure from me and my senior designer. She’s a transplant from Southern California who worked in the magazine industry for three years, so she brings a wealth of good experience to our team. We’re sorting out the logistics of equipment and seating this week, and she’s been invited to about 100 meetings over the next three weeks to talk with our internal clients and begin to understand how the organization works.
I was never trained as a manager, so this experience is a new one for me. My style to this point has been very laid back, mirroring my personality, but I’m seeing that I’ve got to step up more and become more proactive about a lot of things. Having come from a tense environment of micromanagement, I never wanted to do that to anyone else. What I have to do now is find a happy medium between being more assertive with my team and our clients and not being a domineering tyrant.
The second contractor I had come in for the bathroom ghosted me. I’ve left him two messages but haven’t heard anything back since he came to look things over. Meanwhile I’ve got the estimate the first guy sent us to review, to see where I can cut some costs. Maybe with some tough negotiation we can bring the price down to a reasonable amount. I do know he quoted on 7 very expensive windows when we’re going to reduce the number to 5, and we don’t need top of the line models, which will save thousands. There may also be some prep work I can do to cut costs as well–when the porch was enclosed, the builders put in a thick wall below the windows and a thinner wall above the sills, making a waist-high shelf around the room. I want to shim out the walls to a consistent depth all the way around for ease of finishing and added insulation value, which I can probably handle myself.