When Life Gives You Lemons…

6:45 am: Who Brought Muffins?

So Saturday was crazy. We got up at the crack of 6am, met at a predetermined location, and piled into our collective vehicles. There was a lot of optimism among the Delve Team members.

7:30 am: The Mountains Sure Are Perty!

We had planned everything to a tee. Our team knew where they were supposed to be, at what time there were supposed to be there, and when to move on. The race wasn’t to begin for 2 hours, so we had time to get interviews, traveling footage, and some timelapse stuff.

9:15 am: Go Time.

Radios…camera…ACTION. Eli was on top of the mountain, ready to shoot the start of the race. All the rest of us were waiting impatiently at the Nordic transition. 2009 was a record year for the PPP: over 3,000 athletes participated (more than double the previous year). Needless to say, there was a lot of adrenaline flying around.

Each athlete was assigned a group with a different start time, based on whether they were in a team, what age group they belonged to, and their skill level. Greg Salciccioli (the hero of our film) wasn’t set to begin until 10:20, so we had plenty of time to catch the other athletes doing their thing. This early footage was great; the crowd was into it, and the athletes were feeding off the crowd.

10:24 am: Derailment.

The first leg of the PPP is the Alpine stage. Racers start about 150 yards from their skis. When the whistle is blown, it’s a madman’s dash to see who can get to their skis first. We caught this part (beautifully) both with Eli’s camera, and with the headcam Greg was wearing. They were off!

Greg was one gate into the race when his contact lens floated off his eye, completely blurring his vision. He caught an edge (a fancy way to say he went out of control), and veered into the path of scores of weekend warriors. He went down, just as another skier slid his ski across Greg’s right hand, instantly severing the tendons and cutting to the bone. Blood was everywhere. Thanks to adrenaline, Greg made his way down the mountain, and down to the transition area.

We were waving him in when we saw the blood. It was bad. Really bad. None of us had ever seen a laceration that deep or severe before. And we knew that our plans had changed. Nate took his dad to the hospital, while the film crew regrouped. We needed a Plan B.

10:45 am: Providence. Redemption. You get it.

Thankfully, Greg’s close friend Dave was also participating in the race. Isaac and Tyler jumped on the snowmobile, raced down the Nordic trail, and found Dave. Without alarming him (hopefully) too much, we let him know what happened, and that he was our man. Amazingly, Dave got on board, things fell together, and the rest of the race went as smoothly as we could have hoped.

The footage we got was epic, in spite of our early setback. We look forward to putting the rest of the pieces into place, so you can enjoy the end result.

To check out more pictures, click here.

PPP Update

Well, the Pole, Pedal, Paddle is over…and we all learned a lesson: regardless of how much painstaking planning goes into a project, life will throw you a curveball. A huge curveball. But more on that later.

I just wanted to let everyone know that we were at PPP ‘09, we did film it, and it will be epic. We’re taking this next two week period to go through our footage, and decide what kind of story we’ll be telling. We’ll have more updates soon…

Oh, What Could Have Been…

You would never know it from watching our Myst Audition Video, but there was something very special to us that we had to leave out…the island castle of K’veer. Planning and building took up many precious hours, but in the end we just had to leave it out.

Imagine a dramatic fly-by of the D’ni lake, out over the orange water, and past the massive monolith of K’veer. Sounds good, right? It did to us too. The lake was going to be created by pumping water directly into the cave. We even bought a florescent dye that made the water glow orange when lit with a UV light source.

To create a miniature like K’veer, you need modeling foam: the kind Weta used in LOTR’s to create the Minas Tirith, Minas Morgul and Orthanc. The problem, however, is cost: $2,000 per 8’x4’x3’ block, and each block weighs 400-600 lbs! It took 6 guys to move just one block…and we’re all really really ripped. ;)

After a little research we found a company named General Plastics (near Seattle) that manafactured this stuff. Thinking myself industrious, I called them and explained that I was a young filmmaker in need of some help with a project. After a week or so a guy called back and said he had two blocks of foam that I could pick up (evidently they set some aside every year and donate them to schools etc.). I hitched on my trailer, jumped in my truck, and headed north (10 hrs round trip). When I got there I was shocked to see that the two blocks were full size 500 lb. monsters! They had just gifted me $4000 worth of foam (I still don’t know why but they ROCK!).

We found the drawing of K’veer in the Book of Atrus, and Nate took that concept and created a scaled blueprint, which was used to start carving the island out of foam. Our thought was to use your average wood axe, take a good squint, and chip away at the foam block. Surprisingly, this worked fairly well.  Once we had created a rough shape, a sander created the details. After hours of scribbled math equations and clogged nostrils, we had our base model. Andy Carillo (a man of many talents) came over and started the delicate work of carving out the doors and windows. Then things started going wrong…

(1) The dye we used to create the glowing water turned out to work only in small doses. We tried making several hundred gallons glow, without success; it wasn’t bright enough. Then (imagine our surprise) the Forest Service decided they weren’t happy with us pumping a thousand gallons of dyed water into the cave.

(2) The water truck we were going to use to pump the water in cost $400 to rent for the day, and because it was winter here in Oregon it had to be a heated water truck (to keep the water from freezing).

(3) Our airbrush guy, who was going to take K’veer from a foam island/castle into a perfect rock fortress (with all the detail fit for a D’ni Lord), kept pushing his date further and further back.

It came to a head when we had the rest of the Audition video complete; all that stood in our way was the K’veer sequence. After assessing the monetary cost and delays to production we realized (much to our pain and anguish) that we were going to have to let our dreams of a D’ni lake and K’veer castle fly-by be laid to rest. However, we wanted to share the pictures and story with you because it deserves to be seen and heard. (Maybe it’s just our way of saying good-bye to the project.)

Tonight’s Forecast: Massive Brainstorming, Light Hail

Get stoked, because tonight’s our initial planning session for the PPP ‘09 documentary. Getting all the shots we need is going to be a bear, as there are 5 specific events that take place sequentially, so planning will be key. As luck would have it, we’ll be the proud bearers of 3 press passes, which will allow us to sidestep the crowd, and stay directly with the athletes. This will ensure you see every hair-raising, bone-crunching, pride-crushing, gasp-enducing shot we can capture. Good stuff.

We’re also excited to bring Tyler Roemer on board (who’s lovely mug you can see above). Depending on how many cameras we can get ahold of (we’d like 3), Tyler will either be shooting motion or still photography. Can’t wait to see what ideas tonight’s brainstorming will bring. Watch out for hail.

Scouting for PPP…

Greg and I just spent the afternoon scouting locations for the Pole Peddle Paddle. I’ve never seen the route before so off we were to look over things. It was rainy and dreary; I’m not sure how much we will be able to actually get out and see. The past several days (actually for about the last two weeks) it has been miserably cold and ridiculously wet. Very unusual for this time of year. Anyway, as we headed up to the mountain the weather just got worse and worse—worse cause it’s spring… if I wasn’t ready for spring then it would be a perfect powder day! Snow was coming down and covering the tracks as soon as we made them, and it was that slushy sticky snow; the kind of stuff that seems to reach out and grab your tires with a million tiny fingers and takes you where ever it wants to. I think all the snow plows have been parked for the year—or the drivers are lazy—because the road has not seen a plow in a while, judging from how deep we were sinking.

Thankfully, Greg knows how to handle snow and we were having such a great time talking over PPP story ideas that we hardly noticed Father Winter making one last attempt to show us global warming is a hoax (he will have to try harder). However, we did start thinking about what it would be like to do this race in a week and a half with these same conditions – God forbid! I don’t see a road bike (with those wonderfully skinny tires) going 60 mph down the mountain in snow and ice. On second thought, it would make for some GREAT footage! At least the attempt would make great footage…So while Greg prays for sunny weather and great road conditions, I’m praying for a Three Stooges moment between Greg (Moe) Road Bike (Curly) and the Snow (Larry).

Anyway the scouting went great. It really helped to get an idea of where we needed to be to get the best footage and how many camera’s we need (at least three). The transition from alpine to skate skis will be great… lots of mayhem. The hardest footage to get will be the skate skiing, so will will do our best to get what we can where we can. Maybe we’ll get lucky and capture some good spills :). The biking section will be fantastic. I hope to have one camera following Greg the whole time in a car, and then the other two will leap frog ahead and capture him whizzing by at critical moments. The running will be pretty easy, as much of it is along the road, and what isn’t will have me following him with my mountain bike (I’ll have to sneak it past security). For the Paddle section we will have two people in a canoe following him in the Kayak and one person filming from the canoe.

It’s going to be fun stuff! If you have any ideas let me know!

New Website Live

It’s happened. We finally have a functioning website. Lucky you, because now you can check out all the latest projects, in-process ideas, and behind-the-scenes photos. We’d love any feedback you might have, so don’t hesitate.

Here’s the link: www.delvefilms.com