Arrival:
I arrived at the Mattawa Adventure camp at around midnight the night before my first shoot day. The camp was pitch dark, deep in bear country and only had sparse instructions on where to go. I got out of the car a groped around in the dark until I found a cottage with lights on and people inside. I rapped on the window and asked if they had seen any dirt bike guys around. "Oh yah, right OVER THERE!" I turned around to see the towering 6'7" figure of who I would soon come to know as the producer of the shoot with a splunkers lantern on his head. He introduced himself as Dallas Shannon, the producer, clearly he was tired as he irected to my bunk.
To my surprise the accommodations were more than adequate. I mean for a low budget documentary in northern ontario, this was high living. The cabin was all wood, with a full bathroom with plumbing. I didn't take time to appreciate the building as I was exhausted from my day-in-the-car and had a 5:45am call time.
Day 1:
I was woken up after a sound 4.5 hour sleep... I was tired but more excited for the day. Breakfast was a huge freaking buffet of eggs, bacon, sausages dofferent kinds of toast and luckinly as I can barely eat until I've been awake for an hour or so, a platter of sliced fruit. On set usually means eat while you can as there won't be food for while, so I downed an orange juice a coffee and rammed some melons slices down and got ready to go.
Back Story: Yours truly had the great opportunity and experience of being the Aerial cinematographer, (and subsequently pulled sound duties riding the pots on the 4 wireless Sennhausier lavelier mics hooked up to a H6 recorder. It was a lovely setup and after diddling around the menus, we found a nice level of compression and balanced the in-outs after that, it was a plug and play setup. More stories to come including some great pics of international superstar hard enduro champion Graham Jarvis and US Pro Colton Haaker.
Stories of the road, smash up folllow up of the internet cult classic, 50 years of KICKS! Check out the original movie right here: