It was a working vacation in two parts, developing in parallel and occurring in sequence.
It was also “an adventure”.
Development: The Setup
It all started when I saw that an acquaintance was wanting to produce what would eventually be a series of PSA-like videos for a presentation at an event over Labor Day. Since the producer was on the East Coast, I found it unlikely that I could work the shoot but at least I could edit the material into the final product, and so I volunteered in that regard.
At the same time, I was arranging to travel to Minneapolis to attend CONvergence, an SF convention I have attended for a couple of years, the only such convention I’ve been attending regularly for some time now. What makes it appealing is that I stay with friends that I don’t get any other chance of seeing throughout the year.
Development: Making The Arrangements
My primary concern was in wondering who would be doing the video work, and with what videocameras. There are subtle differences in various makes of videocameras that can make significant differences in the resulting footage, and also the talent behind the camera that can make a big difference on the quality: I was most concerned about who was going to do the shooting as I wanted to ensure I had good footage. There were also concerns about lighting and sound that could only be dealt with by professionals. All of these things needed to be considered to get an excellent level of quality on the source so that I could produce a similar quality result.
I was then told that the answer to my concerns was my friend Paul Knight, who, among other things is a professional stage hypnotist and who has a professional level video camera to record his performances: he would supply the camera and be the camera operator. He would be driving to the East Coast from Milwaukee and was willing to pick me up along the way. That way I could bring a second camera as well as my lighting kit and microphones and all the other equipment needed for the shoot. This way I was assured of having quality equipment and quality personnel involved.
For my trip to CONvergence, I was initially considering flying (there are several direct flights between here and Minneapolis because Minneapolis is a Delta hub) when a good friend of mine, Dr. Rex Joyner, told me he was considering attending. This years guests included three members (which would later be two as one of the three died shortly before the convention) of the Firesign Theatre comedy troupe, of which I knew he was an ardent fan. Together, we decided to drive up, spending the nights along the way with Paul to break up the trip.
As things developed, the shoot on the East Coast was scheduled for the weekend before the 4th of July, and CONvergence was the weekend after, so I expected a very busy time during that week.
What I got out of it was what my friend Paul termed “an adventure”.
Trip, Part I: Friday
The Eastern leg of the trip started before sunup on Friday, June 29th, with the goal of hitting Washington. DC, sometime around 5. (Paul drove down the night before and stayed with me.) This would allow Paul the ability to ride his bicycle around downtown DC while I wandered through some of the monuments: that last time I was ever there was about 40 years ago but things have both changed a lot and changed hardly at all.
After that, we stopped by the apartment of Paul’s friend where we would be staying the next two nights, then went to meet the producer and the talent. They were all at the house of producer, getting to know each other and getting the paperwork finished before the start of taping the next morning. It was a fun time, as I knew a lot of the people there but not by sight, and I needed to explain a number of things about the shoot for the talent, most of whom had never been before a camera before. Its something I’ve done a number of times in the past, explaining how the whole taping process works and giving them the encouragement to concentrate on performing their best and not worrying about screwing up, because we scheduled enough time to have multiple takes of each segment. Surprisingly enough, we didn’t need them: just about every first take was used, even though some editing in the middle was needed in places.
During the evening, I was showing off the prototype DVD menuing system I created for the eventual DVD of the videos. However, the lights went out in the room a couple of times, because the DVD player and all of the other electrical equipment active in the room kept tripping the circuit breakers. The third time it happened, however, the lights went out throughout the house.
Throughout the neighborhood.
Throughout the whole DC area.
Later reports indicated that over 3,000,000 people lost power, the result of the 2012 North American derecho, what is described as a horizontal tornado. Its high winds followed us down from the Midwest, leaving destruction in its wake. We didn’t leave the house until it passed, watching the scary weather displays on people’s iPads, then traveled back to the apartment for the night, which had no power and thus no air conditioning or fans, passing downed tree limbs and power lines all along the Interstates and city streets. (It was just as bad in Fort Wayne, where ancient 6′ diameter trees were torn up by their roots or just snapped off at the base like twigs: the winds were the equivalent of a Category 1 hurricane.)
Trip, Part II: Saturday
After spending a hot and muggy night trying to sleep, it was gratifying to see that some areas in DC still had power, especially the McD’s where we got breakfast. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case with the planned shooting location, and the cell phone towers were also without power, so there was no way to contact the producers until we got back to their place.
Fortunately, by the time we arrived, they were able to arrange an alternate site, several miles away, but the only place to shoot there was the basement. Still, it was better than nothing, as it didn’t appear that power would be restored any time soon. So we trucked all of the equipment into the basement, set up a video area, and started taping.
And there we stayed for 10 hours. Most of the talent got to stay upstairs and prep for their shoots but the camera operators (myself, Paul and Paul’s friend) stayed downstairs (actually, it was slightly cooler down there) until it was all over. After that, it was out for refueling, ourselves and our cars, and only to discover the restaurant had an hour wait and the gas stations were either 1) out of gas or had no power or 2) had lines out into the street waiting to get to the pumps.
Trip, Part III: Sunday
One person who was to be part of the shoot couldn’t make it, so we had to take the shoot to them, up in Manhattan. But first, Paul wanted to ride in DC again and I wanted to see some of the downtown sights along the Mall. Regrettably, one of the places I wanted to stop at was closed (the Washington Monument, which I climbed when I was in DC the first time) because it was still under repair from the earthquake several months previously. I did wander through the Mall and see the many memorials, particularly the Vietnam War memorial, that being the only major war I had a personal involvement with, through my older brother who served a tour over there. The World War II memorial, on the other hand, I didn’t care much for because I thought it looked too much like a Roman monument glorifying war for war’s sake and not as much for the necessary reasons behind getting involved in it.
Then we went to have brunch with friends in the area (who fortunately still had power.) However, it was when we arrived there we discovered the piece of metal embedded in one of the tires, which led to a detour at a tire store and a 3 1⁄2 hour wait for a new tire. That was the second place we went to, as the first place was without power. Our friends there stayed with us the entire time until we got back on the road.
Thus, we didn’t get up to Manhattan until much later than planned, having just enough time to get the final segment of the shoot finished (requiring three takes) before we all had to get some sleep. Of course, I slept as badly as I had before, mainly because there was a streetlight just outside the window at the right height to shine directly in the window.
Trip, Part IV: Monday
This was my first ever time in New York City. Our host had already left for work by the time we were up and about, so we did the normal touristy things, albeit involving walking ten miles through downtown Manhattan, starting from about 72nd and the river all the way to the Empire State Building with a left turn at the bottom of Central Park. We went up to top of the Empire State Building, where we could see a building that resembled the Stark Tower from “The Avengers” and straight across Manhattan the Chrysler Building, and that’s when I realized that was the battlefield for the movie, right below us. (A building right across the street from the ‘Stark Tower’ has a great big “4” on the side so that must be the headquarters of the Fantastic Four.)
We then hit a couple of stores, including a big CD and music store that Paul always hits when he’s in town, except I didn’t have much in the way of funds so just I looked a lot. We also passed a couple of shawrama places but we’d already had lunch or we might have stopped. (I still haven’t had the chance to try any, alas.)
And then, we drove home. We got out of New York before the traffic started up and were back in Fort Wayne at about 2:00 am, and we immediately crashed (and I’m still a little surprised we didn’t crash before then, given how tired we were from everything we did over the past three days.)
Trip, Part V: Tuesday
On Tuesday, I stayed home while Paul returned to Milwaukee. I started cataloging and digitizing the video footage and prepping for the edit as I caught up on things from over the weekend. Then, that afternoon, Rex and I drove up to Milwaukee to spend the night with Paul. Rex drives a Prius, a hybrid car that doesn’t use an ignition key and actually boots up when started. Its also very fuel efficient: I paid for half of the gas used for the 1250 mile trip and paid less than $50.
Trip, Part VI: Wednesday
Wednesday was travel day, from Milwaukee up to Minneapolis. Nothing really remarkable, except to note just how bad the traffic is around the Dells, making it even more of a tourist trap than it should be. We got in late without any problem.
Trip, Part VII: Convention
I won’t go into each day of the convention, that would just take up too much room, plus things are a little rushed and mushed together anyway. Suffice to say this was an excellent convention put on by an excellent fan base. (I really, really respect the fans in the Minneapolis / St. Paul area on how they are organized and how they’ve build a large and varied fan community.) Having the (limited, alas, this time) opportunity to see my friends up there is always a bonus. I did some panels, which is always fun, and wandered through the art show and dealer’s area but didn’t buy anything: my money that weekend was reserved for food.
However, it was a working vacation, as I did several panels (as I am finding that I enjoy doing them) including one which was a do-it-yourself production equipment (cheap LED lights, for one example) and one on a beginner’s guide to animé series.
I was also impressed with the quality of costumers there: in a lot of conventions, I have to say, a lot of the costumers there just don’t have the bodies or figures to match the characters. Not so at CONvergence: the big thing this year was “The Avengers” characters and several women were doing the Black Widow and really fit the tight leather outfit. I should also mention the Sailor Senshi (Sailor Moon) group and each of them could have been the character for a live action series (including Tuxedo Mask.) My only complaint (to myself) was that I didn’t want to bring my camera with me because it would be an inconvenience: I so need to get a smaller, portable camera for these situations.
As for Rex, he got to sit and shmooze in the bar with two of his heroes from Firesign Theatre. That alone made the trip for him.
Trip, Part VIII: Return
As Rex didn’t want to stay through the end of the convention on Sunday and return on Monday, we drove all the way back on Sunday. However, before we left, Rex gave our hosts a picture he got at the art auction, a very nice colored pencil work, framed, of the character Kaylee from the series “Firefly” because they had a pair of chocolate calico cats (who weren’t used to strangers, so all I saw of them was a pair of unwinking eyes from across the room, where they crouched under a table and stared at you) named Kaylee and Zoe.
Aftermath
I had a wonderful time. My hosts were uniformly excellent and the driving conditions were superb, which is a good thing: all in all, over an eight day period, I drove or was driven about 3000 miles. (I estimate I drove maybe 10% of that distance.)
But I wasn’t finished: there was still more to do.
Once the trip was finished, I still had the editing to complete. That involved about 250Gb of video data, about 18 hours all total from three different cameras. That took almost a month to do, what with digitizing, editing the multicamera video footage, working on the DVD menuing system, etc. Plus I was limited by the amount of disk space on the working drive, which meant I worked on a limited set of files at any one time, and the eventual loss of that hard drive, forcing me to use the backup drive as my primary editing drive. My only regret is that the videos produced will probably never be shown again, but the producer was very satisfied with the results.
And it was almost a month later before I walked out into my back yard and discovered part of the siding had blown off because of the derecho. In fact, one side was probably someplace in Ohio by that time, and the other was hanging on just a couple of nails. This was the part of the house that faced a large open field without any kind of wind break and had pieces blown off before: this time, the pieces were higher up, closer to the roof, while the pieces that were replaced before stayed on because I used roofing nails on them.
Notes
The CARDIS
It is not without justification that Paul’s car has been called a CARDIS: it had much more room and carried much more stuff that I ever would have expected. In fact, it had:
- Luggage for two people for multiple days, including a full suit hanging from the hook above the rear door
- Two video cameras (one Panasonic and one Sony) in their carrying cases
- Two Manfrotto tripods in carrying cases
- Portable Lowel lighting kit in hardshell carrying case
- Carrying cases for 1) several microphones and cables 2) external audio recorder 3) a secondary videocamera, 4) digital still camera
- Duffle bag for all the power cords and outlets that might be needed
- Grip bag
- Personal carry bag
- Four CD cases
- Two laptop computers
- And a bicycle (but no hardboiled eggs)
Everything fit behind the front seats and we could still see out of the rear window. I should also mention that his car is a compact car with a fold-down back seat. Still, it was crowded.
