U.S. Marine Base Camp Pendelton: Taking a break during a two week shoot training pilots and gunners of Cobra Attack Helicopters how to blast & supress the landing zone. Lots of boom boom: Sidewinder missles, Zuni Rockets, 50 caliber. This is the man I owe it all to: Warren Lieb, now of Charleston, SC. I was his "grasshopper" for several years.
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You don't need a Pilates class to strengthen your core if you shoot DonkeyCam! Now you see why I got into yoga twenty five years ago. Here I'm shooting a child's point of view of going to school in rural Brazil where there are no school buses.
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ElephantCam! Traveling with America's last five ring Big Top tent circus (includes Freak Show). Ten days across the country filming a documentary about the exciting lives of child performers to be shown in elementary schools. Climbed the high wires to shoot the acrobats. Fell in love with the Lion Tamer, but that's another story...
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My Lion Tamer...end of story.
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Took a break after a shoot to go scuba diving on the coast of the Sinai Desert of Egypt at Shark's Bay. Came across these two wild adolescent camels dumpster diving and gave them treats. Bastards bit me! Now you know why I can't stand smelly camels. Forget CamelCam!
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Ooops! Portugal: Note to self: Don't jab sharp sticks into a bull's back! At the mid-day bull fight I filmed the matador and his trusty assistant getting gored. Extra Note to self: don't cheer out loud for the bull! I forgot where I was...
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Appalachian Trail: Mud, mud, more mud. For the Sierra Club's 100th anniversary video Power Bar sponsored a group of six hikers to do the entire 2200 miles over six months, and Soundman Rich Pooler and I visited them several times. Here we're waiting out the pouring rain. Tough work leap frogging the hikers in all weather but it was another once in a lifetime opportunity.
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Watch your step! Here I am paying tribute to the Snake Godess before filming adventure vacation river rafting in the venomous snake infested jungles of Indonesia. It worked! Snake bite kits are useless here because of the "two-steppers". If you get bit you're dead before you can go two steps. Thank you Snake Godess!
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Santiago, Chile: filming a sales video for a veterinarian pharmaceutical company. Here we're in a stable where I'm to film the brahma bulls, the kind with the really BIG horns, charging straight at me. (Was this the right career choice?) The "plan" is for the non-English speaking, total stranger in the white beard to pull the lever down just in time to stop them from killing me. How much do you tip in a situation like this?
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Filming a frozen waterfall in Quebec, Canada on a two week travel video all across Canada with my long time Soundguy Bill Laing. Frostbite? No problem. I have electric socks! Robbed by professional thieves and survived my first hotel fire (10th floor!). Note to self: Never sleep naked in hotels, bring pee jays.
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Too many times during my career I have had to ask the locals, "Do they really shoot at Cameramen?" In Israel I was assigned a soldier with an M16 to watch my back while I'm looking in the camera. I assume it's loaded. How much do you tip in a situation like this?
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Stockholm, Sweden: Body language and an expression my crew is all too familiar with: a client asks me to do something I know from experience cannot possibly work. I'm very good at coming up quickly with creative alternatives, also based on experience. I always repeat to myself, "The client is always right, even when they're wrong, they're right." That's my 16mm French Aaton LTR camera. Miss her...
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I've been "killed" many times. The "plan" is for me to pull back the shower curtain (serial killer's point-of-view) and the detective blows me away with his "Dirty Harry" 44 Magnum. I wear an eye patch to prevent permanent blindness and a bullet proof vest to take the blast to my chest. I ALWAYS insist on checking the chamber to make sure it's a blank, but this blank is so powerful I get powder burns on my forearms and neck that look like abstract tatoos, last for many months and itch like crazy.
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In my winter beard, waiting for the sunset. Shooting a training film at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School for PsyOps (Psychological Operations) for Special Forces. These shoots taught me the art and science of multiple camera coverage because the military wants to do only ONE take. It's too much money and time to put all the troops, tanks and aircraft back in position for Take 2. I learned how to pre-plan and predict contingencies so we would get it on the first take. Very stressful. This beautiful camera was my right arm for six years putting food on the table.
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Just another day at the "office". Warren's visual style
was to "WOW" the audience by putting the camera in unique places they had never seen. I have inherited the style. This meant often taking near fatal risks. Besides doing sound and lighting my primary responsibility was to make sure we lived through it. Here we are balancing on a steel beam, sixty feet above the factory floor, inches from certain electrocution. My job as you can see is to keep my eyes fixated on the giant overhead crane that keeps threatening to sweep us to our early deaths. I didn't take my eyes off it till we were done. This crazy risk taking went on for years, all over the world. I actually thought this was normal for film crews. This period of my career taught me how to perfom technically and creatively under extreme stress, in harsh physical conditions and calculate the risk.
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"Hold me closer Tiny Dancer"... Remember the movie "Almost Famous" ? I really lived it! I filmed many rock bands (famous and never made its) and festivals. Here's my first 16mm camera the Arriflex S. I include this photo because it is important for a potential client to realize I come from a film background. Unlike video where there is the safety net and training wheels of a monitor and playback, those of us whose early days were film had to learn to be exact or disaster will result. This I believe gives me a stronger foundation. In those days you couldn't fix it later so you had to be very good to survive. And I have...
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My first "professional" shoot! Summer of my junior year of college I was Asst. Cameraman to Warren whose father was Jack Lieb, famous Fox Newsreel Cameraman who filmed the Normandy beach landings (ie: Saving Private Ryan) on D-Day, I learned from him also. Warren was a combat cameraman in the Korean War. We spent three incredible but tough weeks in the mountains of northern New Mexico, sometimes on horseback expeditions, tip toeing around rattle snakes, hiding from lightning, shooting a documentary about the spiritual retreat Ghost Ranch. This is where I learned Cameramen must be tough. My early summers being sent to the troublesome boys mountain horse back boot camp came in handy. See, there's a reason for everything. Here we're shooting with the French Eclair NPR. One of the best shoots of my life.
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For thirteen years I was 50% of the Bo & Ned Team. In college during film school I shot news for the local television station with the very heavy CP-16 camera. This period taught me how to predict where the scene would unfold to best capture the moment. I learned to be proactive and fast. Here's where I started to learn about the non-Sunday School side of life by experiencing reality closely through a viewfinder. Life that the public can't experience but being a Cameraman puts you in the center of the action. I became addicted to the "rush" of documentary shooting. As a close friend says, "I have no regrets." ;-)
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The above gallery is a very small sampling of what I have experienced, they are instances in time when we just happened to have a still camera with us and the time to take a quick shot. We didn't have a still camera when the tunnel under construction we were in exploded and three guys were killed, when the soundman asked Miss Universe for a date, the skinheads threw bottles at us, filming inside the patrol car that suddenly had to race to the bank robbery in progress, shooting for four glorious days on a nudist beach, the armored car guard who drew his gun on me, the Korean army locking a missle launcher onto my helicopter because we were inadvertently hovering over the presidential palace, on and on, etc, etc...I could add many dozens of other photos but these should suffice. Hopefully this album illustrates to you that I have "Been there, done that." and you can trust me to do what needs to be done. I'm your new Go-To Guy for the Midwest and international shoots.
I really look forward to shooting with you someday soon.
