Taking Responsibility at the Ropes Course

When I showed up at camp on Monday morning, I was informed that my director was going to be stepping down, to deal with some medical issues.  Two of us from the program staff were being asked to take over her leadership responsibilities.  The fact that there were two of us sharing the job made me more comfortable with taking on that level of responsibility, since I still had the possibility of being called away to work in LA at any time.  Co-leading with a female was helpful since half the staff we were overseeing was female, so she would be more sensitive to their needs.  And the people I would be leading were some of my closest friends at camp, so I saw it as an entirely positive change.  And I suddenly had the official authority to do a bunch of the things I had already been doing anyway for quite a while.  We spent the next week rewriting schedules and work assignments, to prepare for the last three weeks of campers.

 

P was also there that week, and one evening we found ourselves at the gutter-ball table, which led to a very good conversation after everyone else had left.  I don’t know how many games we played, nor who won, but it was good to finally talk in person again, and also to get an outside perspective on some of the issues I was now dealing with as an official leader.  We didn’t really talk very much for the rest of the summer, but I was pretty preoccupied with the task at hand.

 

Since the aspect of camp that I was responsible for was the activities, primarily paintball and ropes course, that is were much of my focus was.  During that week off, I made a number of modifications to the paintball course, to make available new styles of play, which were successfully used for the rest of the summer.  It added a pretty cool element to that already popular activity.  It was also during this time that I went through all of the camp’s ropes course documentation.  While helping with that, one of the permanent staff members asked if I would be interested in rebuilding the ropes course.  I had no experience doing things like that, but I was very interested in learning.  There wasn’t time to do much of that during the summer, but it was an exciting idea.

 

I did manage to spend one day doing work on the course.  I was the primary rescue climber at that point, and Mr. Hassler had spent much of the summer reinforcing the lower anchors for the zip-lines and ropes course.  He needed to install guy lines for the Leap of Faith, and the first step in that process was to drill two holes three feet deep, eighty feet off the ground.  That was definitely my idea of fun, so I accepted the challenge without hesitation.  Not having the ideal gear for the job back then, that seemingly simple task took me about three hours, but I thoroughly enjoyed the process.  I did at one point drop a three foot long drill bit, which was a bit embarrassing.  It didn’t hit anyone, but it took Mr. Hassler a few minutes to find it deep in the black berry bushes.  I went the entire summer without having to do any sort of rescue on the course, until the last day, when I had to go comfort a little Buckhorn girl, who was bawling at the top of the ladder jump.  I don’t think I even had to touch her, just being there and having a little chat was enough to calm her down so she could let go.

Celebrating Fourth of July

Near the end of that week off, I got a call from Bounce, informing me that there was a group going boating the next day, and inviting me to go with them.  I agreed, and she told me that the plan was to stay at Gatos’ house to get an early start in the morning, since his parents were the ones taking us out.  I was a bit surprised when she came to pick me up, to discover that we were the “group,” and even more so when I found out that Gatos wasn’t going to be home that night.  But his parents were nice people, and it was an enjoyable evening.  We left way too early the next morning, and got to wakeboard on the “good” water at dawn.  I am very good at most athletic activities, but water skiing and wakeboarding are not ones that I excel at.  Luckily I was able to redeem myself while tubing later in the afternoon.  It was a good day, and led into the Fourth of July weekend, so we went directly from there to a cabin in Tahoe.  Morgan was my PPAIN group leader that year, and was hosting a large get together at his family’s cabin at Donner Summit.  There were about twenty of us, who had all sorts of adventures for a day and a half.  I finally agreed to try the card game “Mou” when they reset the rules, which I otherwise detested.  I still say it is totally a girl game, no one can explain the rules to you, and the rules are always changing.

 

At one point the girls decided to prank a guy who probably had it coming.  As we were getting ready for bed, they pretended to see a bear in the yard.  Predictably, this was the guy who lost no time running outside in his boxers to get a closer look.  He quickly found himself locked out of the cabin. The guys made them unlocked the doors after about ten minutes, but he was no where to be found at that point.  He didn’t come back in until the next morning, having slept under the lounge cushions on the deck.  Once he heard that the guys had been the ones to unlock the doors for him, he disappeared back outside for a few minutes.  He returned a few minutes later with the tailgate from my truck, which he had hidden who-knows-where.  He then needed help to retrieve Nate’s dirt bike, from where he had left it, on the roof of one of the neighboring cabins.  It was quite an accomplishment to have gotten it up there by himself, and a very misdirected retaliation.  He must have tweaked something, because my tailgate has never fit quite right since then.

 

We left the morning of the Fourth, to return to Auburn, where I was hosting a large BBQ for most of the camp staff.  We spent the afternoon swimming and eating, and there was an epic game of croquet out back.  Summer camp staff tends to attract the type of people who should never be handed mallets in an unsupervised environment.  Then we all watched the fireworks from the nearby hillside overlooking the fairgrounds.  Once the weekend was over, I headed back to camp.  Work projects or not, I had spent enough time sitting around doing nothing at home.  But I didn’t have work projects awaiting me when I got there.

Taking Some Time Off

Once I was done with my week of counseling, we had a two week break in the schedule, with no camps scheduled.  While I enjoy being around camp, the list of work projects they had come up with to keep the staff busy didn’t look too entertaining to me.  Ironically I didn’t have any work to do in LA right then, but I exercised my freedom to leave, and spent a week at home.  My mom was staying out at my grandparent’s old house for the summer, taking care of my aunt, who was dealing with some health issues.  And while my brother was around a bit, it was a week spent pretty much with my dad.  But it was good to relax, and catch up on some reading and such.

 

I hadn’t had a chance to talk with P very much those first few weeks, but it had been interesting to get to know her sister a bit, to see how they were alike and different.  Our online conversation continued while I was home, and we had a good dialog about the skit she was doing with her sister.  Calling it a skit hardly did it justice.  I had missed the main campfire the first week, because I had been in LA.  So I was leading my cabin the first time I saw the program we were doing that year, and I was running the sound system as well.  The agenda they gave me just said “chain skit” before the message, and I was supposed to play a soundtrack on someone’s iPod to go with it.  I was definitely not prepared for what actually happened on stage, and it probably elicited a strong emotional response from me than anything else that I had ever seen at camp.

 

There was no dialog, just a pantomime of P and her sister being tormented by people (or “the world” or spirits) depending on how you interpreted it.  While her sister cast the resulting chains at Jesus' feet, P did not.  And they eventually built up until they basically destroyed her.  Everything from the role she played, to the look on her face, had an intense impact on me.  Seeing someone that you care so much about in that much pain, even if you know it is staged, is very hard to watch.  It took conscious effort to suppress the male protective instinct to intervene (which probably would not have been good for the skit).  Coming at the end of an exhausting week, and catching me totally by surprise may have magnified the effect, but I was pretty much traumatized by the time it was finished.

 

It impacted my campers enough that they thought they knew what I was feeling when we got back together to discuss things, but it took me some time to recover from seeing that.  And I really had to pull myself together, because there was still a lot of work to do that night, between cabin huddle, Illuminaria, and individual camper talks.  With ten of them in my cabin, each of those steps took extra long, and I was busy until at least two in the morning, and never really had time to process that all until I was back home the next day.

 

I hardly skimmed the surface of what had happened when I told P about it later, but it was a constructive conversation none the less.  And our discussion about leading one’s peers became a lot more relevant than I had anticipated when I returned to camp the next week.

God Is Still With Us

I drove back down to LA on Wednesday, after helping them get started at camp, with the first two days of Week 1.  I spent the rest of the week preparing the gear we needed for the week long shoot, and shipping it out to Fort Campbell in Kentucky.  Friday evening, once again there was a change of plans at the last minute, and while the shoot was still on, the shooting crew was cut in half for budget reasons.  As soon as I found out that they weren’t taking me with them, started getting ready to go back to camp.  I drove back north on Saturday, completing my shortest trip to LA.

 

I arrived at camp without telling anyone I was coming back early and headed directly to the lodge for the Sunday afternoon staff meeting.  I was right on time, but none of the leadership was there, so they hadn’t started yet.  Nate walked in a few minutes later, and seeing me leaning against the wall, hurried over to see me.  “Hey, do you want to be a counselor this week?”  “No.  But I will, as long I get to pick the cabin.”

 

There were only two options at Wild Oak, a cabin of eight younger kids, and a huge cabin of ten older kids.  I of course opted for the older cabin, but ten is a huge number of campers, my largest group ever.  I recognized about half of the names, and a few of them had been with me the year before, so it was a good reunion of some of my favorite campers.  With a total of eleven of us, there weren’t enough beds in any of the regular cabins, so I was stuck in the tent cabin for the first time, which actually went fine.  It was one of my most tiring weeks in my career at camp, but it was a good one.  That was definitely my last cabin, but it was a great one to end on.  I was pretty beat by the time they got picked up on Friday.  I was in the dinning hall when Superstar came in, and asked how my cabin had been.  “It went well, but that was my last cabin.  I am getting too old for this.”  Just then Champ walked in behind her.  While I had been supervising ten high-schoolers, she had been counseling a cabin of only two primary campers.  “I take that back.  If you give me a cabin of two campers, I will be a counselor again.”  They never did, and I am okay with that.

 

Nate later told me that my unexpected arrival Sunday afternoon was much more significant than I had realized.  They had ended the leadership meeting without a solution to staff all of the male cabins, and he had been heading to staff meeting without a plan.  After having constantly waited more than usual that summer for the Lord to provide, it seemed like God was really coming up short that time.  So seeing me leaning against the wall of the lodge waiting for him, had reassured him that God was still with them, and that things were well taken care of in the Lord’s hands.

The Return of BullsEye

The week before we left for the submarine trip, as became a trend during production throughout that movie, the Navy changed the schedule, and the submarine shoot was put off until much later in the project.  I was actually thrilled, because it allowed me to head up to camp immediately, to attend staff training and help the first few days of Week 1.

 

I finished work at the end of that week, and drove north that Saturday, arriving for the beginning of staff training on Sunday afternoon.  Things were much different that summer, with a shorter season, and a smaller staff.  We only had one week for training, and five weeks of camp, with a two week break right in the middle.  So our only week of training was going to be intense.

 

We started with a trust building exercise first thing Monday morning, the blind walk.  Right as we were getting started, P arrived.  I hadn’t seen her in person since our intense Facebook conversation, and the strange feeling of vulnerability that left me with can’t be described with words.  I am grateful that she took the initiative, and came over to introduce me to her sister, who was joining us on staff that summer.  That broke the ice, and reassured me that we could still interact in person as comfortably as before.

 

There were a lot of new faces on staff, and unlike the year before, most of the leadership positions were had changed hands.  Wild Oak was run by a totally different group, and my boss was someone I had never met before.  The one positive change was that Nate, the new camp director, was a pretty close friend of mine, and my role on staff was usually flexible enough to allow me to help him out with whatever was needed.

 

And it was needed frequently, as there were a lot more issues than the previous summer.  With new people leading things in nearly every position, they naturally do things differently.  And I am someone who usually isn’t a big fan of change, so I was not pleased with many of the new ideas.  I tried to accept most of it, but at times that it became a question of safety, I didn’t hesitate to step in.  But due to the strange hierarchy of leadership, I am sure it appeared that I was going over people’s heads to get around them.  I value safety far above avoiding stepping on people’s toes, but it did lead to some awkward situations.

 

Eventually the staff was at least reasonably well trained, and our first week of campers arrived.  We had the usual adjustments to get people familiar with the routines, and actually having to do work, but things in many ways went better than I expected.  We usually felt like we were barely holding things together, but just enough so that the actual campers never had any idea that there were any problems being overcome.  It later turned out that I didn’t even know most of what was going on behind the curtain, and I was one of the ones holding the curtain up.  But I had to leave after we had gotten through the first two days, to head back down to LA, to prepare for the next movie shoot, this time in the backwoods of Kentucky.

Looking Forward to Summer

Back in California, I headed up north for a weekend, to attend my brother’s college graduation in Reno.  I hadn’t ever visited his college in the four years he had been there, so it was interesting to see what he had been up to.  He was still doing work in the machine shop the night before graduation, on some off his own projects.  It was amusing to see that he was the one that everyone came to with questions about any of the equipment or tools, and for advice on how to do particularly complex operations.  He was clearly the most knowledgeable person there.  It reminded me of my own experiences in the computer labs at school.  It was probably the first time I really identified with my brother in any significant way, or related to his perspective at all.  He was no longer just an impatient source of annoyance, but an accomplished and respected member of his community of engineers.

 

I returned to LA immediately, and continued to work on processing the footage from Key West, and support the editorial efforts.  We soon had extended versions finished of the two scenes we had shot.  These were used as proof of concept, to show that our plan to use active duty personnel as the main characters in our movie was a workable idea, and to generate interest with potential investors.

 

I also tried my first stint with baby sitting, taking care of Scott’s kids one evening.  The church was putting on some sort of women’s event, which involved all of his usual options for that role, so I agreed to step in, since his kids knew me from Bible Study.  It was admittedly made easier by the fact that they had put the kids to bed before I arrived, and I was just going to watch a movie while they were out hosting the event for a couple of hours.  But as soon as they left, their three year old was up, asking for his parents.  I averted the impending crying episode by playing the “you’re a big boy now” card, which actually worked better than I expected.  I helped him use the bathroom, and then eventually got him to go back to bed.  The rest of the evening was uneventful, but I was relieved when they returned, and didn’t repeat the experience for another five years.

 

The next project on the movie schedule was the submarine shoot, which I was of course slated to be on.  Unfortunately it fell during the week of summer staff training at camp, and while that was disappointing, I didn’t think twice about it.  I always enjoyed staff training at camp, and it was the foundation for the social relationships of the rest of the summer, but I had done it three times before.  On the other hand, getting a trip on an active Nuclear Ballistic Missile Submarine as a civilian, was a once in a lifetime opportunity.  So I planned to arrive at camp a week or two late that summer, after I had returned to shore, and ingested the footage at the office.  I regretted that I would miss part of camp that summer, but that was just how the schedule was working out.  Foreseeing those potential issues in advance, I had asked for a role with less direct responsibility that summer.  Based on my work schedule, I couldn’t even commit to entire weeks, to be a counselor.  So I had been assigned to the newly created “program staff” as a volunteer.  But that wouldn’t take effect until I actually arrived at camp, and it didn’t look like that would be happening until a few weeks into what was already a shortened schedule.

Traveling for Work

I returned to NAB in April, working as a demo artist for Cineform again.  It was easier the second time around, and less stressful since I knew what to expect.  Cineform’s target customers were my ideal consulting clients, so it was a valuable networking opportunity.  Between my website and my involvement on certain technical forums, I was beginning to get a bit of a reputation within the independent post-production community, as an innovative problem solver.  Once word got around that I was available in person at Cineform’s booth, some people sought us out just to ask me questions.  Since most of my proposed solutions involved Cineform’s software tools in some form, they were more than happy to give me a lot of leeway in how I executed my role as “demo artist.”  I referred the software development questions to the Cineform staff members, and they directed the people with more complex workflow questions to me.  It was a pretty good relationship, and it was nice to be part of a team, going to meals and events with them in the off hours.

As soon as I got back from Vegas, Bandito was gearing up for the first major shoot for the Navy SEAL movie.  The movie was currently titled “I Am That Man,” and we had been talking about it for a year and a half, but now it was finally happening.  I had been kept fairly out of the loop on the creative side, but was very involved with the technical plan, to shoot the first major motion picture recorded on video DSLRs.  Siobhan and I had been hashing out the details of file formats and naming conventions for months, and Ben had written us a web database to sort the files and accompanying metadata.  But now it was time to test out all of those theories and preparations on a real movie shoot.

Bandito doesn’t start small, so our first day of shooting was on a boat, with a fleet of other boats and helicopters to coordinate.  I flew to Key West with two laptops and a handful of hard drives, to support two long days of intense shooting.  We had 8 cameras, and only about 12 cards to record on, so I didn’t have much leeway for mistakes, having to backup the cards for immediate reuse.  We were operating from a $20 million yacht, and I was given a spot in the dining room to set up my laptops.  The dining room was in the front of the boat, directly below the bridge, and gave me a 270 degree view of the Florida Keys.  It overlooked the main deck, and they had positioned bikini clad models in the windows for the external shots.  So it fit every stereotype of how perfect life must be to make movies for a living.  It was amusing to have a handful of super-models on the boat with a platoon of SEALS.  They both idolized and were intimidated by each other.

The basic plan was for teams of SEALS to assault the yacht, leaping on board from Seahawk helicopters and inflatable boats.  We had camera teams on the yacht and various support boats, as well as our own camera helicopter.  They ran the whole exercise start to finish multiple times, while we recorded it from various angles.  There were a lot of logistics to handle, and between all the various radio frequencies involved, even just turning the fleet in a different direction was a complicated task.  And with a new shooting crew, many of whom had never worked together, there were many challenges to overcome.  It was amusing to later learn that certain people on the boat thought that I was in charge of the overall operation, from my commanding position at the main table, and based on the number of people hurrying to and from my desk. (Actually delivering media cards for me to backup.)

We also recorded a long interrogation scene on board the yacht.  It was unique in that there was no script; we had a real SEAL interrogator, and an actor who knew “the plan” as a prisoner.  The trip had been carefully coordinated so that these two characters had never crossed paths until we had the cameras rolling.  Over the course of 45 minutes, the SEAL used all sorts of unexpected approaches to extract the information he was looking for.  We used less than five minutes of it in the movie, but it was an interesting process to observe in real time.  The shoot was quite the unforgettable experience, and I returned to LA even more excited about the movie than I had been before.

Towing a Trailer

As my role in the company evolved, I was beginning to spend a lot more time on location, in support of the productions we were doing.  This usually took the form of me setting up a laptop and a couple of hard drives where ever I could find the space to work, ideally with a source of power available.  The best work environment always came from getting space in a production office trailer, if one was available.  Otherwise I was out on a folding table under an overhang.  But as the data and processing requirements increased for the work I was doing on set, I needed more and more gear to support it.

As we prepared for the upcoming feature film shoots, I knew things were only going to continue to scale up, more cameras, and more footage to handle.  So I began to look into getting my own trailer to work in.  I had no experience with anything to do with trailers, so it took a bit of research.  The simplest solution seemed to be buying a tow hauler.  A dedicated office trailer would be more expensive, but toy haulers have a large open area in the back, designed to store ATVs, that I could build into an office with a workstation and monitors.  So I started looking for a good deal on a trailer.

I was also going to need a truck to pull it with.  I went car shopping for the first time in my life, with my dad.  Ironically, after seeing all of the new options available, he was the one that ended up buying one.  Then I bought his previous truck from him, which was six years old by then.  It was a bit smaller than I was looking for, which limited my trailer options a bit, but that was probably a positive thing.  A larger trailer would have only added to the challenges, with few benefits.

So I eventually found a good deal on eBay, from a guy about a half hour away.  I made a decent deal with him, but now realize that I probably could have negotiated a lower price.  It is a learning process, and that was the largest purchase of my life.  He agreed to deliver the trailer to my office, where I had arranged to store it, so I didn’t have to tow it myself until a few months later.

Fortunately there was an area next to my office where I could experiment with maneuvering it, backing up and parking.  So I had a few practice sessions, with people setting up cones to work between and such, but that was still a far cry from taking it out in LA traffic.

I had a desk built against the back wall, and installed my computer and monitors in there.  My dad came to visit for a weekend, and helped me build overhead shelves with shock mounting for the systems and gear.  I setup a large battery power system, which would allow me to operate for a few hours without generator support.  It was the biggest investment I had made in my life, and a pretty extensive project to get up and running.