Shooting in the Swamps

I landed in New Orleans after a layover in Houston, and was driven to my hotel in Slidell Mississippi.  It was across the river from Stennis Space Center, a rocket test facility surrounded by a lot of uninhabited swamps.  The military uses the area for training when tests aren’t going on.  We had to get individual clearance badges the next morning in order to access the base, and then since we were shooting night scenes the first two days, we had a call time at noon.  When I finally got to the set, I was given a space at the back of the production RV, about a mile from the compound we were shooting in.  I had opted not to drive my trailer across the country for the shoot, but I was given a decent workspace.  I didn’t have much to do as the media manager until after we had actually shot some footage, so I usually spent the first half of the day as the onset photographer.

 

The initial safety meeting was quite interesting.  In most jobs, OSHA required safety meets are pretty much a joke, but not here.  First off, they told us that three of the most poisonous animals in the US lived in that swamp, in the form of snakes and spiders.  And there were lots of other huge spiders, as well as alligators, and many other fun things we could run into.  Then they went over safety around the jet boats we were using, and then the helicopters.  And then we discussed the explosives and pyrotechnics we would be setting off.  And the live ammo they would be shooting, and the list went on.

 

By the time the meeting was over, I was a bit worried about all these huge spiders they were talking about, poisonous or not.  I didn’t have to wait long to get a good look at one.  The roads were basically narrow gravel strips cut out of the swamp, with a jungle of plants within reach on both sides.  I had to get around a cube truck in the road, and was edging along with my back to it when I looked up and came face to face with my first banana spider.  It had a web in the bushes about a foot away from me, and was about four inches long, with eight shiny legs.  The body was yellow and pretty much shaped like a banana.  It definitely got my attention, and I hurried past it, but after I saw twenty more that first day, you almost get used to them.  If we setup a canopy anywhere for shade, within a half hour there would be multiple spiders making webs in each corner.  Sometime there would be webs built between vehicles that were parked ten feet apart.  I have no idea how the spiders got that first strand across, but it meant that you had to be careful no matter where you were walking, if you didn’t want a face full of spider web.

 

I discovered that a feature film set is much different from a commercial set, and there are a lot more people around.  I had worked with some of the crew members on previous commercial shoots, but most of them were strangers.  And that was only time I was on location with our featured actress, who wasn’t real popular with the crew.  I thought my brief interactions with her had been quite pleasant until I realized I had only been dealing with her stunt double, who was quite friendly.  We also had a new producer, who I shared an “office” with in the RV.  He was very new to the Bandito style of film making, so I helped orient him to how we operated, and reassured him that “yes,” we actually knew what we were doing.  He was a very hands-on producer, so we had discussions about everything from our highly debated naming convention, to the technology we were using to process the footage.  He had just had the initial meeting in LA that eventually led to the production of “Ted,” so all I heard about for two weeks was this stupid talking bear.