A Night on the Beach

We headed to Virginia Beach the next day, and I was reassigned to drive a pickup truck with the audio team.  I knew them from filming the movie together, and we were friends, so that was a much lower stress vehicle to be in.  Plus I usually just followed car in front of me, which was easier.  It was the off season and very cold, but we were staying in a high rise hotel right on the water, with rooms overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.  Our next shoot was at Fort Point, overlooking the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.  This would be a full amphibious landing, with hovercraft and armored vehicles from the ship.  The landing was at night, and really cold.  I started with a camera unit on the beach, waiting for the first footage, to return to the vehicles to process it.  The USS Ashland was anchored a mile or two off shore, and we could hear what was coming long before we could see it.  The first units to hit the beach were AAVs, which drove out of the water, and appeared around us in the darkness.  They offloaded their passengers, who secured the beachhead, and moved inland.

None of these exercises were designed to be actual combat missions; they were just various unusual situations that could arise.  This one was planned to be a two part mission with the initial landing group discovering a cache of WMDs a few miles inland, and then the mission would shift to guarding and securing those items until a team could be brought in to deal with them properly.  The problem was that the initial landing team didn’t actually identify the WMDs, even though they made it to the correct building.  So the MPs that were overseeing the exercise had to help them out a little, which wasn’t as dramatic for our shooting purposes.

The challenge for us was that the mission took place across the wide swath of coast and several miles inland, over 36 hours.  The initial landing and discovery was finished by the morning, and we headed back to the hotel during the day, where I was able to collect media from the twelve camera operators who had been distributed throughout the exercise.  The next evening we went back to film the arrival of the WMD experts, which may have been the most anticlimactic moment in the history of the world.  The marines had been guarding that area for 36 hours by the time they left, after 12 hours preparing for the mission on the ship.  They would trade off who was on watch, but sleeping in the back of their armored vehicles can’t be that restful.  I spent most of that night logging footage in an SUV, trying to stay warm in the extreme cold.

We had the next day off, to catch up on sleep, and in my case catch up on footage logging as well.  We had gotten a drive of footage from the team on the Ashland, when one of them came ashore on an AAV, so I had a lot more to sort through.  We were halfway done with the project, so I was able to ship a drive full of data back to the office, which lowers the overall stress level once it arrives safely.  Our next two missions were in Fort Jackson, South Carolina.  So the production had chartered a flight to get the crew down there.  It was a pretty small plane, so I had a seat that was a window AND an aisle seat.  We landed and were given a new set of vehicles.  I got another truck, and we loaded up the sound gear, and headed off to get another set of base passes.