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Ah, how
well I remember the day when Michael deYoanna and I were shopping at the Fort
Carson Post Exchange trying to decide if we needed to buy just one 1-terabyte
hard drive to store the footage for our then-untitled documentary about injured
veterans or if we should pony up and buy two just to be safe. Filming hadn’t
started yet and, since neither of us had ever made a documentary, we had no
idea how much storage we would need.
Nine
months later, we’ve filled five terabytes with material, stored in a teetering
stack of external hard drives on Michael’s desk. I think we estimated that the
footage equals about 500 hours. I am responsible for most of it, having filmed
veterans on multi-day long-distance bike rides from Arlington, Va., to Virginia
Beach over six days in June; all around Normandy, France for more than a week
in July; and from Richmond, Va., to the Pentagon via New York City and
Shanksville, Pa. during ten days around the anniversary of 9/11. After each
day’s ride, Michael and I conducted in-depth on-camera interviews in our hotel
rooms and traveled to vets’ homes to see their lives when they’re not on a
bike.
Michael
and I are hard on our equipment. During the course of filming, we destroyed a
DSLR, a Rode microphone, a GoPro camera and a nice Canon lens. We lost a
handful of speed plates, boom poles and too many other filmmaking gimcracks to
count. And with each leg of filming, our volume of gear grew and grew … we went
from lugging a few heavy bags to lugging a dozen
heavy bags as we added studio lighting, walkie talkies, more and more hard
drives, and extra tripods to our list of essentials. By the end of it all, we
needed to rent a van just to get the gear from place to place.
But it
was worth every effort. ...
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