THE FAILED SHOOT
For my shot I had the lovely idea of a first person shot, much in the style of a video game like Call of Duty or Halo. I wanted to shoot on the beach because I thought that could be very cool, but I needed a GoPro to replicate the first person shot. Enter my awesome teacher, Ron Honn:
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| Ron Honn, ripped straight off Google Images. |
Ron let me use his GoPro Hero 2 camera. It's an older model, but who cares, it's great!
My buddy Collin agreed to be my actor, so together we met up at school where Ron gave us the GoPro. We were in business! Time to hit the beach!
The closest sandy beach to FSU is Alligator Point beach. It's about 40 miles south and you have to go through some serious back roads to get there, so at times the speed limit can be rather slow.
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| The route from FSU to Alligator Point |
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| Collin at the entrance to Alligator Point |
I only post the map for one reason: to emphasize the distance. It took a solid hour and a half to reach Alligator Point. And that's an hour and half through nothing except about a dozen roads boiled peanut stands. Why do I emphasize the distance? So that my critical mistake becomes all the more apparent: I didn't check the battery on the GoPro. Nor did I bother to check and see if there was a card. I have never done this before in my life. I told a professor of mine, and he laughed calling it a "rookie mistake." I corrected him and called it one of a "complacent veteran."
But no worries. Collin and I were problem solvers. We could use my phone! I went to go get my phone. DEAD. The navigation to Alligator Point had completely drained the battery. But it's okay, Collin had a phone too. Using a batman mask Collin brought for no apparent reason, we were abler o rig together a face mount for the iPhone by velcro-ing it to the mask and tying it back with some duct tape and a scarf.
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| The batman face rig! |
Somehow, this was going to work. And that's when Collin's phone basically stopped working. He had told me that his phone's camera had a hard time focusing, but I didn't think it would be a big deal. It was. His camera cannot focus on anything past a few inches. It just can't. We tried everything to fix it. Nothing.
After sitting around for another hour trying desperately to figure something out, we left quietly in defeat. A day wasted.
THE SUCCESSFUL SHOOT
Three days later we made the trip again. This time, nothing was going to stop us. I had the GoPro fully charged with a 64GB SD card. I brought along a Contour ROAM, a GoPro equivalent that lost the branding wars years back when the portable cameras were first introduced. It was fully charged and ready to go. I brought an iPhone charger with me so we could use my phone if we had to, and I even brought my laptop in case I needed it to offload anything or reformat any cards. We were golden. This time, the GoPro worked like a charm.
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| Collin strapping on the GoPro |
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| At the beach after a fun days shoot! |
I call this shoot the successful shoot, but there was a serious caveat. This day the beach was MUCH more crowded… that means quite a few people I'll have to paint out in post. It also meant I didn't feel comfortable pulling out our super cool prop sic fi gun, which would have added a lot of production value. Fingers crossed, I hope this works.
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| Lots of people today… Oh boy. Plus side, there were A LOT of cute dogs :) |
