When Les “ Survivorman ” Stroud — the firmly - working cameraman in the job — say shooting his novel show “ Beyond Survival ” was his most challenging shoot yet …
What kind of gear do you use when you ’re shooting yourself ?
Les Stroud : What I hear to do is to detain on top of the cutting - boundary game . luckily , because I ’m not a openhanded , huge , massive production business firm or whatever , I can afford to say , ‘ Oh , what ’s cool and new and exciting ? I ’ll pick up one of those . ’ Because I generally only need one or two , right ?
With my primary cameras I ’ve always been a Sony rooter . I started out using PD150s and VX1000s . For this last season I was using the EX3 , which means I am read direct to intemperate drive , which create a whole different bent of issue for spud out in the landing field .
I am enjoyingViosport . The troupe sends me their gear every once in a while . This year I actually added on theGoPro . I had about three or four of them strapped to this place , strapped to that place , getting submersed shots , and strapped to helicopter .
I use a combining of cameras . It ’s been great . I ’m a very big believer in substance . enceinte mental object on a crappy photographic camera is just than crappy depicted object on a great camera .
Do you run to expend long suit mount and tripods ?
Les Stroud : Yeah , but you know , if I say ‘ specialty mounts ’ it sounds really cool , but the reality is : you just lather camera to things . That ’s all it really comes down to . I do n’t have a multi - armed gizmoajig . It ’s literally just , ‘ Where can you strap a tv camera ? Where can you jostle a camera ? Let ’s put it on the cervix of the dog as he goes hunt . countenance ’s put it on the arsenic of the horse as we go riding . ’
A lot of fourth dimension I find the plans forwards of the game for using self-aggrandizing , screwball mounts … I make out myMagic Arms . I use my Magic Arms a slew . But you land the mounts in and in the death , somebody shove a camera up into the corner of a shelf and it gets the good shot of the Clarence Day .
What about Steadycams or gyroscopic mounts ?
Les Stroud : I do have them . We did apply Steadycam on this shoot , as well . But after a while not so much . Because of what we were doing we were able to get what we involve without using it much . But we had Steadycams there . We had GoPros there . We had the Magic arm there . We had Viosports . A whole array of tripod .
I had a shot there this time namedJohnny Askwith . He ’s great . He primarily fritter away features and thing . So he fetch with him his little micro - jib and his micro - dolly . So we did use a jib and a dolly on a number of occasions . Whenever we thought we had a crowd of people to germinate and we were staying in one topographic point , we ’d pull out the jib and the dolly . That was really decent . Because that jib could get twelve , fifteen metrical foot in the air , so you ’re getting a shot you ca n’t get by holding it .
Another dearie of mine ? Really simple , but really effective : My little beanbag mount , the Pod . It ’s a little beanbag with a quarter - in screw in it for your camera gear . I utilize that thing endlessly .
Fancy gear wheel to some , maybe , but just good working stuff to others . I suppose to a consumer that might all seem very fancy but it ’s really down and canonic once you get going at it .
exposure : Laura Bombier
How do you manage power when you ’re out in the joint ?
Les Stroud : Very crafty ! For Survivorman it was quite unmanageable ; I had to fundamentally just drag lithium stamp battery wherever I hold up .
For Beyond Survival , in almost every case we had a tiny , smallest - we - could - get source . One of the problem was just saddle those barrage every night . I might be out in the hobo camp hunting for wild boar or monkey because this is what this tribe is doing . Meanwhile , right smart back in the jungle hamlet in a little tent , one of my guys , Andrew Shepherd , sitting there charging stamp battery all night long .
What are your warehousing issues ? I take for granted you ’re completely off tape at this gunpoint ?
Les Stroud : I will say this much : I lament the loss of tape a little routine . There was some freedom with tape that you do n’t have when going to hard drive .
There ’s now a whole new berth in the field of force of filmmaking called “ information manager ” . We never had that before . But now we have to have a guy cable whose only job is dumping footage every day and every night . You have to get it off the camera . We ’d take to disc or SD , work out of disk , then just keep film on the camera ’s memory . His job was just underprice , dump , knock down , plunge . And that postulate office , of course .
Was he just dumping to a laptop computer or did you have a specialized equipment ?
Les Stroud : Just a unsubdivided MacBook Pro and some really full-bodied hard drives . I ca n’t commemorate the name of them , but they ’re thehard drive with the orange , rubber covers . We had like eight or more of those . And we ’d have triplex redundancy . Always triple redundancy , which as you could imagine is clip devour . The dumping and the copying over — unbelievable .
But I ’m frightened of intemperate drives ! It ’s , like , okay , my entire show is on this one strong drive . One . My entire show . Or maybe two backbreaking drives ! Or even possibly three , whereas in the old mean solar day I ’d have 45 tapes . And if I lose tape it might hurt because it might have been a really undecomposed taping , but then again my other tape in my other photographic camera develop the other angle , so I ’m okay . I ’ve get the scene .
Not so with hard driving force . You ’ve get two laborious drives , peradventure three , with the entire week of shooting on them . You flatten one and you ’re toast . So we did triple redundancy , even to the point of when take in them home we would split them up . I would take a circle . Andrew would take a set . And my still photographer or sometimes the discipline producer would take a stage set . All because in the terminal it ’s kind of scary to have a week ’s Charles Frederick Worth of work on a $ 400,000 shoot sit on three little hard drives .
In fact , we had one Mount Rushmore State card shot on us . I remember I kept bugging my editor in chief , “ How come you have n’t put in that shot yet ? ” We ca n’t find it , Les . Well , there is that one SD card that we ca n’t interpret . “ Aw , shit . I hope it ’s not on that ! ”
And then one day , he ’s just playing with the bill of fare and all of the sudden it evince up . He coldcock it , gets all the footage , include that shot , and that ’s it . The poster never worked again .
What ’s the shooting schedule like ?
Les Stroud : This was actually harder to shoot than Survivorman because I had a full crew to look after . And I was dealing with whole settlement of multitude to shoot . A muckle of logistics . It was a hard shoot . We in reality had less time with these shoot than we did on Surivorman . I was about two week to two - hebdomad - and - three - days in each localisation , and then we would come back for a week or two and then take off again .
The last four month of this the estrus turn up improbably because of the schedule . It was ridiculous . We would shoot for two week or so and in a couple of eccentric we did n’t even amount home . We ’re talking about frivol away in Borneo , then off to Indonesia , then over to Malaysia . So we were around the creation eight times shooting this serial .
luckily we had two to do in Peru so we were able to fritter away them together . Five full weeks in Peru . It was very acute series .
If you ’re trying to get into the concern , you ’ve really got to understand that this is just not the right business for someone who ’s lazy or not a hard actor . It ’s intense . You sacrifice a lot with your friend and your family . You sacrifice your wellness . Every single one of us got horribly grim at some stage . I mean , like down and it ’s coming out of every remainder . We all had to go through that . Two of my cat have malaria . It ’s not an well-situated shoot to put up with .
You ’re literally hotel to hotel to hotel . And then a stinky fomite or small plane and then a long road and then a long hike and you ’re carrying all your gear . Like in Madagascar , we had seven of us swot into this little field hut that was track in cock diddly-shit with massive spiders above our drumhead and yell babies three feet by with just a rickety wall between . And we ’re all trying to catch some Z’s there because we ’ve been shooting all night and we have to scoot all Clarence Day the next day . It ’s pretty toughened doing shoots like these , and , while the meter in between is cherish , it ’s just not long enough .
Or at least it was n’t on this one . It take a stripe out of all of us .
Les Stroud ’s unexampled series , “ Beyond Survival with Les Stroud ” starts Friday , August 27th at 10PM ET / PT on Discovery .
example by Sam Spratt . Check out Sam’sportfolioand become a rooter of hisFacebook Artist ’s Page .
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