'Dust' tails racers blasting down Baja
By Ashley Powers
Times Staff Writer
November 16, 2004
Flying grit's more daunting than water, says Dana Brown, who bagged cameras with plastic while filming the Tecate Score Baja 1000 last November.
The second-generation Southern California director follows his 2003 crossover surf documentary "Step Into Liquid" with "Dust to Glory," a film that
blasts from one end of the Baja Peninsula to the other. It's due out in April.
Monster waves and silky beaches, Brown says, are tame compared to filming off-road vehicles careening up to 100 mph through washboard terrain.
When he brought his cameras to Baja, Brown figured he would make "a little character piece" on the racers. Instead, "It's this war movie," he says.
It took a production crew of 90 to shoot the 32-hour race from Ensenada to La Paz.
"Every plant has spikes on it; the light is harsher, the rocks sharper, the air drier ? it's like hyper-reality," Brown says.
In filming "Liquid," the challenge was waiting for hours on the ocean. When a swell finally hit, the filmmaker would deploy at most six cameras to
trail a surfer. If the shot didn't pan out, the crew would wait for the next wave.
To create "Dust," the crew trained more than 50 cameras on 265 competing vehicles. Cameras in cars and in helicopters as well as hand-held lenses
scanning the crowds recorded action that's impossible to re-shoot.
"It's gonna happen, that's it. It's not coming back," Brown says. "So if you missed it, you missed it. What are you gonna do, hire a bunch of cars to
go by and re-create Baja?"
Brown first thought about filming the 1000 during the press junket for "Liquid" after desert racer and buddy Mike "Mouse" McCoy pestered him to do it.
He resisted the idea at first because it would mean tracing his dad's path.
Bruce Brown followed his seminal surf documentary, 1966's "Endless Summer," with the motorcycle-racing flick "On Any Sunday" in 1971.
The younger Brown, 44, grew up in Dana Point where he dirt-biked, surfed and shot home movies (including what the "Dust to Glory" media kit calls "an
attempt at Claymation that was so awful it may be his finest work"). He worked as a writer and editor on his dad's 1994 "The Endless Summer II" and
won critical praise for "Liquid" last year.
Dave Kehr of the New York Times wrote in a review of the film that Brown "assumes the entire process, which includes writing, editing and delivering
the casual, conversational narration that the senior Mr. Brown made a trademark of his films."
Brown also fretted that a film about the Baja 1000 might come off as "ugly Americans ripping up someone's Third World country."
But after checking out the Baja 500 in June 2003, he recognized the hair-raising drama of bulked-up trucks, motorcycles and even Volkswagens gunning
through mountains and deserts amid yahooing crowds. His worries about offending the locals subsided when he witnessed their zeal for the race.
"This is a big deal and they love it," he says.
After the fatiguing shoot, Brown stared at 250 hours of footage from which he would craft the race's story lines. Sifting through the characters, he
settled on his friend McCoy ? who finished, but came in far from first ? to drive the narrative.
"Mouse staggering around heroically to the finish with snot coming out of his nose ? I don't know why that strikes me as super-fantastic, but it is,"
Brown says. "Twelfth place for us was better than first; there was something about his journey."
"Dust" isolates other 1000 moments: father-and-son speed freaks and women racers and a who's who of speed demons: Robby Gordon and Malcolm Smith.
For Brown, his experience in Baja is summed up by the words of racer Jimmy Vasser. "It took me three months to figure it out," Vasser says in the
film, "but I had a great time."
El Jefe - 11-16-2004 at 09:47 PM
If this is anywhere near the quality of "Step Into Liquid", it will be a great film. can't wait to see it. BajaNomad - 11-16-2004 at 10:07 PM
Quote:
Originally posted by elgatoloco
"Every plant has spikes on it; the light is harsher, the rocks sharper, the air drier ? it's like hyper-reality,"
Drivers and Cameramen Put the Pedal to the Medal in the Baja 1000
By Iain Blair
Senior Contributing Editor
Film & Video Magazine
In 2003, documentary filmmaker Dana Brown (Step Into Liquid) and a crew of 70 headed south to cover the most dangerous road race in the world. Imagine
an event that crosses Mad Max with the Indy 500 and you begin to get some idea of what the Baja 1000 ? the longest point-to-point race in the world ?
is all about, with hundreds of entrants racing non-stop around the clock until they reach the finish line. The result is the documentary Dust to
Glory, shot using a mix of film, DV and HD formats.
?The biggest technical challenge was just getting coverage, and to do that we used 55 cameras,? reports Brown. These were deployed among 13 ground
units, four helicopters, a chase unit equipped with specialized camera mounts, and four solo roving cameramen, as well as in many of the vehicles
taking part in the race. ?It was mind-boggling, because once you start putting pins in the map just to see what ground coverage you have, for
instance, you see just how far apart they are, and how much of the race you?re going to miss. And then you just pray that all the guys following in
the helicopters are going to make the right choices. So right away, I realized there?s no real way to cover it all without using literally thousands
of cameras and having a budget of millions and millions.?
In fact, Brown and his team of road warriors had a total budget of just $2 million to prep, shoot and edit the film. Pre-production took nine weeks,
including an arduous tech scout. ?We pre-ran the course backwards to get all the locations and figure out our GPS coordinates,? says producer Scott
Waugh (Step Into Liquid, Release). ?That alone took five days.?
Plotting and Outfitting
Back in LA, DP Kevin Ward (The Perfect Moment) ? himself a racing enthusiast ? plotted out a huge wall map showing all the locations, ?just like a big
military exercise,? notes Brown. ?Then we spent weeks figuring how to do it, and thank God we had Kevin. He?s such a veteran of the race and the
terrain, and he knew all these shortcuts and access roads.?
?Obviously our choice of camera packages was crucial, and some of our choices were already made for us, as with the helicopter aerial footage,? Ward
explains. ?The operators would have a Wescam or Tyler mount, and we also had a 35mm set-up with a Tyler Major Mount and a brand new gyro-stabilized HD
set-up with a ball mount, which was perfect for us as it gave us 40-minute tape loads. So we knew we?d get great coverage with that, and they helped
make our decisions for us.?
The 13 three-man ground teams were each equipped with one of two primary cameras ? ?either a Sony F900 HD camera or an Arri SR3 Super 16 high-speed
camera,? says Ward. ?And they all also carried a Panasonic DVX100 [a DV camcorder ], which we shot in the 24p mode with very impressive results. The
footage from these upresed to D5 with a minimal amount of artifacts, which then cut well with the other HD footage.?
These lightweight DVX100s proved very effective. ?We?d go right up to the pits and just stick our hand in and get shots you?d never get with a regular
camera, as it?s so small and compact,? says Brown. ?We actually didn?t know if it?d work out that well, but it blew up great and we ended up using a
ton of that footage in the film, along with great audio, which was another big plus.?
Really Trying to Capture It
But Brown?s plan to use multiple in-car cameras along with embedded cameramen ?to really try and capture what the race actually feels like if you?re
in it? proved to be trickier. ?For a start, no driver wants a bulky camera in their car because of all their gear, so right off we knew we?d have to
go with the small lipstick cameras instead,? he explains. The production used a Toshiba three-chip ice-cube camera and a Sony lipstick camera,
according to the DP. ?Those were recording to a Sony DV clamshell,? says Ward. ?But that raised the question: If we use those cameras, can we go all
the way out to 35mm for the final print??
To make sure, Brown and Ward ran tests. ?We took it back to HD and then out to 35mm, and it held up fine,? says Brown. ?It did pick up some grain, but
that?s OK as it fits the mood of the camera angle itself being inside the car. So the lipstick cameras worked well for the most part, though some
broke down, mainly due to so much intense vibration, dust, or electrical problems. But enough of them worked that we got what we needed and some
amazing footage.?
?One of the by-products of upresing this lipstick camera footage to D5 was a narrow-shutter effect, like you?d achieve with a film camera,? adds Ward.
?We really liked that look.?
Building a Souped-Up Bug
The team also used a specially built and equipped Bug that could race at up to 130 mph. ?It has various custom-built 35mm mounts that allow you to
shoot car to car, so we sent that out first, equipped with an Arri SR3,? says Waugh. ?It had an extension arm that was counterweighted with springs as
well as a remote fluid head that let us pan and tilt. It was able to take a lot of punishment over terrain that?d destroy most gear.?
?It was pretty awesome and it ran with the actual guys in the race ? until it broke an axle,? recalls Brown. ?But can you imagine racing down ravines
and gullies at 90 mph and shooting while you go? That gave us some great coverage, and then we also had a guy on a motorcycle with a helmet-cam
[another Toshiba ice-cube camera] who was part of the official race, and that gave us another unbeatable POV.? In addition, Ward wore a Super 16 IVN
camera made by Photosonics and shot a lot of footage as he rode his motorcycle.
What were the hardest scenes to shoot? ?It was all tough, but the night footage was very tricky as we simply didn?t know how it?d turn out,? says
Brown. ?It was so dark and moonless out on the course, and then any lights at the pits were so bright. And in Mexico everything?s such low wattage.
Even the baseball stadium?s lit with just 40-watt bulbs, so it was very hard to judge what we should focus on.?
To deal with all the night shooting, the DP and his crew worked with Panavision to adapt some military ?image intensifiers? usually used for
nighttime surveillance. ?These were mounted between the cameras and our lenses and allowed us to find light when the naked eye couldn?t,? Ward
explains.
The image intensifiers were built by Dan Sasaki at Panavision in Woodland Hills, CA. ?He took the best consumer grade night-vision scopes available
and fitted them with relay lenses so that they mounted between the taking lens and the camera body,? reports Ward. ?There are about five of these in
the U.S. that have been built and are privately owned, and Panavision Tarzana now has two or three of them available ? but you won?t find them on
their rental list, as they are very difficult to work with.?
Despite the hammering the camera gear took, the team ultimately only lost one camera, a DVX100. ?One of our cameramen was trying to get this real low
angle on this road, and he placed the camera down and luckily moved back,? reports Brown. ?What he?d forgotten on this live course was that civilian
traffic could come from the opposite direction, and someone just ran over the camera and destroyed it.?
Posting the Race
After an exhausting shoot that spanned 12 days, Brown and Waugh, who also edited Step Into Liquid, returned to L.A., where they began editing the 250
hours of footage at home ? Brown on an Avid Film Composer 10.1 and Waugh on an Avid DV Xpress 3.5. ?We?d make dupes of all the dailies ? Beta SP for
his machine, DVCAMs for mine, everything with matching time codes,? says Waugh. ?That way we could send each other sequences over the Internet as we
went. Then at the end, we jumped onto my machine and finished together.? Then the entire film ? including the online assembly, titling and color
timing ? was completed on Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects .
?Form followed function throughout this whole project,? declares Ward, ?from choice of lenses to cameras. For instance, we used everything from 1200mm
lenses to 5.5mm, the latter for handheld, up-close-and-dangerous type shots. So depending on the action and the specific location, we?d go from one
extreme to another.?
Ward, who?s shot hundreds of car and motorcycle commercials, including current campaigns for Nissan and Kia, has been involved in the racing scene for
over 20 years. ?But this is the hardest shoot I?ve ever done,? he says. ?This race is the ultimate.?
Lenses In The Dust
Ward used the widest lenses he could find on the ice-cube and cigar cams: 4mm and 8mm. That footage was recorded to Sony DSR-V10 clamshell decks.
The Sony F900s were fitted with Fujinon HD zooms, ranging from a 4.8-62mm (with 2X) on the wide end and a 7.3-160mm (with 2x) on the long side.
The 16mm lens package included everything from a complete set of Zeiss primes and a 5.5mm Optex prime and a 6mm Century prime to zooms: a 8-64mm Canon
, an 11-110 Zeiss, an 11.5-138mm Angenieux and a 150-600mm Canon /Century with a 2x extender.
The 35mm cameras in the Helicopters were fitted with 25-250mm HR Angenieux Zoom lenses. Anonymous - 2-17-2005 at 10:36 AM
