Anatomy of a scene1

This is the completed scene in the commercial, it consists of two separate shots. A wide angle of a helicopter bringing a hurricane survivor to safety, and a closer angle on the crew helping her out of the aircraft. It's pouring with rain, the wind is howling and the blades of the HH-60 Blackhawk helicopter are at full speed; Not the easiest scene to shoot.

In this particular instance, we're filming a national TV commercial for the US Army National Guard, the people in front of the camera are not actors, they're real soldiers and air crew. For the director, this is helping me out! It's impossible to hear anything over the screaming engines and thus difficult to relay instructions to the performers - and in such a potentially dangerous setting - I'd rather be working with folks who are used to doing this for real.

Of course, in reality, it's not raining; It's a normal day of 90 degrees of sunshine in southern California. The rain is supplied by an Air Force Rescue Fire Truck, in the form of a high pressure torrent of water, several thousand gallons a minute, certainly enough to knock a man down and guaranteed to get inside every piece of clothing and equipment. The helicopter is producing a 70 mph wind that literally sucks the air out of your lungs. The blades are spinning very close, so a safety crew is standing watch to make sure the filmmakers don't get so involved in their work that they walk into a rotor.

The good thing about a movie hurricane is that you can turn it off. The soldiers who were 'acting' in the scene had never been in front a camera before this shoot, so they discover
that they'll have to repeat the whole thing a dozen times, faster, slower, looking one way and then looking the other. For the purposes of the film camera, they're asked to hit certain marks on the ground at certain points in their urgent dash from the chopper, this is so the camera assistant can focus the lens - the camera operator - me - is too busy controlling the composition of the shot. If the actors run too fast, they'll go out of focus, too slow and they'll be out of focus or worse, out of the shot altogether.

The scene is repeated over and over, the two folks pulling the camera on a heavy dolly have to negotiate the torrent of water, someone else has to drag the cables coming out of the camera and make sure the dolly doesn't run over them. On one take the camera jams, on another the actors can't get the helicopter door open, another finds us all waiting for the rain to start. It takes three hours to get two seconds of footage in the can perfectly. Then, in true commercial fashion, we have to switch out one actor for another and shoot the same thing for the Hispanic market, which means we start all over again. The key to directing a difficult scene like this is to be very specific about what you want from your crew and actors, there's no room to flip flop and be unsure when so much is going on - the whole deal is orchestrated by hand signals and we're under plastic sheets which are strapped down over our heads. We were still almost drowned, but to be honest, it was great fun. If it was a scene in a movie or TV show, I wouldn't have done anything differently. A month earlier we did a similar shoot with a couple of Abrams M1 Tanks, that hadn't gone so smoothly; when one rolled off the side of steep hill with me and a camera sticking out the top. That was one of the rare times I've actually been hurt during a shoot, but, we got the shot.

The real McCoy. Though they look like Hollywood actors, they're all aircrew from the 126th Medical Company in Sacramento. These are the folks who rescue the wounded in combat, and while in the US they fly search and rescues in Yosemite National Park.

I'd spent a few months shooting with them for a National Guard film that will go into the movie theaters across the country during the summer of 2007. We filmed air sea rescues, night missions into the mountains and spent an interesting day flying a formation of helicopters through the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. You will not find a more professional or fun group of people to work with, everyone in this picture has or will be going to Iraq or Afganistan. I hope they enjoyed their days as Hollywood stars, when they go back to work it'll be considerably less glamorous.

The following are a series of notes on how I helped put these images together. They're here in response
to questions I sometimes get from young filmmakers, and one can only hope to be honest and candid
in relating some of the decisions a director or cinematographer might make on a TV commercial.
Nothing is necessarily the 'right way', it's just 'my' way and should be taken with a grain of salt!

Apart from having the best job (arguably) of being in charge of everything as the director and cinematographer, the best job on the set has, and always will be, the camera operator. One reason is, that when you're actually operating, it's the one time during the work day when six people are not asking you questions!