So I said “to hell with it,” and bought a damn treadmill

If you read the last post, you’ll know how challenging it is to borrow a treadmill. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I have a face that says: “Don’t trust me with your treadmill.” Maybe they could sense I was going to dismantle it a little. I was going to un-dismantle it after using it (seriously, I was), but I had no luck.

Fortunately, there’s craigslist. I went and bought one today from a guy who has three houses on the same lot. Seriously. I got there and called him to ask which house he was in. I almost asked him to just fund the film and let us use one of the houses as a studio to film the crowdfunding video. But alas I’m the creative type, not the type who’s good at asking strangers for money.

So, now our production company owns several cameras, a lot of lenses, a green screen, a Steadicam®‚ and several tripods. We almost own a slider that moves the camera back and forth in cool ways. We aren’t exactly Sony, but we can film some stuff.

And we have a treadmill for walking in front of the green screen.

Double-blogging

We have our movie site up at www.swimmingwithbyron.com, so there will be some double-posting. Please follow us on Facebook @swimmingwithbyron, on Twitter @swimwithbyron, and on the webpage.

It’s all work in progress, but that progress will pick up pretty fast in December and January as we move towards our February Kickstarter launch date.

At this point we’re posting some tiny teasers about the filming of the Kickstarter video. Here’s the first:

Swimming with Byron starts pre-production

Photo by Eric Trimble

Swimming with Byron is officially in pre-production. We shot our first piece of footage for the Kickstarter campaign yesterday in Austin’s Ladybird Lake.

I couldn’t sleep the night before. Eric Trimble, the cinematographer, and I had planned out the shot. I storyboarded the whole video, and then Eric did some more detailed storyboarding. He rigged up my zoom lens with a pull focus for a part of the shot. I’d recruited a team of volunteers. We had the cameras we needed.

But the weather turned dodgy. This was our last chance to get the scene I wanted in open water. After this weekend, with temperatures dropping fast, we’d be forced to do it in a pool, and that would have been feeble as hell.

Swimming with Byron: First shoot planned

Ladybird Lake here in Austin, Texas. Shooting begins right past this train bridge where the buildings on the left are.

We’re getting ready to film the first part of our Kickstarter video, as I mentioned in a post a few days ago. It’s exciting to go from talking about the thing to doing something about it.

Here’s the lake I’ll be swimming. It’s really the Colorado River dammed at two ends of the ten-mile stretch that runs through central Austin. The day we’ve picked for shooting is supposed to crawl to a high of only 54 degrees, so I’m not relishing the idea of stripping down to my swimsuit and diving in. The water will be a lot warmer than the air, so it’s the getting in and out that worry me most.

We’ll be a small crew: the film’s cinematographer, Eric, two student volunteers from a film and fiction class I’m teaching, and a friend of mine. When I wrote the previous post on this I was thinking we’d use paddle boats, but that won’t work, so we’ll have two kayaks. One will tow the other, the second one will hold Eric and the cameras and sound, and voila, a traveling shot rig. Just like Spielberg does it.

It’s technically illegal to swim in Ladybird Lake, but I’ve done it for triathlons and none of me’s rotted away as a result. Just don’t alert the authorities, ok?

I’ll post a “making of video when it’s all done. I just wish we were going to have a day like yesterday, when I took these pictures. I’m crossing my fingers for good light, but am less sanguine about the possibilities for a sudden heat wave in place of the Arctic front that’s forecast.