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white balance 14-Nov-2002 At 4:12:57 PM Mike

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Yeah, Neil would be the dude for the job, given the quality of his Baffin work, etc.

Anyway, what have I learned in my, what, less than a year of tinkering with film?

Mike's Home Climbing Video Tips

1. Train your buds to film.

Well first off the thing quickly becomes a chore. You need at least three people. One to belay, one to climb and one to film. Without three it's just not easy enough. Problem is, I'm usually either climbing or belaying, so the task of filming sometimes gets delegated to the nearest bud. So as a tip, get all the members of the team familar with the camera settings. With my camera you can easily get it stuck on stills mode instead of video, get the manual exposure locked, manual focus locked, and so on. The result is crap or non existant video. Either that or forget climbing for the day and concentrate on filming.

2. Get More and Cooler Angles.

Spice up the angles whenever you can. Avoid the bum shot at all costs! If you have time shoot a bit from below while the climber is low on the route, then race to the top and get some footage from above. (On a multi-pitch you'll just have to put up with bum shots). I've even gone to the trouble of rapping halfway down the line to get interesting side on views. If somone is working a route over multiple attempts this is perfect for filming. This way you can shoot from five or six different angles over various attempts and edit it into one climb later. I haven't tried asking someone to climb the route again, to get another angle. If I found someone patient enough to do that I might consider rapping down next to the line and mixing in close ups of specific crux hand holds, etc.

3. Edit Out The Crap

Even filming only selective snippets I usually come back with way too much footage of people fiddling around with gear, dogging bolts, and generally not moving upwards. I find that editing out all this makes for a fast paced climb. Just keep the action.

4. Avoid Zooming and Panning.

I'll mention this just quickly because it's really video skills 101. Film action, don't create it. As a general rule try not to pan or zoom while recording. Sometimes that's hard because you might miss something if you don't. But try anyway. There's nothing worse than home video where the camera is making enlessly sickening movements. Force yourself to stay still. Use a tripod if you have too. There are exceptions however. Like you might pan down from the top of the climb to give a sense of height. Or do a controlled zoom out to highlight the tiny nature of the climber in relation to the mamoth size of the cliff. But, yeah, generally, stay still!

5. Pray for Overcast Days

Sounds dumb, but it's not. Sunny days give you nothing but contrast issues. The rock face covered in dappelled shadows from the nearby trees plays havoc with a good shot. This is hard enough to compensate for with a still frame let alone video.

6. Get A Good Camera Bag

One you can take up a multi-pitch without worrying about the state of the camera. Are you going to drop it? I've tried tying off the camera to a sling, attached to by chest. Works for me.

7. Get A UV Filter

Again, this is video skills 101, but as soon as you buy the camera, stick on a clear UV filter and never take it off again. This way all those nasty chalk prints and scratches happen to the $20 filter and not the $1000 lens.

8. Forget About Audio

Unless you're doing a post climb interview or something, the audio is not going offer much, but wind and voices wildly varying in volume. What are you going to do, stick a boom mic on your leader? Make them go up with a wireless lappel mic? Even a good zoom mic is going to get mainly wind noise. If you really need clinking trad gear and shouts of "slack!!!", I guess the zoom mic would be the best bet. Generally though, I'd expect you'd stick some fast paced music over it, and leave the audio for commentary. By the way, keep the "voice of god" commentary (from the camera man), to a minimum. If you're serious you can always ask the climber to describe the crux afterwards, and then mix this, well captured audio in with the climbing footage during editing. This way you'll get clear voice. Most editing packages let you add mutiple layers of audio.

9. Buy A Powerful PC

You'll need like a 60 gig second disk drive, and a fast processor. Editing footage on the PC is great fun and easy with something like Pinnacle Studio, or Adobe Premier, but it eats diskspace like there's no tomorrow. You'll need like three times the amount of diskpace when editing so there's room to move things around and compile the final version.

10. Buy A Kayakers Dry Bag

Mine fits over the camera, and the normal bag just neatly. Its 100% water proof. You can submerge this sucker and a single drop will not hit the camera. Very handy for multi-day hikes where storms can come out of nowhere. Protect your camera from moisture, dust, chalk, basically anything that might harm it. The climbers environment is not a studio.