INTRO COSTA RICA
ALASKA
INDIA

HDTV Diary

costa rica

 Monday 15 May 2000

I meet Randy and Larry at SFO for our first journey, to Costa Rica. Randy tells me that for our second story, Alaska, he is hoping to go to Barrow, the northernmost settlement in North America, and one of the remotest places on earth. This despite the fact that the high temperature there yesterday was 16 degrees above zero, and the low 10 degrees below!

After 4 hours in the air, we meet Jon McDonald at Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport for a 3 1/2 hour flight to San José, Costa Rica.

We are met by Xavier Gutierrez, our local Production Manager who has previously produced a film about our subject -- the Lincos project, which brings computers and the Internet to a mountain village two hours from San José. He knows the town and everyone connected with Lincos.

Xavier takes us to the Hotel Palma Real for our first night in Costa Rica.

Tuesday 16 May 2000

Next morning, Xavier picks us up with his own van and a rented van and we depart San José en route to San Marcos de Tarrazú, a small town in the mountains at about 5000 feet. There we meet with Rosario and her daughter Salomé at their house. They are very involved with the Lincos project and have agreed both to serve as our liaisons with the townspeople and to cook and provide meals for us and our crew for the entire time we are there.

After lunch, they guide us on a drive up into the mountains to shoot scenics, mountains, coffee plantations, terraced fields. We shoot some coffee fields close-up, but mostly we are positioned at overlooks shooting distant scnes, whenever possible working foreground foliage or fencing into the frame to add more levels of depth. Weather is overcast, with low fog and occasional sun breaking through.

We get lost on a back road and end up asking directions and taking a barely-passable route, driving down a steep, rocky, winding mountain road to get back to town. Several times we bottom out and slide a bit on the rocky road, but Cesar, our driver, skillfully maintains control.

We park in front of a store in town to make phone calls. As we start to drive away, some locals holler at us and we stop, only to discover a huge oil puddle underneath where our van was parked. Inspection reveals a big hole in the oil pan, and suddenly we are dead in the water.

After much hemming and hawing, half a dozen townspeople eager to help out suddenly start to push our van across street, into a garage and up a ramp onto an elevated platform for repair, a poor man's hydraulic lift. Frantically I run after the van, as our HD camera is loose on a back seat, but no harm is done. Repairmen weld the hole in our oil pan while it is still in place on the van. Larry and I cautiously move away during this process.

We leave the garage after the repair and check into the ill-named "Country Club," four rustic cabins with roaches, huge beetles, some odd worms, one bare bulb in the ceiling for lighting and another in the bathroom, which blows out the first time I turn it on. No phone. Larry had warned us accommodations would be sketchy in this area. There are few hotels and virtually no other rooms available due to a construction project in the area. But each cabin has a private bath. Hot water in the shower is heated by a small element built into the shower head, enough to heat a steady trickle. Xavier and Cesar and our PA Sergio go off to a hotel in town. Randy looks at our quartet of Gringo filmmakers and dubs us "Three Jews and a Longhorn fightin' roaches at the Country Club."

After dinner, we review the day's shooting. The footage is hard to evaluate. The mist and broken clouds diffuse the images, green vegetation is lifeless and devoid of detail and highlights when in the shade, and what sun there is seems to lurk dead overhead. Also, we are viewing with a 9" monitor in the field and a 14" monitor later, and trying to interpolate how the final product will look on a 40' screen! I know from experience there's a huge amount of detail and texture hidden in these electronic images. We won't be able to appreciate them until we see them on much bigger displays!

Before bed, much discussion of roaches and bugs, heightened by Jon's recollection of a documentary he saw about the Egyptian Deadly Millipede, a cousin of which he thinks is crawling up his wall. Randy plans to sleep with the lights on (to keep the bugs hiding), on top of the covers wrapped in his poncho, as he is convinced there are bedbugs. Larry is amused and doubts it.

Though we've all traveled extensively, we're mostly used to the creature comforts of business travel: 4- and 5-star hotels, international phone service, dataports for laptops. The sole exception is Larry, who has traveled a lot on his own to off-the-beaten-path places, and who relates some of his experiences in Tibet and China. I feel like I've been very spoiled. I pass a restless night, try leaving the light on, but give up on that after two hours, eventually wrap myself up in the quilt and sleep fitfully, waking every hour or so. The rain drums loudly on the corrugated tin roof.

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Posing in the coffee fields with the HD camera

Jon, Bill and Randy walk among the furrows looking for a set-up

The ill-named "Country Club"

White-balancing the camera in the hills above San Marcos

 

 

PHOTOS BY LARRY LAUTER

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Wednesday 17 May 2000

Next morning, none of us have slept too well. Randy's left the light on all night (as he does the rest of the week), we've slept in various states of clothed, but none of us report any insect attacks, other than having to dump an occasional roach out of our shoes in the morning or finding a beetle under a suitcase. Xavier says the hotel is worse than the country club, which we find hard to believe.

Randy and Larry meet the doctor in town and scout his office and clinic in San Marcos de Tarrazú, while Jon and I shoot on the street outside -- architecture, cars, people. Even though this is a high-tech story, we want to show our environment. In the course of many international trips with Randy and Larry, we have perfected the technique of the "Scoot" -- the combination scout/shoot, where we mix our pre-production and technical site surveys with shooting people, faces, houses, markets, gardens, streets, cultural activities, etc. Sometimes our people-shooting is "stolen" from far away with long lenses, sometimes we pose people for portraits, always trying to coax or discover a variety of facial expressions. It's always important to show where we are and some sense of the people and culture and texture of the area.

We scout Dona Flor's home and shoot on the street outside. Buildings, people, signs, vegetation. This kind of shooting is usually called B-roll, an old TV station term for anything that's not a sync-sound interview, but we have decided to call it "flavor" footage, (a term inspired by the "flavor text" on my son Danny's cards for the game "Magic: The Gathering").

We scout another home, shoot a posed portrait of the family, their garden, woodpile, clothesline, their back porch with dried hanging corn, parakeets, and with the mother working on a woodstove. She also shows us roosters, dried coffee beans that she has grown herself, vegetables, bamboo, palm trees, etc.

We scout a coffee farm on bottom land near the river, shoot a worker in the fields, cows, irrigation, a portrait of owner and worker, river with rocks and swirling eddies. Hot sun and light overcast give us all sunburn. We vow to use sun screen next time.

After lunch at Rosario's we shoot Salomé at her father's garage (she works for him as a mechanic) running a smog test on a vehicle, then her portrait and interview. This is the first interview of the project, and we feel we are setting a precedent with our composition here. As we have decided in our ongoing discussions, to accommodate the 3:1 format, we place her close-up in the left third of the frame, with the center and right thirds showing the busy garage behind her. Once we settle on a composition, we shoot just that one framing. Xavier translates the questions and responses for Randy. We shoot another portrait of a man and his baby daughter.

Larry calls Kim Klaas, our Production Coordinator at the Delphi office back in California, from a pay phone in the town square. Kim reports that our trip to Barrow is off, for two reasons: the first is the fact that the polar bears are on a hungry rampage in the streets of Barrow, and it's too dangerous to walk through Barrow without a guy with a shotgun. Larry wonders what budget line item to use for "guy with a shotgun." Also, the Native Alaskan woman we hoped to interview there will be out of town during Memorial Day Weekend, the only window of time we have to go to Alaska. She is going ice camping with her family via snow machine about 2 hours outside Barrow! We've been invited along, but it looks like we'll find another Alaska story instead.

We shoot locals playing dominoes in a basement room under Yogui's Bar (complete with a picture of Yogi Bear) in San Marcos. All four players are recovering alcoholics (we're told by the bartender when we offer to buy them beer). Lighting by single bare bulb.

We screen the day's footage. Much excitement over color, depth, clarity, sharpness, content, etc. A big day, big results, very satisfying. Suddenly we have many "flavor" shots for Costa Rica!

The Lincos site: huge white canopy, paved veranda for community activities, computers and small medical room in a shipping container

A community get-together on the patio

Our generator being pulled in by tractor

Lighting the computer room from the outside

Close quarters while setting up in the Lincos container

 

 

PHOTOS BY LARRY LAUTER

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Thursday 18 May 2000

Early call for breakfast, then Salomé drives us up the hill via 4x4 to a house at 6800 feet altitude, nearly 2000 feet above the rest of the town of San Marcos de Tarrazú. Xavier's earlier Lincos shoot had gotten a great shot of the Lincos container and covering canopy from this house, and we wanted a similar shot in the HDTV format for our show. We are met by the elderly owner of the house, a retired American who is surprised to see us, but happy to find someone to speak English with and serve coffee to. We realize that noone has told him we are coming, but Costa Rica is so laid back that it doesn't matter. We zoom down to the Lincos site from his house through clouds, drizzle, and mist.

Back to Lincos to meet our crew, including gaffer Freddy Sálazar and translator Erika Nahrgang, who all drove out from San José this morning. Our 5-ton grip truck, towing a large generator, gets stuck (as anticipated) in the rainy, rocky, muddy road, trying to come up the hill. The crew unhitches the gennie and continues on up to the location, while Larry has to hire a farm tractor to pull out the generator. Freddy and his crew -- Hector, Randall, Carlos, and José -- set up a big semicircular dolly shot around the Lincos patio, with two dozen townspeople of all ages sitting at tables, chatting and watching a video on a monitor on the side of the container.

We shoot portraits of schoolchildren while Randy tries to make them laugh with his Fart Machine, a little electronic black box (with a wireless remote) that emits a selection of gastrointestinal music. Part of Randy's personal mission on this project is to test the impact of the Fart Machine on various peoples of the world. He has previously tried this device on Rosario and her family, with predicatably hilarious results. The portraits are followed by an interview with Dr. Barrios, director of the project. Though he speaks excellent English, the interview is in Spanish. Light rain continues.

We light the interior of the tiny Lincos computer room, consisting of 6 HP computers with satellite Internet access. It is a difficult task because of the very tight quarters inside and the newness of our relationship with Freddy, our gaffer, and his crew. It's easy to provide adequate illumination, difficult to light it with some pizzazz and style, a situation complicated by the fact that the camera is shooting through the only access door and we are lighting through the same. But we eventually succeed in gving it a good look.

We shoot exterior details of the Lincos site, satellite dish, and the setting amidst green fields. Weather rainy and misty all day, which is disappointing for us. HD images seem to shine when the sun does. We are desperately trying to find a frame where we can see the white satellite dish against some greenery, rather than white sky or low fog. We have a similar problem shooting the white canopy over the Lincos container and patio, as it tends to disappear against white sky.

We wrap and head back downhill into San Marcos, take a break for some refreshment, then set up and shoot an interview with the Doctor at the town clinic, who uses Lincos for help with researching medical topics. Meanwhile, Larry has called back to the office and learned that, despite the fact that we abandoned the idea of going to Ghana over 2 weeks ago, their Embassy in Washington has still not released our passports, which were sent to them for visas some time ago. Larry advises Kim to call our Congressman and try to get our passports back from captivity, so we can start working on visas for India.

Back up the hill to the Lincos site after dark, where Rosario and family and neighbors hold a barbecue for us and all the Lincos users in town. Lots of fun. Birthday cakes for Jon McD and Salomé. We sing Happy Birthday in English and Spanish to Jon and then to Salomé, then repeat it all after our gaffer and grips arrived a bit late and insisted on relighting the candles and singing, again in both languages. Jon impresses me with his command of Spanish. Susan and I took a couple of Spanish courses after our honeymoon in Spain and I've visited other Hispanic countries, but my proficiency is limited to commands for the crew: "Faster, Slower, Up, Down, to the left, to the right," etc, but Jon is able to converse. We are warmed again by the friendliness and openness of the people of this town, inviting us into their homes and into their lives. Fond goodnights, then off to bed at the Country Club.

Shooting portraits of Coffee Son and a field hand

Getting a low-angle shot down by the river that runs through San Marcos de Tarrazú

Riding a farm truck back from the fields Xavier and Coffee Son in front Randy, Jon and Bill in back

 

PHOTOS ABOVE BY LARRY LAUTER

Our Costa Rican crew shot: Rosario and youngest daughter in front

PHOTO BY BILL ZARCHY

Friday 19 May 2000

Sunshine! We are excited by a bright day, and after breakfast we rush back up the hill to Lincos to shoot the container and its canopy and verdant setting with the lovely contrast and highlights given us by the tropical sun.

Back down off the hill to interview Coffee Mom and Coffee Son, part of a family of small coffee growers with a large farm by the river. They tell us (in Spanish) that they usethe Internet access at Lincos for agricultural research, shopping, and a variety of other tasks. We are supposed to go into town to interview Dona Flor, but she is nowhere to be found. The weather changes -- as it starts to rain yet again, we head for the town plaza and shoot people on the street (with long lenses from afar), details of buildings, the main schurch inside and out. From inside the church I am shooting back towards the entrance, a wide shot tilting down from he ceiling. As the camera reveals the entrance, a woman leaves a pew, steps into my shot in silhouette, crosses herself as she faces the altar, and leaves. Serendipity!

Larry calls the office from the Town Plaza and finds out that Ghana has finally released our passports, without Congressional intervention or declaration of war. Our visa expediter is now starting work on our Journalist visas for India.

Back to Rosario's house for lunch and some shooting in the rain -- water dripping off the red-tile roof onto plants, fruits, leaves, stones, puddles. We set up lights in the living room and shoot an interview with Rosario, her husband, their youngest daughter Monica, and their parrot. She tells us that San Marcos is a nice place to raise a family, but sometimes the remoteness can be a drawback. Lincos opens up the world for them. Husband owns a garage in town and uses the Web (via Lincos) for research on auto parts andother subjects. Others do email, shopping, school projects.

Rosario tries to reach Dona Flor by phone, but no avail. We pack our gear back to the cases in preparation for flying out the next day, say our goodbyes (after a hilarious session with the entire crew trying to take group photos with a variety of cameras in a cloudburst!) and head back to San José.

After two hours of twisting roads in the dark, we arrive in the capital, check back into the Hotel Palma Real, and luxuriate in hot showers, big clean beds with lamps, phones, TV, and no bugs. No more Country Club. Sushi dinner out, then a nice clean bed.

Saturday 20 May 2000

Early flight the next morning to Houston, gather our gear, clear customs, flight to SFO. My new and expensive Andiamo suitcase arrives looking like it's been dragged through a mud puddle. Continental Airlines agrees to clean it, but I am able to sponge it off quite satisfactorily when I get home.

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first uploaded 5 June 2000