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PRODUCTION NOTES (or... How We Made "BIG RIG") The entire production crew for BIG RIG was three people: Director-Cameraman Doug Pray, Producer-Driver Brad Blondheim (a.k.a. “Alabama Lightning”), and, Lighting-Sound-Assistant Camera and all-around-help Jim “Knife-In-Teeth” Dziura. It worked like this: we drove our RV around the entire country and stopped at truckstops to find interviews with truckdrivers. We’d approach them and ask if they’d be interested in participating in BIG RIG and we were either immediately turned down, or, invited to climb up into their rig. Doug sat in the passenger seat and operated the camera and conducted interviews. Jim did simple lighting and helped record sound. Making sure the drivers weren’t distracted was a must—the idea was that they did their job and we just talked along the way. The interviews lasted from 30 minutes to 6 hours, depending on how much coffee we’d had and how much the driver wanted to share about his or her life. We also did interviews in truckstop cafe’s, outside the trucks, and, in a few cases, in the trucker’s homes. We were with drivers for about half the time we were in production. The rest of the time, if we couldn’t find an interview, or just wanted to get to the next good truckstop, we shot scenics of interstates, trucks driving by, mountains, city skylines, state capitols, roadkill, and enough gorgeous sunsets to leave at least 30 on the cutting room floor. We slept in the RV at truckstop parking lots and took showers there, too. Our Northeast shoot was in the winter and we drove a mini-van and stayed in cheap hotels. BIG RIG consisted of four, 10-14 day shoots. Our first trip took us from LA to Dallas to Chicago and back through Denver. Trip two was from Florida to New Orleans (just one week before Hurricane Katrina), up to Memphis, Louisville, and Cincinnati, and then crisscrossing throughout Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas. Trip three was during Christmas and covered every state in New England and the Northeast, including a 3AM visit to Hunts Point Market (the largest food distribution center in the country). Trip 4 was during May and covered the great Northwest, including Montana, Idaho and Utah. All told, we have shots of just about every state line crossing, every major interstate, and most major US cities. We have driven about 25,000 miles, visited 115 truckstops, and performed interviews with at least 60 drivers. We shot a little over 100 hours of footage. BIG RIG was filmed with the Panasonic VariCam, in High-Definition at 24 frames per second (DVC-PRO-HD 720p). The Varicam was easy to use and had magnificent color reproduction. Our sound was recorded via a Shure wireless lavaliere microphone (attached to the interviewee’s lapel) and a Sennheiser MHK-60 either on the camera or discreetly mounted closer to the driver. Lighting consisted of either a 15″ Kineflo plugged into a cigarette lighter (inside the trucks), or a small Frezzi “sun-gun”. We carried a standard Arri light kit and a few other options for more traditional lighting of interviews outside the trucks. The editorial process consisted of Doug Pray editing on his Final Cut Pro system, with weekly meetings with producer Brad Blondheim (hence the “written by” credit shared by Brad and Doug). Doug’s part-time assistant editors were Guisepi Spadafora (1st half of the year) and Diana Mayoral (2nd half). The post-production flow for BIG RIG was “tapeless”. We captured the Varicam tapes onto a RAID hard-drive (100 hours of full-resolution footage fit easily onto 8 x 400gig RAID drives), we edited and performed all of our color correction in Final Cut Pro. The final master was played directly out of our FCP system (with our 5.1 and LTRT mix on 8 distinct channels) straight into an HDcamSR deck (23.98fps), and from there into other formats. There was no tape-to-tape color correction, no online or EDLs, no tapes ever made (except for our final master), even for feedback screenings (we played the full-res quicktime files off out of a DVI cable from an Apple laptop). All of our color-correction was performed by Mike Gossen (now of Helium Digital Media). Our sound mix was created by David Bartlett of Areas LLC with editorial help by Lisa Baro, and it was expertly print-mastered by Ron Bartlett and Eric Flickinger at Warner Brothers, Burbank. The titles, graphics and maps were all designed in After Effects by Dave Simmons of Tomorrow’s Brightest Minds. Special Thanks to: Photo above, left-to-right: Driver Al "Tiny" Marshall, Orlando Perez' big rig in mid-town Manhattan, and driver Claude Eric Walker, Sr. Below is a very compressed screen image of the entire movie "BIG RIG" on its Final Cut Pro editing timeline.
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