At last shooting week has arrived and ready or not, all of the students must begin the process of filming for their documentaries. For the next ten days each of us will be traveling all over Europe to capture the essential footage that will ultimately become our films. Some of the films require more legwork than others, and for these, we each have to help each other out. I went with my brother to Spain to assist him with his project.
Upon exiting the plane at the Bilboa Airport, we were greeted with an unexpected summerlike heat. Wrapped in our warm coats and scarves, we quickly shed our extra articles before jumping into a taxi that would bring us to our first hotel. Along with us came one of the AIB student workers, Maren, who was thankfully fluent in Spanish. The subject of my brother’s documentary, a Basque artist and sculpture, would not be greeting us on our first day which left us some time to scout around. The most popular of the artist’s work is in the Bosque de Oma, a nearby forest, and involves a series of living paintings that appear to take form as you walk through the colorful trees. Unfortunately, to get to these paintings, you first had to hike for at least 40 minutes. This may seem like a small feat, but throw 50 lbs. of camera equipment on top of it and it becomes quite a challenge. On the brighter side, we managed to scout our location with sunny skies and very few technical problems.
The second day we met our subject. His three assistants picked us up at our hotel and brought us to the beautiful countryside where the artist and his wife lived. He invited us inside for coffee and after talking for about an hour, we began to prepare the interview. It was difficult to find the perfect spot. At first we thought it’d be best to film it in his studio, but we decided that the art would distract too much from the artists words. We settled to film it in his living room instead. It was clear that the artist and his wife were not so used to being filmed. In the middle of the interview his wife insisted on turning the lights off in the background. Because I couldn’t speak Spanish, I could only hope that my frantic flailing was not so distracting while the subject recounted one of his stories to the interpreter. There were always going to be unforeseen problems while filming, but I had never expected the interviewee to remove his microphone while we were filming.
Despite some issues, our kind hosts were nice enough to take us to din-ner afterwards. They insisted that we try the traditional foods in the region which included squid soaked in “ink” sauce and the “fresh” cod that you had to chew for at least a minute before you could even consider swallowing it. Luckily for us, the Basque wine proved to be just as delicious as its creators boast.
Our last day was spent hiking once again through the forest. Which meant, after waking up at 6 am, another 40 minute hike with all of our camera gear. This proved to be a very good idea because after we had finished filming amongst the quiet, peaceful trees with pleasant weath-er, torrents of crowds began to arrive and along with them steady drops of rain. Of course, not everything went as we had planned, but things went well enough that a strong documentary will come out of it.
Written by Casey Chavarria
