Josh Lowell and Corey Rich: King Lines
Lowell, who’s been making films with Sharma since he was a 15-year-old phenom, says that they learned together over the years how to how to make Sharma’s exploits translate onto the screen: “Climbing can be really spectacular visually, but also it’s a quite subtle sport. It’s not necessarily as easy to understand as say a skier flying off a hundred-foot cliff or a Motocross guy doing a back flip.”
To bring the story out, Lowell depends on the naturally articulate Sharma to describe what is going through his mind. He also worries the details of ambient sound capture. “It’s important that we get really good audio so that we can hear the fingernails scratching behind the flake of rock trying to get a purchase.”
And given the goal of reaching out to a broader audience, Lowell felt it was important as well to capture another side of Sharma’s world. “Climbing’s really a lifestyle sport like surfing,” says Lowell. “It’s about beautiful places, traveling, having adventures, meeting fascinating people from different cultures. It’s one thing if Chris just goes and climbs something; it’s another story when he puts in that extra work so he can share that experience with people all over the world who are maybe watching at home or checking the web during a work break, dreaming along with him.”
Mac Ascendant
Besides making the logistical and creative adjustments required to shoot Sharma at work, Lowell and Rich needed to establish field workflows that allowed them to efficiently complete their own.
For Lowell that meant shooting in HD video entirely on the Panasonic HVX200, a camera that records HD video onto P2 cards. After each shoot, he’d capture and log all the day’s footage in the field on a laptop running Final Cut Pro and dupe the files onto multiple FireWire drives. “Some times we do rough cuts at night to figure out which angles or which aspects of the story we need to cover the following day,” he says. “The majority of the hard editing is done later in the studio but every night we’re checking footage, downloading it, organizing it, naming clips and planning. You couldn’t have worked like this ten years ago.
“The video editing’s all in Final Cut Pro,” says Lowell. “I’ve been working with Final Cut since version 1, and I’ve never looked back, never looked sideways.” Lowell discovered even more reasons to like Final Cut Pro while assembling the rich media project. “For this particular project, it was a little different than normal video editing because we’re working with so many still photos. I really like that it’s so easy within Final Cut to work with stills, go out to Photoshop and back, and have the changes reflect in Final Cut.”
For still photography, Rich also deploys an all-digital field workflow anchored by his MacBook Pro. “We do a lot of our editing and basic tonal adjustment after a shoot in Aperture.”
On multiday or multiweek shoots, Rich downloads the pictures to laptops in the field using Aperture and then transfers the backups onto hard drives. “I would say 50% of the process in terms of downloading the assets takes place in the field whether that’s sitting in a tent somewhere, in the mountains, or in a hotel room.” And Rich’s digital workflow extends seamlessly into his studio, a networked Mac-driven office running multiple terminals, Xraid and Xserve.
For Rich, the choice of a Mac-based workflow was simple: “My passion is creating compelling content. What I’m least passionate about is how to use complex tools, whether that’s a camera or a computer. For me, the Mac is the tool that requires the least amount of thinking yet does the most amount of work.”
After years of work planning and producing their first foray into rich media production, both Lowell and Rich are sold on its possibilities. “If there’s really any question among creatives about whether rich media offers an opportunity to tell a story in a new and interesting way that has potentially more power than just a film, a print piece, or an NPR-style audio piece,” says Rich,”I think the answer is, almost unanimously, yes.”
