On screen my dad has a small role in the movie, behind the camera though the old man had about as big a part in the production as any of the rest of the crew. He is a fan of westerns, so the idea of him not just helping to make mine, but also being in it was a fun little mental thing for me personally.
He is by birth and trade a small family farmer. Which means, among a great many other skills and talents, he is an engineer. On the farm challenges arise or equipment breaks and one must be able to fix whats broken or create something new from whole cloth on a daily basis. Now I’ve previously talked about the access to tractors and other farm equipment as an advantage I would have as opposed to the next ultra-low budget filmmaker, and utilizing my old man’s ingenuity and problem solving skills fit right in with all that.
One element of the production I set as a challenge for him was a way to get our big 2K movie light up in the air to act as the moon for night shoots. I knew what I wanted, a 50 foot boom that we could mount on a tractor so that we could handle a number of different night locations. And with just that as a prompt he took his lifetime of welding and drafting skills and got to work. The final product was rather impressive. We could transport the boom to location with relative ease on the tractor, the light could get mounted and raised up in the air in a fairly short amount of time, and the nature of the construction made it fairly adjustable.
He also made stands to mount generators on, rigged out a flatbed trailer so we could mount lights and a camera team on board, created a mobile bridge to make getting to a difficult location easier, and solving a number of problems on set that I was too busy to address myself.
A point I’d like to make here is about trust. Which extends beyond the trust I had in my dad, brothers, mom and the rest of my extended family who were helping me create this crazy thing on the farm. Now you ought to trust your partners looking through the viewfinder and your actors, but on a busy live set you need to trust that all the little things are getting done too. And because it was obvious I trusted my family in all this stuff the rest of the crew did as well.
Which leads back to the giant boom that supported the rented $10,000 movie light. For the first few nights Raubyn and Lara (the cinematographers) were the only people to touch the big light; turn it on turn it off, and handle it after being hot. But at a certain point trust in the old engineer was complete and they let him handle the costly piece of equipment. Which meant they could get other gear sorted out and we all might hit the pillow by 4 am rather than 5.
