After 30 interviews in roughly 30 days, we are back from a coast-to-coast trip in the VW. So much to show and tell, but it will have to wait. We hit the Jackpot. Although with no help from these guys:
New Jersey, Kansas, Missouri, Ohio, Illinois, Colorado, California. We won about $6 so far.
As I was unpacking my bag this morning from a week-long climbing trip to Yosemite, all of my stuff seemed to permeate the smells of dirt, food, the spring air and sweat. But amongst all that, there was that one overpowering familiar smell on all my clothes: campfire.
Even the biggest bah-humbug city dweller can’t deny that there is something magical about campfires, about they way they bring people together on a cold night, the way they blanket everyone in beautiful orange light.
My Yosemite trip was completed by the nightly campfire in our site at Camp 4 with guitars and mandolin that brought people from around the camp to sing and play stuff like some particularly awful renditions of Bob Dylan songs (think ‘Mr. Bojangles’ done in rounds, uninentionally) and ad lib blues songs about off-width cracks.
In the morning, some people would stop by again around propane stoves, and as I would drink coffee and eat my eggs, they’d spell out what they planned to climb, exchanging some tips, occasionally signin on to somebody elses route, and be off until the end of the day, when we’d meet again at the campfire. The Camp 4 appeal, after fifty years, is still around.
From Thanh, practically a Camp 4 resident with his stories of rattlesnake bites and epics and remarkable memory for visualizing climbs, to Trevor & Javier from Idaho improving their trad technique, to Anna from SB just takin in the air, to Max, the wildlife biologist with an abnormal attraction to off-width cracks, I found myself surprisingly sad this morning when I woke up and didn’t hear them cooking outside my tent, but instead heard my alarm telling me I had to go to work.
At any rate, it’s this quality of the campfire that made me decide at the beginning of the brainstorming for this documentary that all the interviews with climbers should be done by campfire light or lantern light.
A huge portion of The Rock Adventure Guide consists of interviews with different people (rock climbers, outdoors enthusiasts from the 50s onward) who tell stories about life in the outdoors and on the rock. What better setting than at the side of a campfire?
Not only because it fits with the setting of the film and these characters, but also because of the aesthetic quality. Unlike bright lighting in an office or traditional interview setup (like with a swirly blue background reminiscent of your 3rd grade school pictures), a campfire provides for more a cinematic effect. A subjects face is partly lit and partly obscured in the same way that their legends are partly fact and partly myth. You wouldn’t film Paul Bunyon or Johhny Appleseed in a studio with three point lighting, imagine how dissapointed you would be! The same is true of the figures we plan to interview for this documentary.
