Helicopter day on Fire Mountain

Look who it is! It’s nerdboy me, Mike Browne TAD/PA (sneaky producer type), on the set of the BBC 1 docu-drama about the 1980 Mount St Helens eruption called “Fire Mountain”. What’s that beside me? Why a helicopter of course. No they didn’t let me fly it although I did yell the Arnie-esque lines, “If you want to live, run to the choppah now!” many times throughout the day. Fire Mountain was written by, produced by, and being directed by up and comer, Matthew Wortman. This is his first big foray into the world of directing drama and he seems to be having a good time. He takes his tea – Earl Grey, milk, no sugar in case you’re wondering.

I have more pics and video from yesterday after the jump.

basecamp = aka ‘The Circus’ in film lingo

Our day started at the Squamish Airport, which is more of a landing strip in the middle of nowhere than a real airport. It’s so small that we were on the only runway as planes (cessnas mostly) were taking off and landing. There was one particularly close call when we thought an ultra-light had crashed from inability to maneuver in major wind gusts and distraction due all the action on the ground caused by our filming. He was fine, but the stunt co-ordinator, the miniscule David Mylrea (I’ll show you what I mean later), did mention that we ‘probably shouldn’t be here’ a number of times. Always with a smile of course.

Safety meeting and instructions prior to the first helicopter shot.

David the stunt co-ordinator is the smaller gentleman with the actor, David MacInnis, in the red vest and John Penhall, 1st AD. The baseball-capped Director, Matthew Wortman, is the person pointing at left in the foreground. Directors do tend to point a lot and Matthew is no exception.

I took some video of a shot of David running running in, getting aboard the helicopter and it taking off. You can download right here: take-off.avi (7.24 mb file). It looks kind of weird as I took it with my Canon digital camera’s movie feature and the FPS (frames per second) setting that the camera uses makes the ‘choppah’ blades look weird.

Next scene = A press conference on the runway

One of my duties was driving the van or ‘picture vehicle’ (the term used for any car in a shot) into place. What a piece of shit. I thought it was going to stall the whole time. It looks good though. There was more with the helicopter and pilot and some extras posing as news types. Here’s a little behind the scenes video: action.avi (11.0 mb file)

Me with ‘the choppah’ at our final location yesterday

I’m not telling what happened with the helicopter, but it was amazing to be a part of. No spoilers here. There were some fantastic special effects and intricate set design as well as dangerous stuntwork on the part of actors, camera persons and the helicopter pilot. It was fun to watch, but scary at the same time. David the stunt co-ordinator was on top of it the whole time. Everyone was on their games. Here’s video of the helicopter landing at the location after a successful shot: landing.avi (1.41 mb file)

One of the final shots of the day saw me (yes me) in wardrobe donning clothing worn by a character who dies in the film. Well his pants and boots anyway. I was the body/stunt double for the actor who wasn’t present for the B-camera shots. You will see my panicked soon to be dead feet running through volcanic ash on the way to my demise. You can’t escape mother nature… teehee. I should get a British Emmy for excellence in foot acting. Either that or one for sprinting through shot as another terrified resident during the evacuation just seconds before the mountain erupts! I’m sure I’m merely a blur as I was running pretty fast. Anyway, my thousands of dollars of acting classes are coming in handy.

Call time tomorrow is 7am. As I’m helping with Locations rather than AD’ing that means 6ish for me. Ugh! Nighty night.