Sprint And TechWeb: Up In SmokeSprint And TechWeb: Up In Smoke

Shooting video sounds so glamorous. Just saying you're on your way home from shooting a documentary feels a little Hollywood, especially if you throw on a pair of shades inside Dulles airport and your destination is actually LAX. Getting out the camera for security screening, taking the upgrade earned from untold miles in the air, putting on the Bose headphones over the baseball cap and tossing the flip flops under the seat; noticing halfway through the flight you're sitting next to Cheech Marin, watching him order the ice cream sundae while his svelte, attractive companion gets the cheese plate. And I'm thinking about seeing if he's carrying a little something from the old days just for fun.

Here's the truth: It might just be the most fun I've ever had working, but it's not all glamour.First, Cheech is coming off attending a Washington Nationals game to promote a new flick (The Perfect Game), and while I work through spreadsheets and scripts on a six-hour Saturday afternoon flight and catch up on e-mail so that I can listen to interview audio tracks for just the right bits, he's reading Rolling Stone and Men's Vogue and deciding between berries or chocolate for his sundae in between kisses from a hot blonde Russian pianist named Natasha Rubin. And frankly, I'm not really caring how well she tinkles the ivory.

While on set, Cheech undoubtedly has wardrobe and make-up personnel, and when he arrived in LA a driver was waiting (I forgot to see if he held a sign saying "Cheech"). Our sales director, on site to keep a watchful eye on the project, doubled as make-up artist, catering coordinator, and travel booking agent; in addition to being part of the on-screen "talent" pool, I work with our producers and shooting crew on shot selection; while they set up lighting and build dollies and jibs for well over an hour, I run out to get bagel sandwiches and sunscreen because I'm the one who rented the Chevy Impala. Our sales director comes along because she's got the credit card and expense account.

The team consisted of our regular East Coast crew, Production Junction, and then some: four camera operators -- Chris Edwards, who heads up Production Junction, Dave McGrath, Brad Crumb, and James Carman -- all of whom doubled as directors, grips, and gaffers; a sound man named Diego Riewald who's traveled the world and speaks six languages, and who can thread a wireless lavaliere down your shirt in a way that leaves you wanting a cigarette; our much-abused production assistants Dante Skartoni of Brooklyn and Dave McGrath's brother (called, simply, "Brother of Dave"); and Tom Cryan, who laid out video into project files in Final Cut as we shot. This team drove down Wednesday night from New York in a van (probably stolen) packed tighter than Tommy Chong's bowl.

We also had our in-house crew: star Producer Matt Conner out of Cambridge, Mass., lover of classic rock and tight close-ups; our brand-new Production Assistant Heather Stanic, who came to D.C. in the middle of a move from Florida to California; and, of course, our New York-based sales director/make-up artist, Felissa Kaplan.

This is a shoot for Sprint Nextel, specifically featuring its Emergency Response Team which operates in Dallas, Florida, and Washington, D.C., and is situated strategically for optimal response capability ... Florida being hurricane central and Dallas being juxtaposed between various flood areas, hurricane zones, and close enough to earthquake territory. The ERT specializes in bringing a fully equipped cellular infrastructure anywhere it's needed to establish communications. It's had success in the public sector, serving everything from Hurricane Katrina to providing temporary handsets for the Pope's visit to the U.S. (hey, the man makes a few calls, I guess, maybe to the big guy). They'll be in full force at both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.

For this shoot, we wanted to tell the story in a much deeper way than we think Sprint has done before.

Not only do we want to show some of the fancy gear, we want to get some insights into what happens during a crisis, how the equipment gets deployed, and what exactly the equipment is. Sprint's aim these days is the financial services sector, which has been in long recovery, business continuity planning wise, since 9/11 when it took seven days for the market to re-open and the Dow Jones fell 14.3% by the end of the first week of operation and stocks lost $1.4 trillion in value.

New regulations stipulating data centers outside of New York (or precluding them from being within a certain distance of the main data center) and the ability to continue operations during crises have driven a complete remolding of disaster recovery planning. Sprint wants a piece of this action and its past work surely makes a case for this.

Sprint brought a majority of the ERT to its headquarters in Reston, Va., namely in the very sleek executive briefing center where we were treated to fabulous food, the ultimate hospitality, and with full access to just about any room we wanted. In true fashion, we didn't choose a conference room but a major thoroughfare, further invading Sprint's hospitality.

After unloading the van's equipment, most of our time at HQ was spent quizzing ERT members both on camera and off about disasters, and interviewing the excitable Tower Group research director Rachel Alt-Simmons about the state of business-continuity planning among financial services companies.

Like with most shoots, there's a lot of waiting around. Internet access was a useful diversion because it can be painful sometimes to watch a crew light a set, move a shadow inches this way, a key light a centimeter that. They see things in their monitors (camera view finders? Please, that's for grandpa at the local school play) I just pretend I also see, convinced they're on psychedelics. Production assistants and then "talent" stand in for last minute adjustments, followed by make up, and then several takes, sometimes for flubs and often just for safety or to give the video editor a little extra work to do later.

The following day we headed out to a warehouse in the middle of nowheres-ville (Herndon, Va.) just a mile outside of Dulles airport. This is where the unglamour really kicked in. Anyone who's spent time on the East Coast during the dead of summer can understand the brutality of an outdoor shoot in July. We were constantly patting ourselves down to remove sweat, and those of us who had to be on camera struggled to pretend not to be squinting.

The lack of glamour was more than offset by the shots that we got: aerial views of the SatColt truck (a retrofitted Ford F650 that, when fully opened, looks like an ice cream truck, or maybe that's just what I was wishing for) thanks to a 30-foot jib (a crane-like structure that holds the camera while the jib operator moves it around the air like a remote control airplane); setups of Sprint's IP Truck (provides voice over IP); go kits; and a military style tent (and trust me, nobody set foot inside if they didn't have to).

Two days of shooting with well over $100,000 in equipment yields so many hours of video, it's alarming. For perhaps the first time on a shoot this size, we didn't use tape; only handfuls of PC cards which held 32 GB of high-definition video (approximately a minute per gigabyte). The piece, which won't be done for a month, will run between five and seven minutes. We'll toss aside more data than a government cover up.

There are ups and downs to anything. When we arrived, the team had been working on forest fires in southern Virginia. When we departed, the truck was heading to New York -- to help with the Bon Jovi concert in Central Park. From dirt to glamour. I wouldn't want it any other way.