Joshua Tree Bouldering Classics

My brother is often an inspiration to me. Sometimes that's hard for me to say. I find that more often than not, he just motivates me to do activities with him and inspires a new obsession. In May of 2000, he invited me to go to a rock climbing gym in the Seattle area. My birthday later that week he got me shoes, chalkbag and a a harness. Since my 21st birthday, I've been a rock climber. Soon we took a glacier mountaineering course so we could ascend Mt. Rainer, a looming volcano over Seattle. The summer we climbed Mt. Rainer, I discovered slacklining at my brother's gym. Slackline, perhaps the one thing I inspired him to learn and do, was a nice sideline activity for rock climbing. I moved to SoCal where my brother had moved a year earlier. Soon enough we were climbing and slacklining all over SoCal. My brother, sensing a lull in the hobby department, started filming our adventures. First was the camcorder with DV tape. It proved to be cumbersome to him and he quickly got a HDD video camera. Now the video editing and uploading was streamlined. In a rush of film excitment he uploaded a few baker-dozen videos to YouTube. I was of course intrigued and soon purchased my own video camera with what little monies I had. I started with slackline video. Then I shot some video of a friend climbing a personal favorite climb in Joshua Tree NP. My video editing software was crap. I had very little ability to affect the outcome I wanted to see. With some birthday gift money, I upgraded my software and here is where story begins...

With my filming set-up up to snuff, I felt as though I needed a criteria for what I should film. My brother was losing interest in filming our rock climbing, slackline and skiing. More accurately, we just weren't going out to do these activities as much. Most of my climbing partners had left the SoCal area for bigger and better. I was alone to climb, film and adventure. I stumbled across a book my brother had recommended to me. Mary Gingery's Joshua Tree Bouldering, second edition. In the front she lists all the J-tree bouldering classics. This was the spark of climbing inspiration I needed. I set my goal, to climb and film myself on all the classics I could. I thought that when I finished the project, I would bring them all together into one video I could burn onto DVD. So to make the video have some continuity, I will be wearing the same or similar outfit for all the problems. In my guess, there are about 27 problems I should be able to do (with more or less effort to 'send them). To date, I have done, filmed and posted 8 videos. These are among the easier problems. This season, I'll have to focus on some of the harder and higher problems. Betty Jo Yablonski, White Rastafarian, and Slashface are all very high. Around 25 feet of underwear staining rock. Many of the remaining problems are V2. I have only 'sent one J-tree V2 and it was very hard for me.

It's time to get on these problems and 'send, film and post them.

Big Picture Climbing

A friend of a friend contacted me through MySpace.com to arrange a day to climb locally. There was a time that I was climbing two and three times a week. It seems more and more as of late, I climb once every two or three weeks. I've almost completely stopped climbing out of doors. What is the point of living in SoCal if I'm not climbing year round? Let me list the "local" climbing areas.
1. Riverside Quarry: true to its name, it is a quarry full of all the rotten rock you can guess it would have. The plus side is it's proximity, only 20 minutes door to crag. The down side is the insane heat most of the year. The graffiti, trash and used condoms are just a nuisance.
2. Tahquitz and Suicide: these offer the big wall routes and some great single pitch routes. They are at higher altitude and tend to be cooler in the transitional months of spring and fall. The altitude can make me suck wind, but the air is clean and the views are great (usually).
3. Joshua Tree NP: J-tree is about 100 miles from my front door. It is a boulder playground. With little more than shoes, chalkbag and a crash pad, a lot of climbing can be done. I've done some amazing sport routes there (not the best to be had though) as well as some great trad routes with as many as three pitches. The rock is generally unforgiving of soft hands and the weather can be extreme. Hot summers and cold winters. Over 5000 routes of quality. The commitment of the driving time and gas often put me off.
4. Coastal crags: Several areas with modest crags are near the coast. Malibu Creek, Stoney Point, Tick Rock and more. The drive is usually too long for such mediocrity.
5. New Jack City: New Jack is nice for free camping and some impressive sport routes. It's high desert and a bit of a drive (about the same as J-tree). It's great for a road trip involving more destination climbing.
6. Red Rocks: What isn't there to love about RR? My first REAL big wall. Epinephrine 2000 vertical feet of 5.9. Chimneys, face, crack and a gnarly decent in rock shoes. It took us 12 hours car to car. RR has some decent bouldering, really nice trad and sport areas, and the multi-pitch is a tick list for any grade of climber.
7. Bishop Area: Buttermilks, Happys and Owens River Gorge. I've really only climbed ORG. It was hard then in 2002. I climbed my first 10b by wiring the first moves (the crux) and top roping it. That was a good day to remember. I didn't know the grade at the time, which make the revelation that much sweeter.


Since I work a very physical job for the phone company, I tend to be pretty tired at the end of a day. The result is that I don't keep up my weekly climbing. In turn, the weekends aren't as fruitful as I tend to hope for. If I have a new climbing partner, I hope to keep on the regimen of climbing regular. I really hope to climb J-tree this weekend. I can film some new boulder problems on my tick list. It's time to focus on who and what I am. A climber.

Day of Delivery (Overdue?)

I had my trusty partner watch and note what errors she could. What a shocker that she found an abundant supply of errors and "feel" problems. Three pages of notes and most of it was simple fixes I should never have had to make. If I'm going to generate a fake background sound, I should use audio with a pop or vocals in it. It just sounds cyclic and unpleasant.

I still hadn't figured out how to fix my DVD disk drive, so I devised a plan to upload all video information to an external hard drive and transfer it to a functioning PC with a functioning disk drive. Also, I had to upload a DVD architect program to build a menu for the final video. I spent all of my time after work, working on this. Up again until 2am, I managed to get 5 hard copies burned. Two of these had a image printed onto the disk and three had none. I was learning how to build a DVD menu with links, scene selection and all the appropriate chapters. I added chapter markers so a viewer could fast forward or skip to a certain scene. End run time was just over 17 minutes.

I mailed the DVDs off to their new homes. I saved the other three for myself, partner and one for my music guy to review. With the now final product on DVD, I had my partner watch again. Together we gave up all our best criticisms. The opening part was out of focus. The auto focus was not focusing where I needed it. I need to get better at controlling the lens. The audio in parts was either too loud or too quiet. I trimmed out some rather long sequences and just faded in and out of them to show time passing without stating it. My very minimal notice was that the sound of foot steps is there in the beginning and not later. It's hard to catch that after several nearly sleepless nights.

All in all, the product is delivered. The clients likes their merchandise. For $1500, they received a lot more than they would have received otherwise. I don't have all the latest and greatest equipment. My editing station is cramped and with the disk drive not working, a real point of difficulties. My understanding of the lighting and focusing of the lenses, kept me from catching focus issues and some strange coloring issues. With those failings, I offered; Filming, blocking, scripting, direction, lighting, voice over recording (done by assistant), original music score (done with musician and my oversight), editing and scoring, and the production of a few master copies with a fully designed menu and chapter selection mode.

My break-down looks like this:

Filming = 16 hours (myself and helper 8 hours each)

Blocking = 4 hours (part of filming but made it take longer)

Scripting = 4 hours (solo)

Lighting = (part of filming)

Voice Over Recording = 1 hour (assistant)

Created Music = 4 hours (myself and musician 2 hours each)

Editing = 30 hours (solo estimate)

Design & Production = 5 hours





grand total = 64 labor hours

future projects of similar size should be about 40-50 hours

Day Three Editing (Crunch Time)

My client was feeling bold and tightened my deadline. I had to pull the project off the back burner and get to work on music and final editing.

On a Friday, I visited my music guy and together we hashed out an intro, a transitional tune and an outro. It took about 2-3 hours for the music, though admittedly we didn't work very aggressively towards the goal of finishing the project. I really enjoyed the process though. I felt as though I learned quickly what my music guy, Alex, was capable of. I was learning some terminology to accurately communicate what I needed. With more confidence, I was able to get down to exactly what I wanted. It felt good.

Saturday seemed like a great day to take a break from work, project, home and everything. I just took one huge day of rest with movies and junk food. They are soo fulfilling to me. I really enjoy them. It also came back to bite my ass.

Sunday morning, real crunch time was upon me. I was (at least verbally) committed to completing this project by 6:59am Monday morning. I woke up somewhat late, 10ish. I ambled to my PC and sat down to begin the process. My DVD disk drive was non-operational. This meant I couldn't upload the new music to the Vegas program. Also, I wouldn't be able to burn the mastercopies of the finished product. I set into solving problem A. I used another pc to upload and email to myself the music media. It took several attempts to finally get the files transferred. With that, I turned back to the raw editing. It was daunting. I had about 20 minutes of video I must have watched 10 times each. Things began to look similar. Details became less and less important. Audio problems manifested themselves because of my own laziness. Future note says leave it out if it is bad, and come back to it later with fresh eyes and ears.

Well into Monday morning I worked. Around 4am, I just couldn't continue. I had put together something that could have been delivered, but it was far from the quality I want the client to have and think of me with. I went to sleep with the two PCs trying to render the first draft of video.

When I was getting into the later hours, I began working very uneffectively. I would watch the video and notice errors. Instead of pushing pause and at very least noting the error, I just let it run and tried to make a mental list of errors. There were just too many and I kept having to rewatch the video. At twenty minutes a pop, it was just wasted time. I corrected one error at a time and could have done in four views what I barely did in ten.

Day Two Editing

With most of my raw footage on my timeline, I was able to see what I had. Unfortunately, I could also see what I didn't have. More specifically, I HEARD what I didn't have. The voice over was random. By that, I mean Ted spoke in broken sentences with long bizarre pauses and used tech lingo that really confused me. I was gonna need a new voice over track and also needed some additional footage. With some shifting and trimming, I started getting creative about covering my lack of footage. I tried to isolate the video I would need reshot. It took me a few hours to write out a complete script. This script was solely for Ted to read on tape. With the script I gave some very important tips to give the audio/voice over a good sound. Tips included, smiling during speech. It is audible on the tape. I wrote to be aware of background noise and to always read to line before taping it. I knew that parts of the script would be changed. I expected and still I wanted a clear and clean take of each line. What I received from this submittal was a rather droning rendition. The quality was good though. The reading was accurate, but the smiling part was dropped. The result was a net in the positive.

The retakes were shot with me as the stand in. I mostly was looking for cleaner tighter shots that clearly convey the actions taking place. While shooting, I added some scenes that may or may not have been necessary. On screne they read so different from the set. I'm glad I did. I used three more shots than I planned for.

When I got all the video and vocals I wanted, I turned my eyes to a musical score of some sort. The client requested uncopywritten music. More specifically, I couldn't rip off the Stones for the musical track. Whatever, I know guys who create music. I make an appointment with my music guy, and with some personal events to attend to, I put the video on the back burner for a few days.

Day One Editing

My project was in full swing. Since I have to juggle a full time job and this lucrative side project, I was using my afternoons to edit my video. What I did do was a little different from what I should have done. I spent a fair amount of time uploading and naming the video footage clips. My self proclamed "ingenius" naming schedule was to name the clips S1T1(description). S for scene and T for take. It didn't matter the order of filming as long as the scenes were listed together, I could only bring on the relevant clips for editing.

With Sony Vegas Studio, I could have created media bins for all my forms of media. This eventually did include; video, images, titles, color, audio, vocals, and music. Each media form would receive an equally ingenius naming schedule. IE: titles were named "Title Intro" for the intro titles and so on. Images called "Image Truck" for a truck image. Simple yet the first word quickly sorts the media when they are in with all other media. It is VERY important to name all media when it arrives to the timeline. Otherwise, the various clips, audio and titles all start to blur and take longer to find in the editor window. Good labeling is worth all the effort and more.

With prior projects only lasting 2 minutes, to shift media around was fairly to do manually. Shifting ten to twenty clips over doesn't take all that much time. It's not efficient, but not a bother either. With a potentially 20 minute video, shifting and overlapping is key to efficiency of time. I managed to discover the "auto-ripple" function. Click the auto-ripple and now when I shift a clip, everything after it moves too. All relations are maintained. Also, I should have set up my timeline ahead of time with, in order, a title track, video track, vocals track, audio track, and music track.

Formatting quickly and correctly the first time would have saved me a great deal of time. It was all a huge learning curve for me. Another project would flow faster for me now. If I can remember my own tricks and style, I could easily shave a few days worth of effort.

Day of Filming

For the day of filming, I had to schedule a day off from work. Unpaid days off hurt my paycheck, but I figured it would be necessary. My client was only willing to work on a weekday and I had no more paid days off of vacation.

Early Wednesday morning, we loaded up the equipment and set out for the film site. I didn't like that the client was waiting when I arrived. My preference would have been to had plenty of time to preview the set and take light readings. That wasn't going to happen. A quick dime tour and we all sat down to hash out a game plan. We reviewed the script for some time and I received very little from the review. I was able to communicate some simple but important to me concepts. I tried to emphasize a word choice theme. "We are going to do this", instead of "I will show you"

It was decided that "Ted" would be the narrator of the process and would have a few on screen parts. "Gary" would give an intro to the video and intro Ted. "Greg" would be the actual person applying the product on screen.

Gary had it in his mind that he could do his entire intro in one shot. I really wanted to do multiple angles to give Gary a way to break up his lines into one or two sentences. I was easily vetoed. I really didn't push the issue because I didn't have a script in hand to try and stick to. I had to catch what I could on camera. Technical problems including a natural light vs. fluorescant issue arose. Audio was tough because of the warehouse acoustics and a running truck. Also, I'm very unhappy with the blurry focus that was completely undetectable on the view finder of the camera. Eight or more takes to get a good take with Gary and we were done. QUIET on set was a rather big issue. People got excited and started talking over the shot. Wasted shots. Eventually, cue cards were made up. It left the talent looking a little stiff. Again, I will do multi-takes to cover that next time. Lastly with the intro take, the blocking was evolving on set. Future directing means; Stand here, say this, move here, hold for 5 count and CUT! I shouldn't leave anything for them to "figure out". If they don't like it, they will say so and we go with that. I'll decide everything to move it all forward efficiently.

A word on camera height. I'm a tall man. 6'4" on a good day. When I set a camera at my eye level, most of the shot will be tilted down. It's a horrible way to set the camera angle, it disorients and causes a strange sensation subconsciously to the viewer. Very amatuer.

I had Ted walk through quickly the process. He often confused me asking about the process with directing him to do something. Ultimately, I was trying to have his face in the shot as little as possible. It's not about Ted, it was about the process. Also, I had a hard time keeping the talent cognizant of their own positions with relation to the camera. Several shots were ruined because of an actors back covering 90% of the shot. I had to return and reshoot some scenes and I had to pose as the technician.

A lesson learned... When Ted was facing the camera and speaking directly to it, he bumbled his lines horribly. I could have helped this with multi-takes, but I think the proximity of the camera to his person threw him a little bit. He also moved around a lot. I just let him keep on, I figured he'd tire of moving, but he didn't. I totally dropped that scene and opted for a voice over title sequence.

On the day of filming, I felt okay about it. When I got home, uploaded the footage, and reviewed, I quickly realized the necessity for more footage for continuity and flow.

The Project

I agreed to film and edit an instructional video for a "protective coatings" company. Until now, my videos have been solely rock climbing shorts meant for youtube.com. $1500 for what was slated to be a 10-15 minute video introducing and teaching how to apply a new product. End viewers were to be within the company and most likely viewed on a PC.


In my excitement, I borrowed equipment including a video camera with tripod, a pro-quality lighting setup, and a blue or green screen setup. The two cameras were to film with for "one take" shots, lighting to control the lighting, and the green screen to be able to format a easy intro into the video.


A few days before filming, my PC was acting up and I was concerned about its reliability and bought a much faster and versatile computer to speed and simplify the editting process. In the end was probably a bad idea to switch soo last minute! New PC = $1300 with a rebate to be mailed back. Most of my wages spent.


I received a VERY loose script implying an idea of the process. I tried to communicate my desire for a concise SCRIPT with the actual words to be spoken. This proved to be a problem later in filming which I will speak of. I had never previewed to film set for lighting, power, or acoustics. This meant that the one day shoot I was alotted would be tied up significantly trying to tweak my shots or adjust for lighting.



I was very nervous going in, because I felt unprepared and the video would suffer for it.