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Texans are big on “big”. No matter what the topic, the typical refrain
is, “Everything’s bigger in Texas.” The sky looms larger here -- likewise
the land, the cities, the ranches, the cars, the spirit of the people,
their dreams and visions. And since Texans are also known for their big
love of storytelling, it’s high time someone captured the essence of all
that legendary bigness – in a big way.
That is precisely what the State of Texas and the Texas State History
Museum Foundation are aiming for in their large-format film TEXAS:
The Big Picture, which is scheduled for release May 3, 2003 at the
Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, and set for national
distribution in September. This new film, which is being made possible
by funding provided by the Texas State History Museum Foundation, Southwest
Airlines, ExxonMobil and the State of Texas, will be the first of its
kind.
“This is the first large-format film made on Texas, and that sort of
surprises me,” says executive creative director Tim McClure, co-founder
of GSD&M, the Austin-based firm hired to make the movie. A native
Texan, McClure embodies classic Lone Star chutzpah, tempering the occasional
grand statement with the tongue-in-cheek. “This is a state so big, so
bold that if any place on the planet deserves to have a large-format film
made about it, it’s Texas,” McClure proclaims.
Be that as it may, the vastness of the project – tackling the physical
and metaphysical scope of a landmass larger than any European country
– presented some equally big challenges. In the end, crew members say,
the making of TEXAS: The Big Picture may have been as epic as the
film itself.
Negotiating a 267,300-square-mile chunk of real estate, the team had
to think outside the box, using an average size budget (of $5.65 million)
to cover a not-so-average number of individual locations (more than 75)
for a film that lasts a little over 39 minutes. The classic filmmaker’s
dilemma of what to leave in and what to leave out grows exponentially
when trying to fit so many locations into a short film.
“We could have easily done a two-hour movie,” says producer Jan Wieringa,
who is working with GSD&M on this project. Shooting spring and fall
units in 2002, the 40-member crew every which way but loose – from the
Llano Estacado (Panhandle) in the north to the breathtaking Big Bend/Trans-Pecos
areas along the Mexican border; and from the Blackland Prairies around
Dallas to the Gulf Coast and Rio Grande Plains region of south Texas.
The crew filmed an offshore oilrig in the Gulf of Mexico; wildflower-studded
terrain in the Texas Hill Country; and urban centers such as Houston,
Dallas, San Antonio and Austin.
“We were on the road for thousands and thousands of miles,” says Wieringa,
talking between takes at San Antonio’s Riverwalk (the crew also went to
the Alamo, where a silhouetted reference to the legendary battle was filmed).
“We drove up and down, back and forth and around this state, and with
limited time. The crew shot for almost five weeks in spring and three
to four weeks in fall,” she explains.
The resulting film is an unusual blend of documentary, feature and commercial
techniques. TEXAS: The Big Picture pushes the large-format envelope
in many ways. “Stylistically, GSD&M wanted to break the mold a bit
and take the form to another level,” Wieringa says. “I think Texans in
general are risk-takers, and our approach to this movie reflects that…For
example, close-ups have been considered to be faux pas in large-format
films. That’s an industry myth that’s been created in the past. We have,
in one scene, a horse’s head that fills the entire screen. And it works….”
Wieringa adds that large-format viewers will notice a strong kinetic
feel to the film. “It’s pretty clipped. There is some faster-paced editing
and that’s a break from tradition. Typically there’s been a formula of
having frames on screen for about eight seconds. In some cases,
we’ve brought it down to about two seconds, and we think it works very
well. If you do everything that fast on such a large screen, it
creates a whiplash effect. But in this movie there are moments and segments
that are cut very tight, balanced out with longer scenes.”
Also, the creative team used some unconventional settings. One is the
shoot of the band, Two Tons of Steel, performing live at Gruene Hall south
of Austin, the oldest operating dance hall in Texas. In another live-music
segment, the crew captured Tejana singer Tish Hinojosa performing in a
sun-washed, open-air theater along the San Antonio Riverwalk. “In Texas,
because live music is so huge, you don’t really want to say no to it,”
Wieringa explains, noting that, historically, live music hasn’t been considered
compatible with the more orchestral style of most large-format films.
T.C. Christensen, director of photography for the fall unit, says some
of the most interesting sites were Gruene Hall, the State Fair of Texas
in Dallas and a rope-pulled ferry scene in Los Ebanos, which apparently
has the only nonmechanized ferry in the country.
“I really liked shooting the ferry across the Rio Grande,” the Utah-based
cinematographer says. “We got some very nice crane shots there, and I
really enjoyed that. I liked the fact that Mexico is on one side and the
United States is on the other, and this ferry is a part of people’s everyday
lives. They go back and forth many times a day.”
With the State Fair shots, Christensen says he wanted to avoid the typical
documentary/news style often seen in festival footage. “That involved
doing some mounts on different rides, and on the Ferris wheel” – the Texas
Star, the tallest Ferris wheel in the Western Hemisphere – “… and the
park is sort of revealed to you as you ride,” he says. “They do that all
the time with smaller formats, but with large-format there’s a different
sensation, that sort of whoosh as you go up and everything opens up beneath
you.”
Christensen, who was
DP for the large-format Lewis & Clark movie, adds, “What’s
different about using large-format film is that it’s so expensive you
can’t just roll. You have to make every take and every frame count.”
Moving at a rapid
pace, doing one-day shoots at, say, the State Fair, or a grapefruit-packing
plant in the Valley, a horse stampede in Big Bend, a small-town parade
in Corsicana, or a semiconductor facility in Dallas, you either get the
images or you don’t. Christensen and company were fortunate; they got
them.
Interspersed with
the beauties and idiosyncrasies of such far-flung locations, there were
a few on-site headaches that ended up working to the crew’s advantage.
Director Scott Swofford (past large-format projects include Shackleton’s
Arctic Adventure, Amazon and Mysteries of Egypt) recalls
a massive dust storm that blew in during a cotton-planting shoot in the
Panhandle.
“The amazing thing
was the more intense the dust storm got, the better looking the image
became. The sky filled with dust and the more red the light became, the
more interesting it was visually. And the more difficult it got.
The camera assistants were holding up sheets of plywood to try to block
the wind and they were smacking into us. Dust was in everything. The film
was fine, but the camera assistants spent a whole night cleaning the equipment.”
According to virtually
everyone on the project, perhaps the most iconic shoot, and the most hectic,
was a horse stampede orchestrated for the movie outside the town of Alpine
in the Big Bend area. As the Utah-based Swofford says, “To try to put
a camera in the middle of over 150 horses who are being irritated from
behind is quite a challenge. We had a Libra 3 head on a camera car right
in the middle of the stampede. The first ten seconds were really amazing,
then the dust would cover the camera and we’d have to stop.” He says another
challenge was when the crew buried a camera in the ground and tried to
get the horses to jump over it. “That was frustrating and a little bit
frightening. There was a shiny piece of Lexan covering the cameras and
the horses were not interested at all in getting near it. We had
to camouflage it with fake foliage, and even then it took quite a lot
of persuasion for the horses.”
The sheer logistics
of getting crew and gear to far outposts was another point of reckoning.
“We traveled en masse,”
location manager John Patterson says, “and you pretty much had to bring
any supplies you needed. In Lubbock, for instance, there’s no film house
so we had to bring our own film and cameras…. In Alpine, you’d better
have a satellite mobile phone because when you’re in remote sections of
West Texas you’re not going to be able to get a cell signal. These were
realities that I knew were coming our way when I signed on,” adds Patterson,
who has scouted many 35 and 70 mm films in Texas. “On some shoots, it’s
like camping in the wilderness.”
During the entire
project, perhaps the most confounding issue was something nobody could
control. The notorious Texas weather and the sudden shifts in light quality
that follow. There is a classic saying that: “If you don’t like the weather
here, just wait five minutes. It will change.” “It’s true,” says Wieringa:
“The temperature can drop 40 degrees in one day.”
Indeed, throughout
the filming of TEXAS: The Big Picture, the weather did its fickle
dance, bringing an unseasonably dry and hazy spring and an unseasonably
wet fall. Forecasters might have only predicted drizzle, but an intense
deluge would ensue, upsetting schedules when time was already of the essence.
But, as seems to have
been the case throughout the project, many unforeseen occurrences became
assets. When the crew was filming the Houston skyline, for instance, a
fog crept into the city, threatening to blow the shoot. Instead, says
creative director McClure, “we got these shots of downtown Houston that
are almost eerie. The clouds gave us a particularly haunting skyline.”
The element of surprise
is a big part of what the film hopes to convey, says project manager Bonnie
Campbell, who works for the State Preservation Board, the Texas agency
that oversees the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum and funded about
one-third of the film’s costs.
“The challenge was
to balance what people are going to expect from a film about Texas, versus
what you know Texas is. Most myths are exaggerations of truth. Many non-Texans
assume that everybody’s a cowboy or everyone lives on ranches. But people
don’t know the state also has incredible coastlines, piney forests and
huge urban centers.”
McClure echoes the sentiment. He says that a critical aspect of making
the film was to embrace the Texas stereotypes (and convey the state’s
sense of humor about its “bigness”), while showing the unexpected facets
of its culture, terrain and history. Looking back, crew members say that
philosophy was the only way to make TEXAS: The Big Picture.
The resulting film manages to harness the very spirit of the Lone Star
State. It also goes to show that, sometimes, big things come in big packages.
And when TEXAS: The Big Picture hits large-format theaters, the
only thing tall about this tale will be the screen.
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