The Grinding

The Grinding

It’s not what you think. And I don’t even know what you’re thinking.

I was planning out a video shoot in my mind the other day. I got in touch with my buddy Doug, and he suggested we should ride out to a farm site to do some location scouting for a video tribute to the farmers of south Louisiana. “Ride on over, and I’ll grab a truck and we’ll take a little ride back in the sugarcane fields.” That sounded fine to me, so I grabbed my keys and a Diet Coke, and dropped my iPhone in my front pocket. I’d meet Doug back at his office.

My normal routine for a project like this is to plan out some ideas in my head, go out to some potential locations, scout out some possible shots, and then take some reference photos with my phone. After refining my ideas back at the office, I’d come back to the location on another day with “the gear,” a small crew if I had one, and a plan that included a day in the grueling Louisiana heat. I think Doug had other ideas.

When I made it back to Doug’s, he was waiting in a truck. But it wasn’t his white Sierra… no sir, Doug had a bucket truck with an 80-foot boom arm on it, and he was sitting in the driver’s seat with a big ass grin on his face. Typical Doug!

We didn’t really talk about it, but I figured that Doug figured if we were going to shoot the project from a bucket truck (I don’t shoot with drones… at least, not yet), we might as well go scout the location with that very same truck. I jumped in the passenger’s side, figuring we would ride around for an hour or so, checking out potential sites.

The sun was far too high in the sky. We had waited until the best morning light had already passed us by, and at 10:30am or so, the sun was nasty and hot. I would rarely shoot outdoors at a time like this, but we were just out scouting, and a soft patch of cottony clouds had draped in front of the sun, saving us from the full-on scorching Louisiana Monday.

We scouted several sites in the bucket truck. Since we had the truck out, I figured why not just jump up in the bucket, let him extend the arm up 80 feet or so, and swing me around like a spider hanging from a ceiling fan. We tried different locations, various heights, and Doug attempted a few moving shots- guiding the bucket arm side-to-side as gently as the hydraulics would let him. I bounced around in the bucket, all the while being tossed around until most of my useful body parts were bruised. It was fun, and I decided to try one thing different that day- rather than shooting scouting photos with my phone, I popped the totally-hand-held iPhone over into 4K mode and let the camera roll just about the whole time I was in the air. I ended up with about 30 minutes of raw footage to mess with, and even with the questionable light, I figured we had something to work with in preparing for our next “real” shoot. We actually got some pretty good footage, as you will see from this little snippet of video. And, now we don’t have to pack up equipment and crew and go back out there again. I think that was Doug’s plan all along… we finished in a couple of hours.

Doug finished the day with one of his great ideas- let Gary stay up in the bucket, and he would drive the bucket truck all the way back through the farm roads, and up to the parking lot. Stay up there he said! It’ll be fun, he said, and you’ll be perfectly safe! I stayed in the bucket, but I should have known better.

With Mario-Andretti-like skill, Doug backed the bucket truck onto the main farm road, popped the transmission into “drive”, and high-tailed it down the dusty farm road. I’d learn later on that he had been worried about getting stuck head-on up against one of the cane trucks you see in the video (it was, after all, a one lane road), so he had decided to try to make sure he beat them all down the road. Our white bucket truck picked up speed down the crappy dirt road, while raggedy-Andy Gary bounced around in the bucket. Knees, back, hips- they all got bruised along the road, but I never stopped taping. Seriously though, I think all my maniac driver really wanted to do is see if he could make drop my iPhone, so I powered down my precious phone and slid it deep into the safety of my front pocket.

End of a nice story? Not when Doug’s driving. Picture me now, 20 feet up in the air, bucket whipping up and down and Gary bouncing side to side, as we speed down that dusty road. As I work as hard as I can to maintain my dignity and my upright stance in the bucket, viewing the gorgeous fields about 2 miles in any direction, I happened to glance East only to spot a freight train heading toward the crossing on the plantation road… the same crossing that Doug is heading straight towards! With an almost morbid sense of humor, I see my life flash before my eyes (pretty mediocre), laughed harder than I have ever laughed, and started banging like a mad man on the side of the metal bucket, hoping to get Doug’s attention. It didn’t work… with the windows rolled up, the engine roaring, and the noise from the road, my driver never heard a sound that I made.

I’m still here! Doug could not see anything left or right due to the tall sugarcane. But about 40 feet shy of the railroad tracks, he thought he heard a train horn off in the distance. He would slam on those brakes. He slammed them just in time for the 16-ton machine to slide to a stop just shy of the railroad track. Like any worldly professional would do, I calmly caught my breath then proceeded to whip out the iPhone and get it back in video mode… I’ll be darned if I was going to miss some perfectly good train footage! Doug has promised to replace the pair of Joe Boxer’s that were ruined that day.

It was a good day.

{“The Grinding” is the time of year, typically October through December, when Louisiana’s hardworking sugarcane farmers harvest their crops. It is a stressful time (the work is hard and the hours long), but also a joyful time because it marks the time of year when the farmer gets to reap the rewards of a long year of hard work. This video is a tribute to those farmers, and what they bring to the culture and economy of south Louisiana.}