The Tiger Tiger team has finally arrived in Kolkata, India! And we certainly got things started on an interesting foot. Whenever you are on a shoot in an exotic location, things takes a little longer… India is certainly no exception. We were expecting to have all of our equipment waiting for us on the boat when we arrived from the airport. Needless to say, this wasn’t the case. In typical Indian fashion, it took a few more days than expected. The gear didn’t arrive to us until the afternoon of our second day. This was originally scheduled to be our prep day, but in the end, we were all antsy with nothing to do. We did a little exploring into the city and got acquainted with our new living quarters aboard the boat, but it still didn’t take our minds off the daunting task yet to come.
When we started unloading the equipment cases from the truck at 6:30pm (in the dark), we ran into a slight problem with the DIT station. The Light Iron cart, weighing just over 700lbs, couldn’t be loaded onto the boat. Not only was it too heavy to carry up the narrow stairs, but also the doors and hallways were too narrow to roll through. We looked at every possible solution, including taking the window out of the conference room where the cart was supposed to live, but nothing could work. As crazy as it sounds, our best option was to use the boat’s crane to lift the cart up to the top deck, three flights up, and set Matthew up in the “library” on the top floor. Unfortunately, this would have to wait until morning when the tides were right to rotate the boat 180 degrees for the crane to lift the cart.
In the end, the camera team was up until midnight prepping the gear for an early morning start. We were able to get things together enough for the day, but for many not having seen the camera until now, it made for a potentially trying first shoot day.
It wasn’t until the early afternoon the next day that Matthew Schroeder was finally able to get the Light Iron cart built and tested. This came just in time to have the 3-4 hours of media from the shoot day dumped in his lap. Thankfully, the entire day after the first shoot will be dedicated exclusively to prep, so we can all get our heads right and Matthew can get caught up on his download and LTO backup.
More stories from India to follow…