Sadly, I think this makes me a bad fit for my job.  I can’t help but feel that I’m intruding on something deeply personal when I point my camera at a person in prayer.  There’s a great scene in Waking Life when filmmaker Caveh Zahedi tries to summarize the position of the Christian film critic Bazin by saying, “Film is like a record of God or the face of God, or of the ever-changing face of God.”  It’s a beautiful thought, and one that should strike terror into the hearts of any god-fearer with a camera phone.  Still, we don’t have to share Bazin’s beliefs to recognize that the strangers I’m filming DO believe, and that if ever there was a moment when they might fear me capturing their god on camera, this is it.  (For the record, Bazin never called it a “holy moment,” as Caveh claims.)

They don't build 'em like they used to.

So why do I film someone when I’m worried they’ll take offense?  Because, inevitably, they don’t.  Like my own discomfort, my surprise in these situations is constant.  A worshipper will open his or her eyes, catch sight of me, and grant me a polite nod or smile, a small acknowledgment that yes, I am praying and yes, it’s OK to film it.  What I continually forget is that for those who believe,  my camera is inconsequential, trivial even.  It has no more ability to affect their relationship with a higher power than does my own presence.

My insignificance isn’t the only reason I’m non-threatening.  In this episode, our shaman, Ed, opines that Westerners (or maybe just Americans), “lack spiritual training of any kind.”  I’ll let you debate that.  Certainly, we lack the spiritual/religious cohesion of Vietnam or Ecuador.  In America, people of all faiths are used to having cynics ridicule them on one end while other cynics try to abuse their trust on the other. In Ecuador, where people don’t fear that their beliefs will be mocked or militarized, practitioners have less fear of openly expressing their faith.  Er, Catholic and Quichua practitioners, anyway.

Whatever your beliefs, I hope you enjoy the spiritual explorations of episode 6.  It’s not all churches, either.  Jenna’s crazy encounter in the jungle is still blowing my mind.  If more spiritual ceremonies were like that, they would be a lot more fun to film.

From Thailand,
Evan

No, I’m not talking about that time that Ryan had to outrun the cops who spotted him peeing in Quito’s main plaza in broad daylight (although that’s not in the episodes either.  Sorry).  I’m talking about the realities of story and editing which make it so that certain adventures will never make the cut.  Take this episode, for example.  We see the gang’s hike around the lagunas, but what we don’t see is the night that followed, when Freddie and Ryan met up with a bunch of Otavalo locals and hiked through the woods to a solstice celebration at a waterfall.  I know!  It’s even cooler than it sounds.  So why don’t we show it?

Well, a couple reasons.  First, the woods are dark and there’s no room on the rig for a light.  I know you’re like, “DUDE, just get a light!” but it’s not that simple.  In case you didn’t hear, our first camera was stolen in Ecuador, so I wasn’t looking to attract any more attention to our new one than was necessary, and a light isn’t exactly subtle (as anyone who ever played Silent Hill knows).  We also figured that the scene just didn’t serve the story.

I bought her drinks all night and THEN she told me she had a boyfriend.

And life on the road, more than anywhere else, is about storytelling.  This existence lends itself easily to a narrative format by giving our lives those concrete beginnings and endings that our rational mind craves.   The great tragedy of office life is that it makes us slaves to time without providing a narrative that we can comprehend.  When I worked behind a desk, my life lacked any meaningful beginnings or endings, any significant temporal milestones by which I could mark my growth beyond ’15 years with the company!’.  Travel is travel because it has an ending against which we’re able to see the story of our lives unfold.  With an ending in sight, we realize how each moment leads to another, how one expectation shatters the one before, and how seemingly insignificant events have the potential to become the center of our lives.  When we travel, we are all storytellers.

Of course, our lives tell a story no matter what we do.  So while I’m frustrated that I can’t share some of my favorite moments from this adventure with the rest of the world, I know that even the ones that make the cut are no more or less consequential than the moment you’re experiencing right now.  If our measure of an event’s meaning is its inclusion in a documentary series, then most of human history is pointless, but if we believe in the value of a life lived for its own sake then these exploits are worth it whether or not they’re seen by anyone.

So why do we film our lives at all?  Jet Set Zero’s highest aim is to inspire people to take the kind of chances that we’re taking, and it’s easier to do that when we’ve got something to show you.   Hopefully we’ll show you a lot, but if we can’t, then we hope to show you something cool.  And above all else, we hope that you’re making the most of your moments, whether you’re watching or not.

From Thailand,
Evan

P.S. But please watch.

P.P.S. Sure, we could put those scenes up as a stand-alone short, and maybe we will soon…or maybe one day they’ll be extras on a Jet Set Zero DVD…

—

UPDATE (9/23)

Speaking of elements that get left out, here’s something that I completely forgot to mention but is vitally important.  You see the scene in this episode where Ryan is eating pizza and he says it’s “sooo good”?  That’s actually the WORST pizza in the world, bar none, and I have no idea what he’s talking about.  You can practically see it on screen.  If you ever find yourself in the Mariscal district of Quito and spot that pizza place and think, “I’m hungry,” do yourself a favor and go just 15 feet down to the Magic Bean ice cream shop on the corner.  Their ice cream is cheap, delicious, and makes you feel good, whereas that pizza tastes like it’s made out of library books and used waxing strips, and makes you feel glad that mankind will one day die out.  That is all.

A long time ago in a film school far, far away, I studied to be a fiction filmmaker.  My favorite films were fictional, and the stories I wanted to tell certainly didn’t lend themselves to documentary, or so I thought.  Over time my views changed; I came to see that the difference between the two was more a matter of production than anything else.  Documentaries can and do tell any number of stories, often with more grace and less ego (and always with less money) than their fictional counterparts.  Aside from that, the two are remarkably similar.  Most films are made in the editing room, anyway, regardless of the fiction/documentary label.   But, from a production standpoint, the differences are still astounding.

When I made fiction films, I would put months of work into preparation.  I knew how it would look, how it would sound, who would say what to whom and where long before anything was recorded.  In documentary, it’s almost the exact opposite.  The story develops in front of you, and I’m lucky if I even know where we’re going next, let alone what’s going to happen there.  Sometimes I’ll have only a few minutes notice before having to embark on a trip to an indigenous market, or a soccer game, or a gang fight outside our apartment (“South Quito says hello!”).  To say “You have to be prepared for anything” is an understatement.  You have to be prepared for everything.

The guys’ trip in episode 4 is a good example. At around 8 PM one night we got a call from Sarah and Alice (who we kinda knew, a little) to come to Baños, a town about 4 hours from Quito.  Freddie had just quit his job and the girls were out of town, so the timing was more or less perfect… except for that 4 hour bus ride.  But what could we do?  With less than an hour’s notice I packed a small satchel bag and hopped on a bus with Freddie and Ryan.  By 1 AM we were stealing blankets out of the hotel linen closet and making makeshift beds on the floor of the girls’ room.

There’s a couple things I did to “prepare” for that move, I guess.  First, I had my equipment at the ready: batteries charged, memory cards empty, etc.  Second, I have a well-honed ability to travel light.  Since the camera is in a backpack, I have to fit all my belongings into a smaller side bag.  Neither of these things take a whole ton of work, but you have to stay on top of them 24 hours a day, otherwise either one could have scuttled this trip.

The next day brought more surprises.  Sarah and Alice casually mentioned that we’d be going horseback riding because, y’know, we do that all the time.  I guess it doesn’t matter, because had I known before I probably wouldn’t have done much different.   How can you prepare for that? Filming from horseback was challenging but fun, until it started raining and I had to figure out how to pack up the camera from on top of a wet, angry filly.  Also, my horse was the slowest of the bunch and got lost at one point, so I had to figure out dismounting and guiding, too.  Whatever horse.

Sarah and Alice want you to say 'Yes.'

So what have I learned after being subjected to these (and other) unforeseen events?  There’s no secret to being prepared.  Much like making a fiction film, it’s a matter of keeping your equipment clean and in good working order and getting a good night’s sleep.  Also, just like making a fiction,  carrying a toothbrush with you is never a bad idea, and a knife never goes to waste.  But the real trick, the real moral to this story if there even is one, is that you just have be ready to say “Yes.”   It’s the fastest, easiest, and hopefully cheapest way to get into trouble.  Beyond that, just be ready to go a couple days without showering, because you won’t always get to crash in some British girls’ swanky hotel room.  That kind of stuff only happens in the movies.

Every producer/cameraman/editor lives with three great fears, the first being that his bosses will ask him to add “blogger” to his title.  Even that’s not so bad as long as the producer/cameraman/editor/blogger doesn’t have to face that second, greater fear, and that’s that he’ll have to begin a post with the following sentence.

My heart broke when I realized that the camera had been stolen.

See?  This is already the worst post I’ve ever had to write.  My worst nightmare has always been losing a camera, which represents not only my livelihood but my very raison d’être.  I realize that many travelers have had cameras, wallets, or iPods stolen from them, but keeping our camera safe from would-be thieves is in my freaking job description. It may be the first sentence.  So when I grabbed hold of the camera bag and felt that it was light, the wave of remorse, stupidity, and the sense of failure that swept over me was surpassed only by the feeling that I had let down my friends.

That’s a rough feeling, even if my friends were more than forgiving.  In Quito, the cast accepted the situation and took great pains to work around it, going so far as to delay trips until we could film them.  Back in the States, the news was met only with a frantic race to find a replacement camera.  Jed, a guy who does so much for the show that we can’t even find an appropriate title for him, reminded me that I was up against some of the best thieves in the world, and that statement almost made me feel relieved.  Almost.  The guilt from that missing camera hung over me for the remainder of my time in Ecuador, and still does.  Our show is produced on a low budget, and that camera (or its replacement) was no small expense, so mathematically-speaking it would have been better for the show if I had been kidnapped and killed.  That’s how it felt, anyway.

Not that I sat around feeling sorry for myself.  Well, not after that first day.  I was determined to set things right by recovering the stolen 7D in some half-imagined plot that involved finding and ideally stabbing the guy who stole it.  In reality, I never had a chance.  That camera was probably on its way to Mexico City within hours of it leaving my side.  Even so, there is no reasoning with a cameraman who has lost his camera, so I put on my fedora* and set out to reclaim what had been taken from me.

Better times.

The most helpful person in my search was an American anthropology student and family friend named Anna whose research has brought her in close contact with Quito’s sex workers.  (She keeps a great blog here.)  Anna was privy to all sorts of secret markets and underworld dealers that I wasn’t, and she generously donated her time and expertise to my plight even though she knew just how unlikely it was.  Over lunch she relayed stories of Quito’s legendary crime scene, which ranged from thieves who only stole car radios if the door was unlocked to burglars who took everything including the apartment door.  She also mentioned a weekly market for stolen goods a few hours from Quito outside of a town called Latacunga.  I questioned her about it obsessively.  “Do you think it’s worth it for me to go there?” I asked.  She gave it some thought, and finally spoke  a sympathetic “No.”

I left for Latacunga before sunrise the next day, not because I doubted Anna’s wisdom but because I had nowhere else to look.  I found the expansive market located in one of the town’s out-of-the-way plazas, and was unsurprised to find myself the only foreigner present. As I toured the tables of repackaged iPods, second-hand camcorders, and the obligatory blanket of knock-off sunglasses, the unlikelihood of my fool’s errand sank in.  There was nothing here that even approached the value of my missing camera, and I was just some stupid, self-deluded kid in a dumb hat.  I tried to salvage the trip by tracking down a mysterious “camera lady” who wasn’t in the market this week, but was equally disappointed with the result.  Dejectedly, I ate a cheap lunch and boarded a bus back for home.

Writing “I had to accept that the camera was gone for good” is the last fear I hope to confront today.   I wish I could write of some silver lining to these events, like “I got to spend more time with the kids,” but the fact is that this whole ordeal fucking sucked.  Or maybe there is a silver lining, a reminder that attachment to inanimate objects causes suffering.  I probably could have learned that from a  stolen iPod, though.  In any case it all happened, and I learned something from it.  Don’t underestimate these guys.  They’ll even take your damn door.

//

*Yes, literally, but only because fedoras are cheap and practical in Ecuador, and not because I’m some detective story-obsessed nerd**.

**You be the judge.

1.  The safety of my friends.
2.  The security of the equipment.
3.  Not getting ripped off by taxi drivers.
4.  My safety.

Over the course of working for JS0 I’ve developed a few strategies and techniques to help make sure that everything remains cool.  I can’t share them all with you, sadly, because then they won’t be as useful, but these are the things I’m thinking about on a daily basis.  Anytime we plan a trip to a new town (or go somewhere unplanned),  walk into a dark, bustling club, or attract the glances of on-lookers as we film in the streets, I’ve got an eye out for possible problems.  As travelers in a foreign land we already stand out, but with the camera in hand our visibility and the ensuing risk can quickly multiply.

Some solutions are simple.  Putting the camera away and looking angry works 80% of the time.  Other times we have to leave the situation entirely.  It’s shitty, but it’s a fact of life.  Or it is in Ecuador, anyway.

I’m trying to think of instances in Vietnam when I feared for the safety of my friends or my gear, and I’m coming up short.  That’s not to say that Saigon is some crime-free paradise; while there I saw cell phones stolen out of tourists’ hands by guys on motorbikes and a couple shady situations that I had to steer clear of.  But after living in Saigon’s backpacker district for a month and taking proper precautions, I felt safe walking around unaccompanied with the camera.  Vietnam may have some petty theft, but muggings and robberies are almost unheard of.

Not so in Quito.  The backpacker district, La Mariscal, can be one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in town, especially if you’re carrying a camera.  Staying in a group is always advisable. The neighborhood is littered with dudes sketchily loitering around for reasons that become all too apparent if you’re by yourself.  Luckily, this wasn’t much of a problem.  Laurene, Freddie and I only lived in the area for a few days before finding our apartment in another neighborhood, and we played it safe in those early days.

I thought that our move might improve the situation.  Santa Clara, our new hood, was relatively clean, busy, and filled with students from the nearby university.  So on our first day in the new place, I filmed Freddie and Laurene as they went to get keys copied at a key-copying-phone-charging-AA-battery-selling-magazine stand on our block.  We had only been on the street for a few minutes when a guy bumped into my bag from behind.  At the time it seemed harmless since I was kinda blocking the sidewalk.  But moments later, as I reached to grab a fresh battery from my camera bag, I realized that something was amiss.  My bag had been sprayed by mustard.

Mustard. Yeah, I don't get it either.

This is the first step in an asinine scheme that the thieves of Quito regularly attempt (and I hope never successfully pull off).  First an unseen hand sprays the bag with mustard.  Next, a well-dressed man approaches, alerts the tourist that he’s been sprayed, and offers to help clean the bag.  The grateful tourist hands the condiment-soaked bag to the Suit, and another guy (probably the mustard-sprayer) runs by and grabs it out of the Suit’s hands, disappearing around the corner.  The well-dressed man is apologetic, the tourist is apoplectic, and the thieves are GONNA GET DRUNK TONIGHT.  Luckily for me, the well-dressed man never materialized, not that it matters much because I would never hand my bag over to someone after it mysteriously rained mustard and he conveniently had some tissues.  To me, that’s this plot’s biggest flaw, and I sincerely hope that no one has ever been stupid enough to fall for it.  But I digress.

I was still apoplectic without the con being completed, as now it seemed that I couldn’t film on my own block.  That’s a shitty-enough feeling even if filming a travel series isn’t your job.  On top of that, the asshole had managed to get mustard down the back of my pants which I had to wear unwashed for a week afterward, giving the appearance that I only own one pair of pants which, while true, isn’t something that I really need advertised.  The situation grew gloomier that night when we were given a security talk by our neighbors, Mehda and Erika (you can watch part of it in Episode 2… the part where they tell us about finding a dead guy).  Their warnings dominated all future shoots.  There’s a reason why the opening shot of Ryan’s night skateboarding scene is taken from our roof, and that’s that I wouldn’t bring the camera outside the apartment at night until I had scoped out the entire street, and even then I couldn’t leave the front of the building.  I had done research prior to coming to Ecuador, but this day spelled it out:  Staying safe in Quito, especially with the camera, was gonna be a hell of a challenge.

Over the next couple months, I would have to out-maneuver followers, sew a few new pockets, and get sprayed by mustard again.  I was annoyed but on guard, and I thought I had it figured out.  Sadly, I was wrong.  Check back when Episode 3 goes up to read about the time I failed.

These were shot in February, when principal photography had wrapped and I was able to turn my attention to some of those details that make life in Vietnam so unique.  I was always intrigued by the utilitarian aspect of Vietnamese society, by its people’s ability to make do with whatever works and not demand all the bells and whistles that mark any undertaking in the States.  The train crossing is a great example.  In America, where it’s often said that we value machines and automation at the expense of people, a human-operated train crossing would be unthinkable, or at the very least hopelessly outdated.  In Vietnam, where the biggest technological concern is air pollution from motorbikes (and lately the censorship of Facebook), it’s common-place.  So common, in fact, that there were stations just like this one only 25 yards in either direction.  Cynics might say that this is the communist influence on the country, a simple way of creating soul-sucking jobs that keep everyone busy.  Maybe there’s some truth to that, but the reason I found this station so interesting was because the workers’ spirits seemed to be as high as anyone’s.  I was able to observe them a couple times before this shoot (this crossing was near my apartment), and every time I saw these young women emerge from their small guard house and lower these barriers, they did it with enthusiasm.  Perhaps it’s that difference – that a Vietnamese person could do the same task every day and be happy – that explains why these train crossings exist.  No economic system can explain that kind of inner peace (though they’ve all certainly tried).  No, it seems to me that that the Vietnamese are able to be happy with their work thanks to the influence of Buddhism.  There’s more to that than I can pretend to know, but the more I learned about Buddhism while in Vietnam, the more I saw it reflected in daily life.  Maybe America doesn’t need hand-operated train crossings, but perhaps there’s something to be said for inner peace.

I don’t have as much to say about the coffee short.  While it also exemplifies the utilitarianism of Vietnam (gloves? what for?), the truth is that I just love Vietnamese ice coffee, or cà phê sữa đá.  I went to this coffee cart every single morning, mostly for the delicious, sweet elixir, but also to get made fun of in Vietnamese by the nice woman making the drinks.  See that glass that of coffee she just made?  I drank that.  And it was damn good.

For starters, you should know that everyone who works for JS0 is a complete masochist.  Most companies that produce shows like ours do so with a crew of at least 3 people in the field.  They also have an editor, assistant editor, and a couple technicians back in the States to put it all together, and then a whole slew of people whose jobs are to encode, embed, advertise, track, quantify, and sell it.  Here at Jet Set Zero, we thought it would be funny if we did all of that but with only 4 people.  Total.  It turns out that we were kinda right; We’re in the midst of producing our seventh season, and each person involved works around the clock to bring episodes to air.  And we love it.

Making it look easy.

My current 24-hour shift started in late April, when I flew down to Quito.  I hoped to get acclimated to the altitude, improve my limited Spanish, and get a general feel for the city in the week before the cast arrived.  I had been warned that climbing stairs and drinking beer would be challenging at this height, but I was happy to find that it was just the stairs.  On my second day in town I climbed to El Panacillo, the highest point in Quito, and definitely felt a bit winded up top.  I immediately went back down and found the lowest bar I could find, which was actually just a pool table with some crates around it and a kid selling cigarettes.  Unfortunately, those crates were still 9,350 feet in the air, so it wasn’t a huge relief.

The altitude definitely made things difficult early on.  The camera we shot on (the Canon 7D) is surprisingly heavy and I’m not-surprisingly weak, so lots of times I found myself struggling to keep up with the non-camera-carrying cast.   During Freddie’s uphill trek around Guapulo (the part when he says the view looks like a postcard) I ended up about 100 yards behind him.  That wasn’t so bad, though, compared with what was to come.

I’ve climbed a mountain once in my life.  I was 10 years old, so it probably wasn’t a very tough climb.  Mt. Punay, on the other hand, isn’t nearly as forgiving.  When I applied for this job with Jet Set Zero, I highlighted the fact that I’ve regularly had the crap kicked out of me while making films, but climbing this mountain was easily the most grueling, challenging, arduous shoot I’ve ever worked on*.  It’s next to impossible to get a good tracking shot while walking backwards up a muddy, rocky mountain.  In fact, the only tracking shot that appears in the episode cuts out just before I almost fell over.  I learned that when you climb a mountain, your job is to climb the mountain.  Anything else – like, say, producing a web-series – comes second.

After 3 hours of putting the show second, we made it to the top and took a long, long rest.  Then, of course, we watched the sunset.  I hope that the footage conveys a tenth of the beauty that we saw up on that mountain.  As I stood awe-struck at the sight of the setting sun, I realized that this scene, this magnificent moment, plays out every single day, and has since before any of us existed.  As I write this, that sun is still setting over those clouds.  If we don’t screw things up too badly, that stunning view will still be there after we’re gone.  If you ever get a chance, you should see it with your own eyes.  But pack light.

From Quito,
Evan

*Except for the time I was shot by a taser.