I caught a look at a draft proposal of a travel series in the U.S. and haven't been able to think about anything else since.
Except for the piece on Norway I'm cutting right now.
And except for the 48 Hour Film Project that starts tonight and will consume my weekend.
Other than that, though...
The proposal actually taps into a series I always thought we should do again: America's Historic Trails. And the reason I thought we should update it is because, since we produced that series, a lot of time's gone by and, in that time, drones and 4K have become ubiquitous.
When we first shot the series, I was a production assistant who accompanied shoots along The Mission Trail in California, The California Trail from the Rocky Mountains to Sacramento, and The Mormon Trail from Omaha, Nebraska to Salt Lake City, Utah.
Especially across the Midwest I was continuously struck by the horizon. How it seemed to go on forever. How I could actually see it.
This was so long ago, unfortunately, we were shooting in Standard Definition. Aside from the incredibly low resolution of it, we were basically shooting a horizontal world through a box frame. A world absolutely suited to 16:9 that captured the horizon as opposed to the 4:3 we were using that robbed what we saw with our eyes of its breathtaking impact.
The landscape was stunning, is all I'm saying. We would absolutely do it justice at 4K resolution with a 16:9 aspect ratio.
Plus, especially along The Mormon Trail, the distances traveled historically by foot, by cart, by wagon... are insane. High resolution shots from a drone would drive that point home in a way that's not possible otherwise.
Which brings me to the Morocco episode of Adventures with Purpose where the production traveled from Kasbah to Kasbah across open desert.
Now, that show we shot in HD and it's gorgeous. Once again, however, the distances traveled across open desert through the centuries are insane. It boggles the mind to think that, once upon a time, people would intentionally leave the safety of a Kasbah, heading out into oblivion on camels.
And drone shots placing the Kasbahs in proper scale to the surrounding desert would profoundly illustrate what a crazy proposition that was.
The new proposal covers some of the same ground we traveled before in the states... to which we can now apply serious production (and post-production) technology.
And I really really really REALLY...