A documentary about survival. Part I - “Idea, Concept and Preparation”
In August of this year, the project for shooting a documentary film about human survival in the wild was successfully completed.
I did not dare to create this post before something concrete is done. Now that the most difficult is over, I am creating this topic to describe the whole project here. For all the time I worked on the project, a hundred liter cauldron of delicious cereal from information and thoughts accumulated in my head, which I tried to explain in two approaches. Sorry for the possible confusion. I wanted to tell a lot. I could miss a lot of interesting moments, so it will be very good if everyone who is interested in it will be free to feel free to ask more questions.
')
I divided all information into two parts: “Idea, concept and preparation”, which tells about the essence of the project, how it originated and developed, and the second part - “Survival” contains a report on the time spent in survival mode.
The first stage was experimental, and was to try to povyshyvat and evaluate what is important in events of this kind and build a more adequate model for the next stages. Under the leadership of Sergei Tselikov, the first survival trip was organized. It was a three-day summer trip to nature without tents or food. In the fall, followed by a second departure for survival , then a third closer to winter. All of them differed in equipment, circumstances and patterns of behavior, each of them gave a lot of experience, broke many stereotypes. But the main thing is that survival has ceased to be for me some kind of abstract task with incomprehensible difficulties and hardships.
Previously, in the process of preparing survival trips, there were often disputes about what is honest and what is not honest, if we had those or other resources in a real situation, what to take and what not to take. Someone was thinking about life after the plane crash, others were preparing for a nuclear winter, and still others were making fire. Often we have gathered together circumstances combined in one situation, but in reality in life they do not exist simultaneously. And now, when only a few trips have been implemented, I learned to clearly see and understand the model and structure of survival. I ordered the accumulated knowledge in the form of several articles, and in the final article I highlighted important, in my opinion, priorities and essences on survival. With their help, it was possible to describe any survival situation. Only six entities and three priorities. Entities describe a situation in which a person falls into, and priorities convey information about what needs to be done first. Now much has become obvious and clear to me. It became possible to describe both real situations with the help of this method and to model our own. Now there was no need to organize trips, because knowing about the conditions of survival, I could already tell what activity it would be reduced to, what strategic and tactical measures I would have to take. From this point on, I switched to studying survival topics and training individual survival skills, such as building a shelter or making fire in various ways.
As time went on, I trained, read and collected information on the Internet, until at the end of 2008, all the same Sergey did not offer me to participate in a new survival project. Prior to that, all my trips were limited in time to three - four days, he also offered to survive for two weeks. And the project was not just to survive, but to shoot a documentary about this process. It was a challenge for me to test a new order. I myself have long thought about great survival, where I could test myself, apply all my knowledge and experience, but have not yet decided to organize it myself. I agreed. Sergei had experience of all sorts of filming, but for him it was also an idea of a fundamentally new level. We firmly decided that we would definitely implement this project, set a date for it: August 2009, and in the future our thoughts about the project did not for a second leave our consciousness. This was the start of the implementation of the idea: “To make a documentary film about real survival in the wild”.
Making a film opened up many possibilities and very much attracted us. As a result, the film has become a higher priority than even survival itself. We immediately decided that you need to shoot a professional camera, and it is very expensive, even at the box office. It became clear that without sponsorship is not enough. Work began with sponsors. At the same time, such an idea came: since we are doing a project with sponsorship money, then the place for survival needs to be chosen where we ourselves could hardly have gone. The decision came pretty quickly when we glanced at the map of Russia and stuck a finger into its farthest corner. Kamchatka! After we approved Kamchatka even the distant Altai for us (which we developed initially as a place for survival) began to seem to us a minimum option, in case we don’t find sponsors at all. And in the future we did not give up Kamchatka even in the conditions of a severe lack of funds.
In parallel, work was carried out on many tasks. It was necessary to find and invite other project participants, and we could not trust participation in such an event to people we do not know or are not sure of. The difficulty was that even a person who was fit in the physical and moral aspects could be rejected due to the non-cinematographic nature of his image. The technical difficulty was to provide photo and video equipment with energy during the autonomous two-week hike. With all this it was necessary to create high-quality material for sponsors, one that would reflect the essence of the project, intrigue and interest sponsors. This required an understanding of the subtle psychological moments of this kind of materials. Sponsors need advertising, so finding sites for the film and places to publish articles and photos was also an important task. It was necessary to make a business proposal, make an adequate estimate and sponsorship agreement. We did not want to miss the opportunity of sponsoring by foreign companies and everything that we created needed a professional translation.
The project developed in a spiral. Over time, we have penetrated deeper into many aspects and subtleties, returned to old practices and reworked everything to a new qualitative level. For example, the place for survival has changed, this has made a change in the proposal for sponsors and further down the chain: in the estimate, in the contract, in translation, etc. The survival model has changed - again, all the materials in the chain are changing and improving with the experience gained. The most routine and difficult was, of course, work on finding sponsors. We sent offers to everyone who could be interested in advertising in the context of this film and an extreme project. This includes manufacturers of equipment, firms for the production or sale of weapons, just sports shops, airlines, travel agencies, manufacturers of drinks and power engineers, sportswear manufacturers and even oil corporations. Moreover, each type of company required its own motivation in the sponsorship offer. The list of potential sponsors was replenished daily with dozens of firms and companies. Sergey made a lot of calls all over Russia every day. Every day we sent fifty e-mails. At the same time, work was continuously being done to improve the ideology of the film.
The model of survival itself has changed many times and eventually degenerated into the fact that I will have to survive alone and not even communicate with the film crew. From the point of view of cinema, the survival of one person looks more dramatic and more interesting, and the lack of communication will allow the hero of the film to withdraw into himself and become stronger in the image. On the one hand, it was an interesting step, but it was also an unpleasant moment - it was necessary to refuse the already invited participants. We are again in the project together. And all the tasks that we planned to distribute among the participants lay entirely on our shoulders. Another problem has been added - who will now carry all the shooting equipment? After all, earlier it was planned that 5-7 people would survive, and the survivors themselves would carry the equipment in small portions.
In the meantime, a preliminary agreement has emerged with some sites for distributing project materials. The TV channel "Russian Extreme" promised to show the film 12 times and gave a letter of guarantee about it. National Geographic magazine in words promised to place an article in the magazine and indicate sponsors at the end. It could somehow be a motivation for sponsors. But still, in 99.9% of cases, we were denied for various reasons, someone referred to the crisis and lack of funds, someone said that the advertising budget for this year was already set, others simply said that it was not interesting. There was a lot of mistrust, because we could not give any guarantees. A large number of sponsors behaved like a pig, promising to consider and call back, or somehow report their decision, but disappeared without a trace. There were moral scammers who admired the idea, saying that it was very interesting to them, but after a series of calls for some reason they refused. These groundless hopes were very tiring for us, and towards the end, we became completely cold about any enthusiastic reviews and promises.
And here we are lucky! The company "Kizlyar", a manufacturer of knives and cold weapons, declared its readiness to partially participate in the project. They did not undertake to fully pay the estimate and paid about a third, but they were the only ones who kept their word and acted adequately during the entire period of negotiations. Also, the company "Kizlyar" more than provided us with knives. Quite a lot of shops, manufacturers of clothing and equipment, volunteered to sponsor us with equipment, but the next sponsor was to become the Ryazan tourist clothing manufacturer Sivera. So it turned out to be a small world, that the director of this company is closely friends and cooperates with the head of the Kamchatka search and rescue team of the Emergencies Ministry. Thus, in addition to sponsored clothing, we also received a variety of support from the Emergencies Ministry in Kamchatka. This, in fact, saved us from another third of the costs.
Only in July, we began to think about a quality photographer for this project. We put the offer on the Internet, which made a lot of noise. The conditions were, I must say, not very profitable - we did not offer money, and we could only be interested in the uniqueness of the event and in solving some problems in Kamchatka. We received a lot of summaries, which we reviewed and compiled a rating table on a 10-point scale. Here, too, there were a lot of problems, those photographers that we liked either demanded a fee, or were already on the road or could not for various reasons. And here we are lucky again! The photographer, whom we independently assigned 10 out of 10, who was invited first, agreed! He was supposed to go to Karelia, but the trip was canceled. It was Ivan Dementievsky. It is necessary to give him his due - to agree to such an adventure, and even at his own expense, without a guarantee of the payback of the film and photographic materials - this is a bold and noble decision.
After receiving the first sponsorship money, we bought tickets. Here I will dwell a bit on the airlines. These are the most unpredictable and illogical transport companies in the country! Physical ticket offices and websites with the ability to buy tickets live in completely different dimensions, each with its own chaos. During the week, prices for tickets for the same flight could spontaneously disappear, appear en masse, rise in price and become cheaper several times. As a result, we bought tickets to Petropavlovsk and back for a decent amount, and a week before the departure a bunch of tickets appeared on the site at a price three times lower. To attempt to return expensive tickets and buy cheaper flights for the same flight, the cashier made round eyes and stated that there are no cheap tickets and everything is not correct on the website. Although we knew for sure that we could buy them, we simply did not have buffer money at that time, but we did not risk and pass the tickets without a guarantee that we would buy the same flight.
With the purchase of tickets, some encouraging certainty appeared: we already knew that we were going to Kamchatka, although neither technically nor organizationally the project was ready at that time. Spontaneously borrow money from anyone we can. There was an acute issue with the rental of the camera, the rental conditions were either inhuman, or very expensive, or completely unacceptable in our project. For example, a technician was attached to the camera on a mandatory basis, but where should we put it? Not to take him to the mountains in Kamchatka with him. Additional batteries and chargers were needed for the camera, and Sergey was moving around Moscow in search of solutions that were available to us. On July 31, I left Rostov-on-Don for Moscow. In Moscow, before the departure was only a few days and had to solve a lot of questions. But during this period it was somewhat easier from the fact that the work on finding sponsors had already completely stopped, there was no need to call, write, wait for something and hope. We no longer have any moral strength for excitement, we did not even worry when we were stuck in traffic on the way to the airport and the car went dead and the engine did not start. I wanted to get on the plane as soon as possible, fly away and finally get down to the most interesting.
And here is another early morning we went to survive. The amount of things loaded in the car was terrifying. Photographer Ivan had 3 cameras, Sergey's director had a large coffer with a camera, a tripod, and every video kit. And while no one has canceled other camping equipment. This all has added a gas generator with a canister of gasoline, an additional bag with chargers. Local photographer and guide were also loaded to the full. As a result, all backpacks weighed over 30. The project officially began at the time of disembarking from the car at the starting point of the route. In the car, I greedily ate chocolates, pies and sandwiches. On the way, we had a wheel pierced, and at first I even thought that the guys had deliberately arranged this so that survival would begin for me unexpectedly. But no, everything was for real. Putting the spare tire, we got where we wanted. Sergey spent the last briefing: “Not to communicate with Stas, he is on his own, we are on our own. He leads us, and we follow him everywhere, even if he begins to wander, we do not tell him the way. On the day we go 3-4 hours to have time to shoot and relax. " Everything. Let's go. Survival has begun.
Continuing on the way ...
I did not dare to create this post before something concrete is done. Now that the most difficult is over, I am creating this topic to describe the whole project here. For all the time I worked on the project, a hundred liter cauldron of delicious cereal from information and thoughts accumulated in my head, which I tried to explain in two approaches. Sorry for the possible confusion. I wanted to tell a lot. I could miss a lot of interesting moments, so it will be very good if everyone who is interested in it will be free to feel free to ask more questions.
')
I divided all information into two parts: “Idea, concept and preparation”, which tells about the essence of the project, how it originated and developed, and the second part - “Survival” contains a report on the time spent in survival mode.
Idea and concept
Thoughts about survival, be it a global catastrophe or just a car breakdown far from the city, many of us periodically visit in one way or another. Many on the basis of these disturbing thoughts try to prepare themselves for such a coincidence of circumstances. But it's one thing to think about it, and quite another to try to really swell. I was always attracted by the idea of trying something like this in practice, but I absolutely did not know how to approach this and where to start. In 2007, I found on the Internet a forum on extreme topics, where, in particular, the idea of survival was actively discussed. After about half a year of discussions, concrete actions were taken. Everything was divided into several stages.The first stage was experimental, and was to try to povyshyvat and evaluate what is important in events of this kind and build a more adequate model for the next stages. Under the leadership of Sergei Tselikov, the first survival trip was organized. It was a three-day summer trip to nature without tents or food. In the fall, followed by a second departure for survival , then a third closer to winter. All of them differed in equipment, circumstances and patterns of behavior, each of them gave a lot of experience, broke many stereotypes. But the main thing is that survival has ceased to be for me some kind of abstract task with incomprehensible difficulties and hardships.
Previously, in the process of preparing survival trips, there were often disputes about what is honest and what is not honest, if we had those or other resources in a real situation, what to take and what not to take. Someone was thinking about life after the plane crash, others were preparing for a nuclear winter, and still others were making fire. Often we have gathered together circumstances combined in one situation, but in reality in life they do not exist simultaneously. And now, when only a few trips have been implemented, I learned to clearly see and understand the model and structure of survival. I ordered the accumulated knowledge in the form of several articles, and in the final article I highlighted important, in my opinion, priorities and essences on survival. With their help, it was possible to describe any survival situation. Only six entities and three priorities. Entities describe a situation in which a person falls into, and priorities convey information about what needs to be done first. Now much has become obvious and clear to me. It became possible to describe both real situations with the help of this method and to model our own. Now there was no need to organize trips, because knowing about the conditions of survival, I could already tell what activity it would be reduced to, what strategic and tactical measures I would have to take. From this point on, I switched to studying survival topics and training individual survival skills, such as building a shelter or making fire in various ways.
As time went on, I trained, read and collected information on the Internet, until at the end of 2008, all the same Sergey did not offer me to participate in a new survival project. Prior to that, all my trips were limited in time to three - four days, he also offered to survive for two weeks. And the project was not just to survive, but to shoot a documentary about this process. It was a challenge for me to test a new order. I myself have long thought about great survival, where I could test myself, apply all my knowledge and experience, but have not yet decided to organize it myself. I agreed. Sergei had experience of all sorts of filming, but for him it was also an idea of a fundamentally new level. We firmly decided that we would definitely implement this project, set a date for it: August 2009, and in the future our thoughts about the project did not for a second leave our consciousness. This was the start of the implementation of the idea: “To make a documentary film about real survival in the wild”.
Training
For several months, we just hatched the idea in our head, all sorts of problems and affairs prevented us from starting to act. Then it seemed that there was still a lot of time, but only later we realized that we were greatly mistaken. Around April 2009, active work began on the development of a model and concept for this idea. We worked in parallel, I am in Rostov-on-Don, Sergey - in Moscow. The accumulated information was shared via the Internet. Sergey coordinated actions, was engaged in organizational issues, and I was something like a senior assistant, and mainly engaged in the exploration and study of potential points of interest for survival. Model and ideology, we discussed and improved together.Making a film opened up many possibilities and very much attracted us. As a result, the film has become a higher priority than even survival itself. We immediately decided that you need to shoot a professional camera, and it is very expensive, even at the box office. It became clear that without sponsorship is not enough. Work began with sponsors. At the same time, such an idea came: since we are doing a project with sponsorship money, then the place for survival needs to be chosen where we ourselves could hardly have gone. The decision came pretty quickly when we glanced at the map of Russia and stuck a finger into its farthest corner. Kamchatka! After we approved Kamchatka even the distant Altai for us (which we developed initially as a place for survival) began to seem to us a minimum option, in case we don’t find sponsors at all. And in the future we did not give up Kamchatka even in the conditions of a severe lack of funds.
In parallel, work was carried out on many tasks. It was necessary to find and invite other project participants, and we could not trust participation in such an event to people we do not know or are not sure of. The difficulty was that even a person who was fit in the physical and moral aspects could be rejected due to the non-cinematographic nature of his image. The technical difficulty was to provide photo and video equipment with energy during the autonomous two-week hike. With all this it was necessary to create high-quality material for sponsors, one that would reflect the essence of the project, intrigue and interest sponsors. This required an understanding of the subtle psychological moments of this kind of materials. Sponsors need advertising, so finding sites for the film and places to publish articles and photos was also an important task. It was necessary to make a business proposal, make an adequate estimate and sponsorship agreement. We did not want to miss the opportunity of sponsoring by foreign companies and everything that we created needed a professional translation.
The project developed in a spiral. Over time, we have penetrated deeper into many aspects and subtleties, returned to old practices and reworked everything to a new qualitative level. For example, the place for survival has changed, this has made a change in the proposal for sponsors and further down the chain: in the estimate, in the contract, in translation, etc. The survival model has changed - again, all the materials in the chain are changing and improving with the experience gained. The most routine and difficult was, of course, work on finding sponsors. We sent offers to everyone who could be interested in advertising in the context of this film and an extreme project. This includes manufacturers of equipment, firms for the production or sale of weapons, just sports shops, airlines, travel agencies, manufacturers of drinks and power engineers, sportswear manufacturers and even oil corporations. Moreover, each type of company required its own motivation in the sponsorship offer. The list of potential sponsors was replenished daily with dozens of firms and companies. Sergey made a lot of calls all over Russia every day. Every day we sent fifty e-mails. At the same time, work was continuously being done to improve the ideology of the film.
The model of survival itself has changed many times and eventually degenerated into the fact that I will have to survive alone and not even communicate with the film crew. From the point of view of cinema, the survival of one person looks more dramatic and more interesting, and the lack of communication will allow the hero of the film to withdraw into himself and become stronger in the image. On the one hand, it was an interesting step, but it was also an unpleasant moment - it was necessary to refuse the already invited participants. We are again in the project together. And all the tasks that we planned to distribute among the participants lay entirely on our shoulders. Another problem has been added - who will now carry all the shooting equipment? After all, earlier it was planned that 5-7 people would survive, and the survivors themselves would carry the equipment in small portions.
In the meantime, a preliminary agreement has emerged with some sites for distributing project materials. The TV channel "Russian Extreme" promised to show the film 12 times and gave a letter of guarantee about it. National Geographic magazine in words promised to place an article in the magazine and indicate sponsors at the end. It could somehow be a motivation for sponsors. But still, in 99.9% of cases, we were denied for various reasons, someone referred to the crisis and lack of funds, someone said that the advertising budget for this year was already set, others simply said that it was not interesting. There was a lot of mistrust, because we could not give any guarantees. A large number of sponsors behaved like a pig, promising to consider and call back, or somehow report their decision, but disappeared without a trace. There were moral scammers who admired the idea, saying that it was very interesting to them, but after a series of calls for some reason they refused. These groundless hopes were very tiring for us, and towards the end, we became completely cold about any enthusiastic reviews and promises.
And here we are lucky! The company "Kizlyar", a manufacturer of knives and cold weapons, declared its readiness to partially participate in the project. They did not undertake to fully pay the estimate and paid about a third, but they were the only ones who kept their word and acted adequately during the entire period of negotiations. Also, the company "Kizlyar" more than provided us with knives. Quite a lot of shops, manufacturers of clothing and equipment, volunteered to sponsor us with equipment, but the next sponsor was to become the Ryazan tourist clothing manufacturer Sivera. So it turned out to be a small world, that the director of this company is closely friends and cooperates with the head of the Kamchatka search and rescue team of the Emergencies Ministry. Thus, in addition to sponsored clothing, we also received a variety of support from the Emergencies Ministry in Kamchatka. This, in fact, saved us from another third of the costs.
Only in July, we began to think about a quality photographer for this project. We put the offer on the Internet, which made a lot of noise. The conditions were, I must say, not very profitable - we did not offer money, and we could only be interested in the uniqueness of the event and in solving some problems in Kamchatka. We received a lot of summaries, which we reviewed and compiled a rating table on a 10-point scale. Here, too, there were a lot of problems, those photographers that we liked either demanded a fee, or were already on the road or could not for various reasons. And here we are lucky again! The photographer, whom we independently assigned 10 out of 10, who was invited first, agreed! He was supposed to go to Karelia, but the trip was canceled. It was Ivan Dementievsky. It is necessary to give him his due - to agree to such an adventure, and even at his own expense, without a guarantee of the payback of the film and photographic materials - this is a bold and noble decision.
After receiving the first sponsorship money, we bought tickets. Here I will dwell a bit on the airlines. These are the most unpredictable and illogical transport companies in the country! Physical ticket offices and websites with the ability to buy tickets live in completely different dimensions, each with its own chaos. During the week, prices for tickets for the same flight could spontaneously disappear, appear en masse, rise in price and become cheaper several times. As a result, we bought tickets to Petropavlovsk and back for a decent amount, and a week before the departure a bunch of tickets appeared on the site at a price three times lower. To attempt to return expensive tickets and buy cheaper flights for the same flight, the cashier made round eyes and stated that there are no cheap tickets and everything is not correct on the website. Although we knew for sure that we could buy them, we simply did not have buffer money at that time, but we did not risk and pass the tickets without a guarantee that we would buy the same flight.
With the purchase of tickets, some encouraging certainty appeared: we already knew that we were going to Kamchatka, although neither technically nor organizationally the project was ready at that time. Spontaneously borrow money from anyone we can. There was an acute issue with the rental of the camera, the rental conditions were either inhuman, or very expensive, or completely unacceptable in our project. For example, a technician was attached to the camera on a mandatory basis, but where should we put it? Not to take him to the mountains in Kamchatka with him. Additional batteries and chargers were needed for the camera, and Sergey was moving around Moscow in search of solutions that were available to us. On July 31, I left Rostov-on-Don for Moscow. In Moscow, before the departure was only a few days and had to solve a lot of questions. But during this period it was somewhat easier from the fact that the work on finding sponsors had already completely stopped, there was no need to call, write, wait for something and hope. We no longer have any moral strength for excitement, we did not even worry when we were stuck in traffic on the way to the airport and the car went dead and the engine did not start. I wanted to get on the plane as soon as possible, fly away and finally get down to the most interesting.
Implementation
Everything! We are in Kamchatka! Nine-hour flight and the same time difference relative to Moscow. The body was a little unconscious, and for a long time we could not understand and believe that we were at the edge of the world. There have come pleasant moments of reaping the fruits of long organizational preparation. Before the main stage, we had several days in Petropavlovsk and a weekly acclimatization hike to the sights.And here is another early morning we went to survive. The amount of things loaded in the car was terrifying. Photographer Ivan had 3 cameras, Sergey's director had a large coffer with a camera, a tripod, and every video kit. And while no one has canceled other camping equipment. This all has added a gas generator with a canister of gasoline, an additional bag with chargers. Local photographer and guide were also loaded to the full. As a result, all backpacks weighed over 30. The project officially began at the time of disembarking from the car at the starting point of the route. In the car, I greedily ate chocolates, pies and sandwiches. On the way, we had a wheel pierced, and at first I even thought that the guys had deliberately arranged this so that survival would begin for me unexpectedly. But no, everything was for real. Putting the spare tire, we got where we wanted. Sergey spent the last briefing: “Not to communicate with Stas, he is on his own, we are on our own. He leads us, and we follow him everywhere, even if he begins to wander, we do not tell him the way. On the day we go 3-4 hours to have time to shoot and relax. " Everything. Let's go. Survival has begun.
Continuing on the way ...
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/71692/
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