In June of 2010 I had booked a large hybrid stills/video project for the fall so I spent the summer gearing up, practicing and running test scenarios. I had done filmmaking growing up and during college. I had also kept abreast of the nascent dslrs now do video movement; reading all the websites about camera settings, second-system sound recording, and editing.
For the client’s project I decided I would go with a video capable dslr. It could have been shot on a prosumer camcorder as it had by others in the past but if I was going to take on video I wanted to do it in a way that was different (in 2010 dslr large chip video was different) and that was interesting to me.
What I would come to find, as I practiced, was that capturing moving images would bring a freshness I had felt was long gone. A way to see anew and that couldn’t be more true than in something as simple as the family vacation. While we have traveled a bit, more often than not we would go to Maine to an area my wife and I discovered before we got married. While it’s low on wanderlust it’s high on comfort, ease, and beauty.
This was shot in 2010 but I did not get to editing it until now. I first titled it, Things We Do in Maine, but then took the title, The Only Ones, from a song used in the piece. It fits. The sense of time spent, the sense of family once again recaptured from our hectic day-to-day lives, and the sense of being in a landscape where you can feel like the only ones.
As I edited this it struck me how much our dog, Bix, had inserted himself into many shots. If you don’t see him, you often hear him breathing, panting or snoring. He passed away last summer so this also serves as a bit of a tribute to him.
Soon after shooting that summer I did produce a short piece from my footage highlighting a local Maine tradition, the Flash in the Pans. It was done to show clients the low light capabilities of the then new video capable dslrs. One Balmy Night in Maine is still online and recently refreshed in terms of the edit and grading.
All footage was shot with a Canon 1D Mark IV, a Zacuto z-finder, a Sennheiser MKE 400 mini shotgun mic, and a mix of handheld, tripod, and slider work.
Music: The Only Ones and Only Atoms, both by Nicole Reynolds.