Brown

Harvey

Bridges

Greetings from the film guys. We thought we would send you our perspective on this project.

We have been shooting every day, both film and video formats. By the end of the trip, we expect to have about 30 hours of footage. From this we will cut a 42 minute special for NBC television. Our challenge now is to decide what is worth shooting, what is possible to shoot and whether to use film or video.

The trick now is to decide where our film story will actually start. We spent four days in Kathmandu and then the next several days driving. We shot lots of footage, but now that we are here we are thinking our story will start in Nyalam. There are so many opportunities for beautiful images, but we have to choose which ones we will use to tell our story. So far, we feel that we have a strong sequence of the trek into Base Camp. The all-day hike from 13,800ft to 17,250ft was really tough for the team and provided good drama for our film. We arrived in a snowstorm to set up camp, which provided both humor and misery. Now we are looking for sequences that give insight into life at Base Camp. So far, we have Conrad organizing a garbage pick-up, meals, our clubhouse (a two meter dome tent complete with CDs, a bar, workout space for Alex, equipment storage and selected photographs), and a puja ceremony with lots of prayer flags.

Over the next few days, we plan to start shooting our climbing and skiing sequences. This involves a lot of coordination between skiers and cameramen, deciding angles and best locations. This is always tricky because there are so many great possibilities. Today we drooled over a long tongue of glacier that arcs down from a 20,000ft "minor" peak. In the background is the whole South Face of Shishapangma.

It's not just the skiing we are looking for, though, we also want to capture the personalities of the team members, the Sherpa staff and even our Chinese liaison officer and his translator sidekick we call "Junior."

We are also having to deal with the issues of keeping ourselves healthy in this incredibly hostile environment, just like the rest of the team. We are oftentimes so excited about getting the shot or checking angles that we tend to put our personal needs to the wayside. It is easy to forget that we are acclimatizing and having to stay physically fit enough to do our jobs. Forcing ourselves into "downtime" rest sessions has become mandatory.

It is odd to think that we have over a month left here to complete this project. But, on the same note, you could not ask for a better place to walk out your door and get the day going.

Bye for now.

— Michael Brown, Kent Harvey, Dave Bridges, MountainZone.com Correspondents

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