eKaqchikel 2009 - Staging a Dinner

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Wednesday, July 22 - I've talked before about Panajachel, the town where we stay and work from while producing content for the Kaqchikel application. Pana lies along the shores of Lake Atitlán, an ancient volcanic caldera in the Guatemalan highlands ringed by three (probably) inactive volcanoes. It's a beautiful locale that we try to make as much use of as possible in our material. You can't help but see the massive volcanoes towering across the lake when you visit its shores. But in town, it's sometimes easy to forget what's sitting just "out there." Walking along the street this morning, I caught sight of this eerie reminder.

Today's dialogue started as a daunting proposal: shoot six diners eating a complete meal, exchanging greetings and social banter, and then commenting on the meal itself. That's a lot of people to wrangle and a lot of dialogue to get through. Add to that a fully set table with actual food that needed to be eaten at specific moments during the production (a potential continuity nightmare), and you have a very full day. Except it wasn't.

The talent arrived fully rehearsed and ready to perform, and Lee and I had a blocking plan for the cameras that simplified the shots. We collected shot after shot while maintaining a complicated continuity. In past years we could have spent an entire day on this one dialogue. This year, we did it in three hours. It's good to have an experienced team!

I've been using the geo-logger throughout the trip. It's very easy to collect geo-location data. The toughest part is remembering to turn the device on! Once it's running, though, it's solid. All you have to do is download the log and sync the location data with your images. All the images from today are located on this map of Panajachel.

A few are positioned a bit off from the actual location, but on the whole, the data has been amazingly accurate. My next task is to introduce Google Earth into the process.