The many faces of Mt. Baker

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Saturday, January 31st:

The first time ever I've gone to Mt. Baker after living less than an hour away from it for three years. Of course, the reason I make my epic journey up is not to ski or snowboard. Oh no, it's to go to a photo shoot.

Ah well.


KVIK, the campus TV station at WWU is making a musical. Yay! Trust me, it's not as bad as it sounds. The crew was filming a scene where an emo girl runs away to the mountains to escape (it's a spoof).

So to get an early start we left at 5 a.m. (oh boy...). We proceeded to spend the next 12 hours on a very large patch of white snow. There wasn't much in the way of anything on the patch of snow we were on.



However the background was breathtaking. Being on a mountain we proceeded to experience about 7 different weather changes throughout the day.

7 a.m. We get to the mountain after an epic coffee trip. It's cold and extremely foggy. Snow proceeded to fall on and off in varying degrees throughout the day.

11 am. After convincing ourselves that we were going to have a miserable shoot and that we would never be warm again, the sun begins to break through the foggy trees, slowly washing itself over the snow drifts. Our cold foggy morning has suddenly turned very, very, bright. We weren't complaining though. We instead worked hard at taking advantage of the time we had.


2 p.m. Sky sighting! It's a miracle, we hadn't seen sky in eight hours. This was amazing. Filming in the snow is proving to be a lot more exhausting than one might think. No we're not doing as much physical activity as we would if we were up there skiing or snowboarding, but it was that lack of activity that was actually our downfall. No movement equals no blood flow, and in cold, snowy weathers our bodies weren't too happy with us. We actaually had to take an extended lodge break at one point to keep one of our actors from passing out, as he was getting pretty purple in the cheeks. Oh dear...

(After a chili dog and a hot beverage though, he was as good as new)

Now as a small campus film crew, we don't have much in the way of a budget. And when I say not much in the way of I really mean none.The fun part is the director is a big fan of dolly shots (for those who might not know, and believe I never want to assume a dolly shot is when the camera "is mounted on a wheeled platform that is pushed on rails while the picture is being taken" -- Nation Master Encyclopedia. However, we managed to make due. Thanks board and PCV pipe!


But hey, it was well worth it.



// CassiBean