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The adventure started in the Fall of 2012 when Ben Masters called looking for someone to film him and three fellow Texans as they travelled by horseback over 3,000 miles across the American West. As a filmmaker passionate about documenting adventures in the outdoors, this sounded like an incredible project...only I didn’t know how to ride a horse! Ben wasn’t concerned, and said he’d teach me himself. Saddle sores aside, I knew this was a chance of a lifetime and something I couldn’t pass up. Later that Fall, Ben came to Montana where we connected and took the first steps in turning his vision into a reality. Pulling together footage on the mustang situation, conservation in the West, and why four young men were out to ride across America to prove the worth of these wild horses, we created our
Kickstarter trailer to raise funds to film their journey. The Kickstarter was a great success, not only did it exceed our goal, but it also attracted the attention of Cindy Meehl, director of the award winning film Buck. Cindy joined the team as Executive Producer, and the project really took off. With everything moving forward, I felt both excited and terrified, wondering how we were going to pull off filming a documentary of this scale...on the back of a horse. Almost all of my work is done in the
outdoors, but adding horses brought a whole new dimension to this project. Two weeks before the trip,
I headed to the San Pedro ranch in southern Texas, home of one of Ben’s fellow riders, Jonny, to figure out how to ride a horse and rig all of the gear. Our main camera needed to have a cinematic look that would capture the vast landscapes as we journeyed through some of the most scenic parts of the West. We chose the Canon C-500, nicknamed the “Princess,” which we rigged on top of the hard panniers on one of the horses. We also rigged a smaller Canon DSLR to the saddle horn for quick shooting from on the horse. One of the biggest obstacles was rigging the four guys with wireless mics. An external audio recorder to pick up the guys was carried in a saddlebag by Luke, who we coined the “audio horse.” You can see Luke, who I rode most of the trip, in many of the shots trailing behind the pack string with an empty saddle doing his job of picking up the audio. We also used GoPro cameras, a Panasonic camera set on full auto for the guys to shoot with when we weren’t documenting them and some aerial videography with a drone. The first month was hard, breaking ourselves into the ride and figuring out the production of shooting a backcountry pack trip. We learned quickly, and, fortunately, knew early on that we were going to capture an amazing story.