SHOOT STORY | FREE SOLO
LEFT Director Jimmy Chin and with co- Director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi below. BELOW Alex Hunnold just finishing his nail- biting climb.
Jimmy Chin is a professional climber, skier, mountaineer, 18-year member of The North Face Athlete Team and National Geographic Explorer. He is the director, producer and cinematographer of the National Geographic documentary film Free Solo , which he co-directed with his wife Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. His commercial clients have included North Face, Chase, American Airlines, Working Title and Apple. ( source Nat Geo) JIMMY CHIN DIRECTOR, PRODUCER, CINEMATOGRAPHER ELIZABETH CHAI VASARHELYI DIRECTOR, PRODUCER previous work includes Meru , and Incorruptible . Her first film, A Normal Life , won Best Documentary t the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003, and her second, Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love , won the Special Jury prize at the Middle East International Film Festival in 2008. ( source Nat Geo) Award-winning filmmaker Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s
Camera crew for Free Solo included Jimmy himself alongside cinematographers Mikey Schaefer and Clair Popkin. Building a crew for such a production involves selecting from a very limited pool of people whose experience includes both climbing and camerawork. “Many of them are like me in the sense that they are professional climbers who have started filming over the years due to necessity, and people like me calling them, or people I’ve worked with and helped mentor. I never, ever have to worry about them as climbers. There’s absolutely no question for me that they’re 100% on top of their game.” Still, Jimmy adds, “they also have to have a very solid sensibility to what it’s like to film people in this kind of scenario.” CREW SAFETY The key factor, inevitably, is safety. “The conversations we always have, especially with our crew members, is that you are always a climber first and you have to make sure that you’re covering all your bases as a climber before you start filming. A very simple mistake up there could be catastrophic in terms of your climbing systems.” Perhaps unusually for a documentary, Free Solo was planned in shot-by-shot detail. “You have to remember that we spent two years filming on this specific route. We were training for this specific event and trained as Alex was training to do the climb. We were able to really become surgical about how we were going to shoot it. We had a long lens on the ground, we knew exactly where our camera team would be, we had remote cameras set up, we knew exactly how we were going to shoot it.
Despite the difficult circumstances, Chin was determined to pursue the best possible results with filming taking place in the spring, summer and autumn of 2016 and the spring of 2017, when the weather is most suitable for climbing. Despite the difficult circumstances, Jimmy was determined to pursue the best possible results. “For the kind of filming we were doing, high-angle and big wall, we were shooting on cinema cameras and cinema lenses because we wanted it to have that look and be shot at 4K. The fact that we were able to do that was one of the big achievements. A lesser team would have shot it with little DSLR lenses.” under four hours, the documentary was produced over a period of nearly two years,
32 DEF I N I T ION | OCTOBER 20 1 8
Powered by FlippingBook