White water kayak filming

May 2015 and I found myself on the way to a great sounding town called Crested Butte in Colorado. I was directing a shoot filming four fearless kayakers on a white water creek called “Oh be Joyful”. As I arrived I must admit to feeling a little less than ‘joyful’ about it - not because of the shoot itself, but because I was going to be filmed by a colleague for a ‘behind the scenes’ segment. And I like being behind the camera, not in front of it…

And then it hit me, quite literally … the altitude. Bizarrely that was the one thing I wasn’t prepared for. Of course I had heard Denver being called the ‘Mile High City’ but it just hadn’t quite sunk in what that might mean for me. And Crested Butte was even higher - we were nearly 2 miles up! And boy did my head pound!! Every time I moved it felt like my brain was going to explode out of my skull. I took pain killers but it didn’t even touch it. There was no time to wallow in self-pity, we only had three days to film a sequence about the snow melt, and there were two cameramen and four kayakers waiting for me to tell them what we were doing. Best crack on then!

Thankfully the headache eased over the next few days but I don’t think my heart has had to work that hard for quite a while - carrying kit up & down the river to ensure we got every angle, every shot we wanted of our kayakers.

Our kayakers were amazing - Rush, Dave, Capo and last, but definitely not least, Sage. At only 14 years old and a type 1 diabetic, Sage was an incredibly inspirational young woman. She first got in a kayak age 3 and has been hooked ever since. She is currently a rising star in the white-water kayaking world. But at first she wasn’t so sure about taking on the big 30 foot falls along “Oh Be Joyful” creek, and I didn’t push her to do it - this was her decision to make, not mine. Day one she decided to watch the others, but next day she felt confident enough to give it a go, and she loved it! To see how chuffed she was with herself was just brilliant.

On our final day we lugged and set up a very heavy bit of kit called a jib, all the way up to the big falls. This was the only way to get a sense of what the falls were like for our kayakers and to do this section of the river justice as we weren’t allowed to use a drone.

From start to finish the shoot was physically tough, but I loved it, and it was completely worth it. Headache and all! I just won’t underestimate the effect of altitude on the human body again.