Every shot a gamble
Waiting for the right weather and light is a regular part of life for filmmakers, but shooting from the air posed special challenges. Every retake required the helicopter to return to the starting point of its flightpath. There were even cases where insects hitting the camera required midflight returns to the airport to clean the lens.
Likewise, when shooting under water, you have to wait for the right sea conditions. Just because there are no waves on the surface doesn’t mean that it’s peaceful underneath. Those shots of close encounters with schools of fish, corals and turtles are the result of three days of hard work from the team.
Being at the mercy of the weather is part and parcel of filmmaking, especially when it comes to aerial photography. The crew recall that when they wanted to capture the Mazu pilgrimage procession as it crossed the Xiluo Bridge, it was raining constantly, so the question was: “To fly or not to fly?” Nobody had the courage to take the risk until Andrew Wang said, “Let’s do it!” Perhaps through the intervention of the deity herself, the rain suddenly stopped for the last hour of daylight and the filming went smoothly. “Every time we went up to shoot, it was a gamble,” says Wang.
To add a little human interest to Taiwan’s majestic mountain scenery, two members of the crew hiked to the area around Mt. Dabajian and Mt. Xiaobajian. The production team’s Su Ren-hong and Liao Chien-hung were the “lucky ones” who got the assignment. Neither of them had much previous hiking experience, so they simply steeled themselves to the hardship and pressed onwards and upwards. Their journey started from the Guanwu National Forest Recreation Area in Hsinchu County, and the trek up and back took a full seven days. In the mountains their cellphones had no signal, and their only means of communication was a satellite phone. Unexpectedly, the low temperatures on the slopes caused the phone’s screen to go black as the rest of the team was awaiting their report to decide whether the next day’s film shoot could proceed. When they finally managed to get a call through, they begged executive producer Su Tsung-tsung, “Please do shoot tomorrow! We bust a gut to get up here, and we can’t do it again!” Liao Chien-hung and Su Ren-hong thus recall how capturing just a few seconds of footage of two small figures on a mountain ridge waving to a helicopter required so much preparation and support. As Ling Chen says, “Simply put, you’ll only succeed if you’re in the right place at the right time.”
As the crew discuss their experiences—both the bitter and the sweet—they only laugh about their personal hardships. But in their constant quest for high-quality footage, they always wanted to include even more images of Taiwan’s beauty. Chen lists some of her regrets: “It was a shame we missed the sweetgums turning red in Smangus. That year the weather was strange. A landslip took the road out the day before we wanted to go up the mountain. Then there were the shimmering ‘blue tears’ of bioluminescent algae in the sea around Matsu, which we missed due to difficulties involving nighttime shooting on the outer islands. And there was that time we flew to Jiaming Lake and the water level was too low, plus the area was closed to visitors….”
At the end of the show, some audience members remarked on how moved they were when they saw their hometowns, the source of so many personal memories, filmed beautifully from vantage points they had never seen before. “I’m gratified that the entire film, from the filming equipment and the i-Ride hardware, to the music, to the postproduction and editing, was ‘made in Taiwan.’ It really inspires pride.” Su Tsung-tsung points out that regardless of how hard it was to shoot, it is a work by children of Taiwan, and Taiwan can take pride in it.
The i-Ride crew went up into the sky and down into the ocean, coping with all kinds of weather and terrain, to shoot moving footage of their homeland.
Take flight with i-Ride to get a bird’s-eye view of Taiwan’s stunning beauty.