January 13, 2009 by mountainriverjournal
So the boys have finally coughed up the goods. Day 1 of the epic trip from our colleagues and friends Brian Wise and Matt Tucker. Four days, over 1000 miles, and 20 Missouri trout streams. We hope you enjoy as much as we do.
Go to the full report here Day One
AND NOW
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Hey there Journal!
Youtube is giving us fits trying to upload the video for Day 4…it’ll happen though…oh yes, it’ll happen.
Gday mate, looks like you guys had a blast.
What were your highlights/lowlights, give us a summary
The highlight of the trip was the WIDE variety of water that we got to fish. From having to sneak streamside to cast on the wild trout streams to the bigger sized streams like the Niangua. We saw a ton of different water. The people that only fish the Missouri trout parks do not know what they are missing.
The lowlights were not stopping at a single strip club. Personally, I was at a loss for this (especially since we drove past Big Louie’s several times). Perhaps with better time management. I was a little disappointed we didn’t catch any serious hogs, although we did hook a few.
While we had been “talking” about this trip for about a year, it originally started out as just fishing the streams along Hwy 63 over a weekend. Well, it “evolved” if you will. We were scheduled to do this over Christmas break, but I kinda called out Mr. Wise on the phone at the beginning of November and said “Fuck the planning, lets get this thing done.” and like that it was on. The rest is in the can.
–tucker
I like this impropmtu “interview” on the blog…nice idea Mr. Dally.
The biggest highlight for me was pretty much just actually getting done. Like Tucker said, we didn’t want to plan too much on this trip, I think we have actually planned a little more for a weekend of fishing on the White than we did for this trip. This is how the planning went:
Tucker: “I got the mac and cheese”
Brian: “Sweet”
In all seriousness though, it started out as one of those Balls to the Wall trips just to say we did it but it turned out that we probably appreciate what Missouri has a little (LOT) more than we did before.
Lowlights, finding out that hedgeapples make a nice garnish, losing the fish of the trip and then watching it be caught by someone else (at least he is a cool guy), and taking the waders off on day four.
I’ve said it a lot but it was a ton of fun.
Brian
I think taking the waders off would have been an adventure in its own right _ hope you gave yourself plenty of personal space.
The whole tale is definately worth telling, right from the failure to get your original camera (though this might not be publishable for legal reasons) but it kind of set the tone for me. Can I suggest This Is Fly or Catches.
But back to the interview:
Who did get to drive the stereo and what was the music of choice?
Which of the rivers are really worth fishing?
After part 4 _ are you doing a bloopers reel?
Is Tucker’s next project 100 Missouri Strip Clubs or is this a rumor?
Who had the first dummy spit (temper tantrum)?
Now some serious questions, we have seen some You Tube shorts from you Brian, not sure about Matt. But this project was a step up towards a real film. I would think might might even be able to cut a 5 minute film for the Drake film awards etc. I’d love to see more guys in this area take it on, we have great fishing, great scenery and plenty of smarts.
So as inspiration for those following in your footsteps.
What did you learn, first about making a “film” as opposed to a short?
What do you really need in terms of camera gear and other equipment?
I know you had editing problems Brian would you stick with Windows Movie Maker or is it worth buying editing software.
Any other suggestions?
The stereo was a funny thing. My FM modulator broke, so that rendered my MP3 player useless. The music of choice for the trip was pretty varried and ranged anywhere from Javier Mendoza (a local stl favorite) to Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson to the likes of Sublime, Dave Mathews, AC/DC, Audioslave, Ben Harper, Metalica, Stone Temple Pilots, and I think there was even some old school rap at one point in time (I am a sucka for Notorious BIG and NWA).
For me, all the rivers offered a little something — with the exception of Hickory Creek (if it was running through my town I would fish it, but probably won’t travel down there to see it again). The Niangua is a really cool river. I want a rematch on Crane Creek and Roaring River for sure. Capps Creek I want to head back to, but more for photography reasons. The 11pt and NFOW are just super gorgeous rivers. Blue Spring Creek is about as tiny as they come (smaller than some smoky mountain streams i have fished). It all depends upon what you are looking for. For big fish, I would check out the Current, the 11pt, the NFOW, Taneycomo, and Roaring River State Park.
There may be a blooper reel…….
The problem with doing 100 Missouri Strip Clubs, is I don’t think Missouri really has them. Unfortunately I am really only familiar with a handful of Missouri clubs. The reason is that I have found, in my travelings, that very few clubs compare to those of my home region of East St. Louis, Illinois. I will soon be offering guided tours of those places to the fly fishing community though.
Temper Tantrums……it was wierd, we traveled well enough together that something like this will at least be an annual thing.
The videos that are currently up are totally Mr. Wise’s editing skills.
I think both of us learned a great deal from this, enough that we want to do it again with more focus on the videography and camera shots and a potential submission. We got caught up in the fishing, plain and simple (which isnt right or wrong, but there were alot of things that should have been caught on tape but we were both fishing and the cameras were in thier packs on the ground)..
To effectively do something like this, you need to have at least one person (preferably two) rolling video the entire time. You also want to capture the still images, so you need to be snapping stills as well. We were kind of screwed, as the original camera we were going to use was not available so we only had one HD camera and then we also shot video with our point and shoot digitals.
You also need to have the right gear. Wide angle lenses, polarized filters, and video tripods are required, not optional when trying to shoot fishing stuff. We found ourselves running out of battery quite often on the river, so I have ordered an additional battery (that gives me 3 batteries for my HD camcorder) and will probably pick another one up on ebay in the future.
The camcorder we were using was a JVC Everio HD3 that is a high def camcorder that records to a 60gig hard drive. We would have to empty the hard drive every night and that required us to bring at least one laptop and ensure we had some form of standard 110 power (we did in the car through the use of a power inverter) to charge the camera as well as transer the video to the laptop.
The camera was new to me and I had really only ran it a couple of times before, so I found myself babying the camera. We should have rolled alot more film, but becasue of the snow / rain we left it in the rig. This proved to be a big mistake, and we should have brought it out to use then with a trashbag cover or something.
With regards to editing the videos that are up currently, I will let Brian answer those as the current clips are entirely his except for my musical suggestions in a couple of places.
I do know that video editing requires A LOT of computing power and time, so be sure to have both. The software that Brian ended up using is the same software that I use — Cyberlink PowerDirector. It is a consumer package, but pretty easy to use and pretty cheap. Personally I like it better than windows movie maker, because it handles a whole bunch of file types and can save as pretty much any type of movie file. I don’t have much experience with windows movie maker though.
With regards to any other suggestions, just get out there and have fun. If it seems like work, you won’t enjoy it and ALWAYS shoot off a tripod.
–Matt Tucker
Matt, seriously thank you for taking the time to answer these. I appreciate it and Im sure others will too.
Guys take the time to check out Matt’s site http://www.ozarkchronicles.com/
and Brian’s Blog http://flyfishmo.wordpress.com/.
You can ask them more questions either here on on their own pages.
Thanks mate and we wait for Brian’s comments.
The stereo worked out really well and there were no fights to speak of over what we were going to listen to. Unfortunately Tucker’s cd player won’t exept mp3’s because I had brought all of the Celebrity Jeopardy skits from SNL.
Alex Trebeck(as played by Will Ferrell): “Let’s see what Sean Connery wrote…”Below”, well technically that is a correct answer, lets see what you wagered… “Me”….”Below Me” “Belowme” I don’t get it
Sean Connery (as played by Darrell Hammond): Oh I bet you do you Canadian Ponce!”
Rivers I am looking forward to are, like Tucker said, the Niangua. For some reason I still have such a draw to that place. Crane Creek is probably the most special stream in Missouri, the rainbows are PURE McCloud Strain…pure! The Little Piney as well.
A blooper reel is in the works and could be up as early as late this weekend…maybe. I may get kicked off of youtube for uploading it as it will for sure be rated R+ but it should be good.
A dummy spit? Dally, you have to quit using these foreign phrases, I almost took offense and challenged you to a game of rugby! For real though, I think I had the first temper tantrum. It isn’t everyday that you hear that a fly fisherman probably scared spin fisherman–it’s usually the other way around. But we were fishing the Little Piney and I had hooked but lost 2 fish real quick (the first lost fish you laugh at, the second you kind of cuss under your breath) and then I hooked a nice fish–and lost it. Dropped a couple of words to see the spin fisherman just downstream of me looking at me like I had just had a dummy spit.
Wow, what did I learn about video and photography? I can pretty much thank Tucker for getting me into still photography. So I think both of us have a special appreciation for stills, for me a lot of the video was shot to lead up to the taking of a still.
This video as compared to a short is pretty hard to really tell that much of a difference. When you start doing these videos I think no matter the length (even if it is a slideshow) you literally “see” the video take shape as it is being shot. I knew almost exactly how Day One was going to take shape while we were shooting it. Of course there is some tweaking and general stuff that you end up doing but it is funny how it works like that. I think for any kind of video you have to know you are going to make a video of what you are planning on doing before you go for it to really make sense or be as “cool” as you want it to be.
Equipment-wise I think you would be suprised what you can do with some pretty low-end stuff. I shot a video of my 5 year old on Dry Run Creek (again I knew I was going to do a video of it)and it was completely done with an Olympus Stylus 850SW…a point and shoot digital camera and I am super happy with the quality especially on youtube. For quality footage that you would want to show other people Tucker hit is right on the head, wide-angle stuff, I want to do some Fish-Eye stuff, tripods-tripods-tripods-shoot off of a tripod! There is something to be said for some handheld shots as long as the person doing that can do it with an “effect” of handheld instead of it moving all over (much like the Day One video when Tucker re-caught that fish…I suck) Be creative, and it’s all about the angles.
It is kind of funny, I don’t want to say too much here but we only had a couple of staged shots we wanted to get for the video camera. We talked about leading into the video with a gasoline lit bonfire (explosionesque) in complete darkness. We saw a stream of gasoline being lit and quickly making its way to a puddle of gasoline that lit the bonfire..How cool would have been!?!?! Tucker brought Charcoal lighter fluid stuff, I was stoked and started squirting that stuff all over the firewood, then I made a little stream of it that led away. We only had a lighter so I stepped up to light it and……..wait for it………….nothing. Have you ever seen lighter fluid that would not CATCH ON FIRE??
Editing software was a HUGE pain with this video. I am a big fan of Windows Movie Maker, when it works. And actually it is what I edited the “Trailer” with. I have a bunch of plug-ins for it and there are plenty of free plug-ins that can be downloaded online to help the looks of a slideshow or video. But WMM all but died on me when I started trying to edit all of this HD video. I went through 3 or 4 programs trying to find one that was good but still easy to use and Powerdirector turned out to be it, thanks to Tucker.
I am no good at finding music for videos and I’ll leave it at that.
Hindsight being 20/20, next time we will have a lot more to work with–and the fish are always going to be there….and if they are not we may have to invade Arkansas.
I am done now.