I just got back from perhaps my biggest and best adventure yet! I have always wanted to visit the Mayan ruins, and this week I had the opportunity to do just that. I got hired to film/DP a chocolate commercial working with Kineto Pictures in Salt Lake. Travis Babcock was the director, and Jamison Dayton came as well, as a 1st Assistant Camera man, and PA, etc. It was a three man crew. They both spoke fluent Spanish, and I knew nothing of the language, which was quite funny because I had no idea what was going on half the time, and they had to constantly translate everything for me.
We also worked like crazy! We wanted to take advantage of our opportunity for being out there, so we would often wake up around 5 am, and go to bed at what seemed like 2 am, to catch the best lighting to film in, and do location scouting, and the crazy thing is, I honestly loved every minute of it!
We stayed at an amazing hotel right on the beach, all inclusive, with as many pina colodas as we could drink, we took advantage of that :) The entire commercial took place on the Mayan ruins and jungles, so I was in photography heaven for the whole week. We got access to many places most people don't have access to. And the places we didn't have access to, we found a way to get access to them :)
We had Mayan actors as well, recreate all these scenes of chocolate being made from a plant. They travel by canoe to deliver it to the Mayan King. The last day we had some free time, so we went to Tulum, and went swimming right below the Mayan pyramid. No one was hardly there at all because of the swine flu! I was loving every minute of it! And this is only the beginning :) I plan for film to take me all around the world, starting with Cancun :)
