Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Final SUN BOXES Shoot

Craig and I caught the 11:30am ferry out of Woods Hole, MA and headed for Martha’s Vineyard for one final shoot for the film INSTALL.  We’ve been at it for a couple years now, filming Craig’s installations throughout a scattered number of environments whenever our schedules allowed the two of us to be at the same place at the same time.  And here we’ve landed at the final shoot, a sunset shot at Philbin Beach on the southeastern shore of Martha’s Vineyard. 

We were looking for a place where we could film his solar-powered sound installation SUN BOXES with the sun setting over the ocean.  Seeing as we’ve been filming on the East Coast, an island was our best bet to capture what is typically a West Coast privilege.  We scouted locations at a number of beaches around the eastern side of the island before discovering Philbin Beach.  It’s a private beach for residents only, however, we were told by locals Craig’s van would not get towed or ticketed after 5pm.  So we arrived at 4:30, hung around the parking lot and waited until 5 before Craig, myself and a production assistant named Evie began hauling the boxes up through the sand dunes to the open beach on the other side.

This shoot was to bookend a sunrise shoot we had done back in June of 2011 at Cadillac Mountain in Maine, the first place in the country to see the sunrise every morning.  That particular shoot is what opens the film.  Craig scaling the rocky terrain of the mountainside at 3:30am donning a headlamp and setting up SUN BOXES against the colorful haze of the Sun’s light well before appearing over the horizon.  The sounds of the boxes come alive with the ascending Sun and the film INSTALL truly begins.  At sunset here on Philbin Beach we were hoping to capture the opposite experience, the sounds fading out with the disappearing sun, offering a physical representation of that threshold between day and night.  Although the result wasn’t quite what we were hoping for due to a band of clouds blanketing the horizon, we did manage to capture some great footage for the film and close out what has been a remarkable experience filming Craig’s work all over New England.