Every Bend in the River Filmed For Posterity

copywritten for RED

The desert, river, canyons and teaming wildlife along the U.S.-Mexican border are filmed as spectacularly as in any blue-chip travelogue, but the scenic beauty of The River and the Wall belies an urgent political message. The 1,200-mile journey undertaken by filmmaker and conservationist Ben Masters explores how a border wall would affect wildlife, immigration, security, landowners, and public lands.

https://www.red.com/stories/ben-masters-the-river

With four friends, including ornithologist Heather Mackey, river guide Austin Alvarado, conservationist Jay Kleberg, and NatGeo explorer Filipe DeAndrade, Masters spent three months (late 2017 to early 2018) following the Rio Grande from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico with the intent of capturing the landscape for posterity.

“In 2016, when Donald Trump was talking about building this wall, we didn’t know how much border wall would be built,” Masters explains. “We wanted the film to be a historical archive of what the border looked like at that time and to show what building a continuous wall would actually have to go through and over. The wall is controversial and our idea was to contribute to the discussion. People’s understanding has changed over time as they realized that building a wall across these massive canyons was not only crazy, it wouldn’t achieve what they wanted it to.”

Masters is producer, director and cinematographer on documentary shorts including 5,000 Miles of Wild and Horse Rich & Dirt Poor through his company Fin & Fur Films.

“I always shoot with RED cameras but in this case what we wanted to do was capture the landscape in a format that would stand the test of time,” the filmmaker explains. “That’s why we chose the HELIUM sensor and the DSMC2 brain. We were going to film landscapes that might not be possible to film in 10 years because there’s a wall built through it.

“I wanted to shoot 8K to futureproof the visuals. I’m not looking 5 to 10 years ahead but 50 to 100 years down the line. We had historical archive in mind knowing that some of the images might never look the same again.”

Masters was joined on the journey by a rotating crew of cinematographers including Phillip Baribeau and John Aldrich. With DSMC2 HELIUM as the A camera paired with Sigma Art primes, they traveled by canoe, horse, and bicycle.

“I’d like to say we didn’t abuse the camera … but we pretty much abused it,” he says. “We ran rapids. We got them wet. We played with them in the snow. They got covered in ice and all sorts of dust. Those cameras are pretty tough.

“We also mounted the RED in a helicopter and shot some aerial sequences stabilized in DaVinci Resolve. It looks like it was shot with Cineflex, but we didn’t have to pay $500,000 to do it.”

The native Texan native had explored dozens of miles of the border area before, but says he was shocked to find how quite dramatic the landscape was even in his home state. He notes, “I’ve spent a lot of my life on the U.S.-Mexico border, but it is just astonishing how remote and rugged and steep the canyons are. Hundreds of miles of vertical cliffs and magical rock formations populated with diverse wildlife species.”

Masters continues, “The border itself follows the Rio Grande. At the beginning of our journey, much of the region through which the river flow is rugged, arid, and desolate. Isolated mountain ranges soar 6,000 feet out of the desert floor with sides covered with trees. Once you leave canyon country and head closer to the gulf, the desert starts to get more tropical. The ecosystem is characterized by extremely dense trees, brush and palm with an incredible diversity of birdlife.”

The trip was followed by b-roll and interviews with politicians and border law enforcement – both Republican and Democrat – over the following six months. Some 60TB of REDCODE RAW was edited in Resolve and finished at 4K for a feature length documentary that premiered at the SXSW Film Festival where it earned the award for Best Texan Film.

“The HELIUM sensor delivers such a beautiful image and 8K gives you so much to work with in post,” says Masters. “You can punch in and stabilize shots and it’s just a really handy camera to have when you only have one. For example, you can shoot interviews then punch into the 8K and generate another angle from that single shot.”

He adds, “I would love to have made this film just about the beauty of the landscape and the wildlife but our politics has an impact on the natural world. Unfortunately, it’s kind of hard to separate the human impact from the world we live in so we have to incorporate people and current events.

“I felt The River and the Wall was a new way to look at a controversial topic.”

Masters is currently shooting a feature-length wildlife documentary that is a love letter to Texas. “Deep in the Heart interweaves the human component of wildlife conservation more than a traditional blue-chip natural history film,” says Masters. “Some of the species included are bears, mountain lions, alligators, bison, and never before seen footage of ocelots.” 

Deep in the Heart will be completed in 2022.