Keep It Glassy, Lake Nacimiento
Caty Tsu's shot of Nacimiento captures the calm, serene nature of the lake that can be seen regularly on early Fall mornings.
- Video assignment, see the completed project below
- I just want to swerve!
- A compromise with project requirements
The assignment was to create a 60-90 second video about a place pertaining to my blog. Not bad, right? Well it wasn’t, but not for the reasons you would probably expect.
As the video will illustrate, Lake Nacimiento is the single most important body of water for the Cal Poly Water Ski Team. I have been going there for the last five years I’ve been on the team, often times several days a week. This is a place I associate purely with water skiing. Many of my friends have been out a fraction of the hundreds of times I have been on that water, and they are astounded to hear I have only been out past the slalom course and back into the narrows a handful of outings. My first problem then, was to create a balanced picture of the lake itself and the culture around it in its entirety, not just as I generally see it. Well to be honest, I don’t think I did too great of a job on this point. Had I more time to film, I probably could have convinced a practice crew or two to abandon slalom skiing for the day and to explore the lake. If I could have convinced myself, that is.
My overwhelming desire to ski became another issue in itself. Between the time this project was assigned and today’s deadline, I went out to the lake five times. Yet I only managed about 45 minutes of footage, and most of this was simply shots from the boat of pass after pass that was more useful to the skier than to anyone looking on. Finally, on Veteran’s Day, we took out a large group and both the primary practice boat, and a second boat that was donated to the team and is equipped with a tower. For once I was actually more enthusiastic about filming than skiing or driving, as it gave us all a chance to watch our sport from a perspective we rarely get to see. Although I did not get to make a short surf- or snowboard-style water ski flick, as I would have liked to with this footage, I believe this video captures what Lake Nacimiento is all about, and why we all love it so much.
