The Making of Without Bound

I've received a handful of questions about how we made Without Bound and I think the answer deserves a blog post. Here we go!

I'll start with the budget. We travelled 4500 miles, burning approximately 150 gallons of fuel at an average cost of $3.50 per gallon. During the 14 day trip, most nights we either slept in the car in parking lots or tent camped on public land.  We also stayed at developed campsites with shower facilities six nights costing an average of $15 per night. Here are the numbers:

Fuel $525

Campsite Fees $90

Total Budget = $615

Fueling up in southern California. 2012

Fueling up in southern California. 2012

Next: the cameras. We used two Canon T2i DSLR's while sharing three lenses, a Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS II, a Canon EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 III Telephoto Zoom and a Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II. I've owned my T2i since 2010 and it's still going strong. I'm amazed by how well such a plastic device has held up to heavy use. The T2i was discontinued in 2012 so the current equivalent is the Canon T5i.

For lighting, we used what the environment gave us, and paid dearly for it.  There were lots of situations that really needed lighting but I only owned hot lights and knew that access to power would be either extremely limited or nonexistent. As a result, we ended up with a lot of noisy, underexposed shots that had to be boosted significantly in post.

Audio was recorded with a Tascam DR-40 field recorder. I love this recorder but we did have a few problems. On the first day in Bob's camp, I accidentally over-torqued the headphone jack, broke the solder and was left unable to monitor in-ear. For the remainder of the trip we relied solely on the meters which was very unsettling. We were also using a DIY windscreen for the DR-40 which worked well for the most part. In a handful of shots with heavy wind gusts we got some rumble but didn't realize it because we weren't monitoring in-ear. 

All post-production was completed using Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects and Audition on a Mid-2010 MacBook Pro.

That was a very brief overview but I am happy to answer any other questions. Please feel free to ask in the comments or send me an email to michael@michaeltubbs.com

Thanks!