Be Prepared (or, When Boy Scouts Go to India) Part 1

Aaron is (and I say this without an ounce of sarcasm) a multi-talented guy with an encyclopedic knowledge of a few specific topics. He knows more than I ever will about the technical aspects of film production, video editing, photography, and all the associated equipment, accessories, and software. I've watched him shoot video. I've watched him edit. I've watched him direct. The boy knows his stuff. So it's good that he was hired to make the India video, because that also means he did the bulk of the planning (and that I was merely his lowly production assistant, utterly terrified of making mistakes lest it reflect poorly on him).

He's also a lifelong Boy Scout with a penchant for order, a finesse for organization, and an intense (almost supernatural) knack for spatial relations. If he can't afford it, he finds a way to get it cheaper, or crafts a substitute, MacGyver-style. The hamster wheel of his brain runs at a decidedly different speed from my own, all of which helped him PREPARE like a boss.

Equipment

For the past few months, Aaron has been holed up in his office researching everything we might possibly need for making the video in India and considering all kinds of obstacles, problems and full-on disasters. How do you account for the difference in the electricity? Would we need shooting permits? What if we bought all this equipment and schlepped it to India, only to have our baggage lost/stolen/damaged or seized by Customs? Would bribes be necessary? Would we be able to rent and/or buy anything we weren't able to bring?

Aaron looked at a lot of websites, some with grim accounts of what happened to the ill-prepared. He researched the CARNET, which is basically third-party yet "official" documentation for importing certain kinds of equipment into a foreign country which would hopefully prevent a Customs seizure. He e-mailed people who had done video productions in India (although it was hard to find anything but huge film crews with multi-million-dollar budgets). He called people and corporations (also Republican for "people") asking for advice and help. He got very, very frustrated. We had some lively discussions (and a few screaming arguments) about the whole thing.

He bought two DSLRs, an LED light panel, two tripods, an iPad, a laptop, hard drives, a battery charger, a power adapter, an audio recorder, microphones, a remote timer, a slider...and that's just what I can remember. He also bought cables, cords and various accessories. And hard Pelican cases for everything.

Documentation

A big issue was getting the right kind of VISA that would allow us to enter the country with our equipment but without drawing undue attention to ourselves. Aaron spent a lot of time on the phone with two different VISA companies (and India outsources its VISA process to a third-party company!) as well as the Consulate. We had letters of invitation from the Andhra Pradesh Productivity Council.

Were we going on Business? Well, kind of. There would be meetings. We were going as Aaron's video production company. Would an Employment VISA be more appropriate? We would be paid for our work, but not by an Indian company. With our equipment, would we qualify as Journalists? No one could give us a straight answer, and sometimes we got conflicting answers between an organization's website and the customer service representatives we called for clarification. We spent a lot of time on hold. We spent a lot of money on applications, shipping, photocopies, and money orders.

We each ended up with a Tourist VISA, which meant we couldn't safely take more equipment than the average American tourist would. We were probably being paranoid, but thousands of dollars of equipment being seized by Customs is nothing to joke about--especially when that would mean scrambling to rent/buy what we needed in a foreign country where we had few contacts, and with our already-strained finances.

We also had to renew our passports, during which I learned the hard way that CVS takes horrible passport photos. Too bad I was already at the post office, ready to mail my application, when I noticed and I didn't want to go complain because I needed to get my application sent before the Thanksgiving holiday. Walgreens takes much nicer photos for the same price, so we did our VISA photos there.