Scott Stoneback - Cameraman

Shooting on an aircraft carrier can be a world of opposites. Any one's first impression of the USS Ronald Reagan is that it is huge. The hangar bay is something like the size of three football fields. The deck is larger than some municipal airports. Five thousand sailors can live on board at once. There has got to be a ton of space to shoot, right?

Well, there are tons of spaces to shoot. However most of those spaces are crammed with people, bombs, planes, food, forklifts, beds, cables, wires, computers... you name it. The Naval ship designers did not have camera crews in mind when mapping out places to work (although the Navy did manage to squeeze the Reagan's fully functional television station into one room). All of which makes the ship seem very small for a camera crew.

For instance, there are passageways. To get anywhere on the Reagan, you have to walk seemingly miles of halls, ladders, and hatches. If you are over six feet tall, you are in constant danger of smacking your head on something metal protruding from above. Chris, one of the sound recordists, is about 6 foot, four inches. He hit his head daily... even though he walked hunched over with his head tilted to one side.

We were constantly fearful of tripping and dropping expensive camera gear. Every twenty feet, or so, there are hatch cut-outs that you must step through. The bottom edge is called a knee-knocker but really it should be called an ankle smasher or foot catcher. There are no direct paths from one spot to another. You have to wind your way up, over and around machinery rooms, dorms, reactors, kitchens, etc. Many paths involve ladders, which are steep stairwells. You walk down them facing forward, holding on with one hand and gripping camera gear tightly in the other. Over two weeks of this, I managed to only have one near fall down a ladder with gear. Somehow, I stayed upright and the $40,000 camera was unhurt. Just getting from one place to another, while carrying camera, lights, tripod, and sound gear can be the real journey.

Once you arrive in the place you are shooting, you must wedge yourself between equipment and walls to get what you need. There are few spaces where you can set up lights on stands or a tripod for steady camera shots. Indeed, as a cameraman, you are in the way of sailors doing what they need to do. There are few places to stand out of the way. In my opinion, this is a bonus to the viewer because the footage was immediate and close, with little of the distraction from production equipment. It was the ship, its sailors, and a camera.

Even if you found space to shoot there were logistical problems to overcome. A large issue is the secretive nature of an active military vessel. There are very photogenic rooms on the ship, which happen to be off-limits to cameras due to the sensitive nature of what happens inside. We were not allowed to go near the reactor spaces, partly due to safety and partly due to military secrets. Many times, there were armed guards standing at the entrances to those rooms.

Another logistical problem with shooting on the Reagan is the dangerous nature of what takes place on board. It is a massive ship and an active airport, all in one. The flight deck flings massive aircraft off the bow and catches those same aircraft off the stern. Around any corner is something that can severely injure or kill you. Jet engines, hydraulic hatches, propellers, heat, fire, cabling, fuel... all potential hazards. Those running the ship made us very aware that we followed their rules, at all times, no exceptions. When we were ten feet from an f-18 launching off the deck, we paid attention.

The challenge of shooting on the Reagan was formidable. We constantly had to adapt on the fly to our surroundings. Many times, we would be told that we have five minutes to go to some area on the ship to get our shots and be done. We would hustle out to a spot, say out at the end of a catapult, shoot five aircraft launching, literally, overhead, and be pulled back in to a safer area below deck. It was a rush.

We had two weeks on the ship. We slept in tight sailor's quarters. We ate the same food, from the same mess, three times a day. We awoke to the daily pounding of aircraft landing on the deck, seemingly directly above our heads. Our hands were calloused from carrying gear miles and miles around the ship. Still, I am sure, all of us would gladly go back and do it all over again.