I recently completed the most dramatic piece I've ever been involved with. A climber takes a huge fall during an ice climbing expedition on some New England ice.

Write up on vimeo. Comments/feedback appreciated!

Fall. on Vimeo

It's real. It's intense.

Jerry:

Emotional, intense, beautiful, heartwarming. OMG... what a beautiful film. I don't know if l was just in the mood, but, this film just smashed me in the face with raw feelings. Thank you for sharing this !!

Thanks, Chris. I relish your description. I knew it was those things for me and for friends, which makes it worth the effort, but it's hard to predict how parties removed from it all would take it. It was difficult to put this one together being so tangled up in it. Feels right, though, to me.

Nice film with an interesting storyline. Well worth watching.

I think it would have been even more powerful if it were much shorter and edited tighter. The amount of handheld shaky stuff and jumpy pans, and crash-zooms began to annoy me though... :)

Thanks, Tony. Normally crash/pan zip and zoom stay home. It wasn't intentional; it's just what the camera was doing at that moment, which was relevant to the story. Normally I would edit around all that, but here I use it to show a variety of emotion that I'm going through as the shooter or it's relevant to a comment someone makes.

Tough to smooth out being so real. Right after he hits, I'm still stuck at 70mm. Hated that. Thought about it; did eventually switch lenses, but it was just too tricky a spot to be on a tripod for those few moments. Of course, the iPhone is impossible to hold steady; opening shot; car...

Not sure what to cut given the range of emotion that's in here. Boy, the climbing community would cut some, though. Thanks for commenting.

I didn't of course mean the actual fall clips, because that footage relates to the actual moments of the accident so does not need to be cut - plus it adds tension and reality to the film and can be left in.
I meant some of the footage filmed either side of the incident; in that I'd be tempted to edit out short sections of those clips.

I hear you; this is such rare footage, that it probably needs to be in there; it's getting an appropriately heavy amount of analysis; frame by frame stuff, with screen grabs coming out; so for what it's worth, I felt it had to be more long than short? Ah, whaddo I really know...