My call from LA stunt coordinator Ray Anders was to ask if I would appear on a TV show called The John Newcombe Show, hosted by one of the top tennis players at the time, John Newcombe. He wanted me to catch arrows in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. I said I’d give it a try.
It was an overcast day. It had rained recently so the ground was damp and a bit muddy in spots.
The place they had set off for me to catch was among the trees. My archer was to shoot from under another tree, around 45 feet away. The arrow would have to travel across an open, significantly brighter section of lawn before passing under another tree, where I was to make the catch.
Had they asked me to do this later on, when I had more experienced with such things, I would have told them no or made them move to a different location. But I was new and thrilled about the prospect of appearing on a national show, albeit a minor one.
The problem with the site was the arrow went from shadow into light and back into shadow again. Our eyes are marvelous things that can make many amazing adjustments. But tracking something moving rapidly from dark to light to dark again isn’t one of them. Our irises can’t open and close that quickly, leaving either the darker or the lighter sections harder to see. As it turned out, the lighter section dominated everything, like trying to shoot a photo of someone indoors with bright sunlight flooding in from a window behind them. The image of the person will appear very dark.
The same occurred here. I always focused on the tip as, to intercept one, my hand had to start its movement the instant the arrow started forward. Apparently, I would subconsciously calculate an arrow’s trajectory based on the angle of the shaft as it left the bow. This would direct my hand upwards or downwards, or whatever, to be in a position to intercept it.
Here, the arrow started in relative darkness, making it almost impossible for me to see its tip. So I was behind right out of the gate. When it crossed the open patch, I could track it easily. But then, it went dark again just before it got to me and I had to try to intercept it based solely on its trajectory and speed within the middle section. Making things even worse, I was standing in mud and my footing was not great.
In spite of all that, I managed to catch one for them. But it wasn’t as clean a performance as I would have liked. In the end, I think I only managed to grab about one out of every ten shots, as I had done the first day on the beach.
Turned out, this was significant. Ray asked if it was possible to increase my catch rate. They were shooting in film in those days. So it was very expensive to shoot high speed film on all those misses. That became my focus and forced me to change the way in which I caught.
I’ll talk about that next time and the surprise I got when appearing on my next show.
No comments:
Post a Comment