Norfolk Southern dir. by Simon Stock
It’s been a while since I shot these spots for Norfolk Southern Railroad. We shot in August and September in Roanoke VA and the Virginia Beach/Norfolk Area. One of the coolest parts of this job was shooting the trains themselves. Simon Stock, a prestigious British still photographer, was directing for Moxie Pictures. Simon often shoots big automotive print and tv ads and wanted to bring that approach to filming the trains. Working with the railroad, we came up with one of the coolest rigs I’ve done in a while. In order to get movement traveling alongside the train we used the railroad’s hi-rail Suburban trucks which travel on the rails for maintenance crews. Where it got really interesting was we wanted to have both lateral and height adjustment as well as have dynamic shots with movement around the train. So we brought in a Russian Arm from Florida and strapped that to the top of the hi-rail. It was the safest option by far, keeping all the operators inside the vehicle. It used a stabilized head, had a huge range all around the hi-rail, including being able to extend across to be in front of the train traveling on the parallel track. We took full advantage of the Russian Arm, using it for static based, off the track crane shots, and car to car. It was great. We made many passes shooting car to train leading the brand new NS engine and cars through a beautiful area called Solitude. It was made famous by photographer O. Winston Link, now a favorite of mine. We visited his museum when we stayed in Roanoke, VA at the coolest hotel. It was right across the street! He was obsessed with photographing trains and the Norfolk and Western line was one of the last using steam locomotives and he wanted to document them. The railroad encouraged and helped him, even though he financed the project himself. One cool person I met while on the job was Casey, a Norfolk Southern photographer. He is a young guy who just had moved to Roanoke to start the job as a photographer. Prior to that he had been an engineer on the trains. He shot photos of the trains as a hobby and was really good. His photos always were in the NS calendar and I think he was basically living his dream, shooting photos for the railroad. Really cool guy. He introduced us to some great locations, including pointing out Solitude and a beautiful bridge where we did helicopter shots. His knowledge of both photography and how the railroad operated was indispensable. Another character we met there was Tim Shepard, or “Shep”. He was a local location scout in Roanoke and a true character. He’s an artist and here’s a little taste of him on the news.
Our shoot was dangerous. We were in full on safety gear wherever we went, which was fun. I like steel toes. Many of our locations were insanely dangerous for visitors, like the Steel Dynamics steel foundry. It was so beautiful to shoot in, but step in the wrong place at the wrong time and you get mowed down by a front end loader carrying glowing hot slag. We shot from a pickup truck at the Port of Norfolk which was terrifying. There's the hugest, craziest moving loader trucks called Peiner Cranes that are looking for a bunch of dudes with a camera going slow around the ships. At one point I hung out of a helicopter with a Tyler side mount. We also shot in the Stihl factory in Norfolk where if you weren’t careful you could get run over by autonomous robotic forklifts. It was a fun job. I so wish they had longer cuts with more of the dynamic train footage, but here they are followed by some photos of the rig and a BTS video that NS made while we shot.
http://www.scotthenriksen.com/reel/norfolk_southern_connects
http://www.scotthenriksen.com/reel/norfolk_southern_engine
