Dramatic recreation on a budget

When we first got involved with working on this documentary over a year ago, we found out about the story of a warden (Kyle Kroll) working a marijuana grove eradication who got shot. The bullet went through both his legs, and he was starting to lose a lot of blood before other wardens got to him. The incredible part of the story is that the helicopter that was supposed to come pick Kyle and his buddies up didn't come for three hours, and it only came in after one of the other wardens (Adam Kavanaugh) cut a landing strip out of the surrounding brush using a machete.

When it came around to telling this story, we joked about doing a huge recreation on a Michael Bay scale. Obviously, we didn't have the money to do anything close to this. However, as it came time for the documentary to be finished, we found that we really needed some sort of visual sequence to help tell the warden's story. One of the wardens who helped save Kyle's life (John Norres) had been offering to help us do a recreation for months, so we decided to go ahead and shoot something. Our limitations were somewhat daunting:

• We couldn't use any marijuana plants.
• We could only get one warden (John).
• We couldn't pay anybody anything.

So we did what all independent film/video people do in this situation: we improvised. We got two friends to come out, and ended up with enough people to play all the wardens and one very cool guy (Paul Rubio) to play both growers. We found a place that had similar foliage, dressed up two guys in wardens outfits, and had two outfits (with guns) for the guy playing the growers.

The final product is still a few weeks away, but here's a taste of the most elaborate trick we used.

There were three wardens working on the eradication, and we realized we only had two guns. We could have just cut the scene around this, but I figured we needed at least one shot of all the wardens together. So, we tried a composite shot; first I shot John and Ryan (one of our actors) walking on the right side of the screen. Then, I shot James (CEO of Snow Goose Productions) on the left side. After the shoot was done, I put the shots together by simply splitting the image of both clips in half and putting them together to form one image:


Warden Doc Dramatic Re-enactment composite demo from Andrew Swan on Vimeo.

We ended up shooting the whole sequence in about 4 hours, and we had a lot of fun doing it. Sometimes you have some bad days shooting documentaries, but this was definitely not one of them.

The cast:




- Andrew