:: Windfall Films ::

MONSTER MOVES : BEHIND THE SCENES
THE STEEPLECHASE

The invasion began at 5am. Thirty crew, a fifty-strong choir, four cranes, two tractors, five quad bikes, and a fleet of pick up trucks crammed with ten camera kits congregated in the car park of Trinity church in Lincoln, Iowa. We hadn’t pitched up for morning service. “That truck is going to pull that church across the prairies?” exclaimed a bewildered cameraman “Yes”, I replied. “And our mission is to chase it.” Welcome to the bizarre world of moving buildings.

Trinity Lutheran Church, topped with a 100ft steeple, was set to embark on an epic twelve-mile journey. Over the years, its congregation had dwindled from 250 to just 13. So the parishioners had raised the funds to move it to a town with more worshippers. With a truck on the front and sixty wheels underneath, ‘house mover’ Ron Holland boasted that the church could reach a top speed of 10mph. Filming its journey would be one almighty steeplechase.

Trinity was one of eight unwieldy structures ranging from houses to whole towns whose relocation we were charting for the second series of Monster Moves. A chance meeting with a seasoned ‘shack dragger’ a few years ago led to the series idea. Over beer, he showed me startling pictures of mansions, hotels and lighthouses on wheels. He also told me how he’d lost the hair off the back of his head when the roof of a house he was ‘riding’ careered into live power lines. The prospects of hanging out with these guys filled me with fascination and fear.

Each film inter-cuts the daredevil exploits of two teams hauling two huge structures. Realtime footage of these showmen in action provides the drama, CGI illustrates the engineering problems they must solve, while timelapse photography of the buildings in motion offers eye-catching imagery.

We lived alongside the teams as they spent months preparing each structure for the road, capturing the daily dramas on Sony Z1 cameras. The most frightening incident involved a runaway crane. A Canadian team had called in the 40-ton machine to pull apart a house that they had cut into four pieces to move. As we filmed the crane arrive, its brakes failed. It careered downhill through town, crashing through telegraph posts and only coming to halt after hurtling into a railway bridge. Luckily no one was killed, but it was a chilling reminder of the hazards we faced.

The most challenging shoots were the moving days themselves. And no move this series was more complicated than filming the journey of Trinity Church.

Ron warned us that the church would rarely stop and could not go backwards. So there would be no respite or second takes. We had spent four weeks capturing exciting material of the team preparing the building for the road. But we still needed enough material from Trinity’s actual trek to sustain twenty minutes of the film.

I recced the route more than twenty times with my Assistant Producer Bettina Truemper and Researcher Alex Tate. Each time we’d spot more problems. How could the actuality crews shoot and walk non-stop for twelve miles in the summer heat? To convey the scale of the church, the timelapse crews needed to shoot above and away from the road in high cranes. But the surrounding fields were boggy. And with the church blocking the road, how would our cranes leapfrog from one spot to the next?

We spent four weeks in our motel planning the move shoot itself. Some quick maths told us we’d need a minimum of six HD timelapse crews and four Z1 actuality units to track our moving target. With the help of locals in Manning, we commandeered cranes, trucks and tractors to put our timalapse camera crews in so they could shoot the move above ground level. We drew countless maps of diversion routes to work out how each camera crew would get from one spot to another to film the church as it moved, blocking the road.

Alex spent the best part of two days making colour coded flags to plant in fields so each crew could locate their shooting spots. With runners on quad bikes to shuttle batteries, stock, food and water, and spare tractors on standby to rescue any stricken cranes, the race began.

The church moved down off its perch at a snail’s pace. Everyone feared that the steeple would topple. But once on the road it hit 8mph. “They’re moving too fast, we’re screwed”, radioed fellow producer Jamie Lochhead, struggling to keep up with the action at the rear of the church. The crane crews would never make it to all their spots in time.

Fortunately the building ground to a halt at the foot of a steep hill. Ron’s team went to find a tractor for extra pulling power. We caught our breath and the cranes lumbered across the fields to their next position. Negotiating the church around tight corners and over bridges took the rest of the day and provided us with strong material.

Our final challenge stood waiting near the finishing line. To mark the church’s arrival into Manning, the local choir had collaborated with our musician Dan Pemberton to compose a special song, ‘Here It Comes’.

Led by their fearless conductor Helen Weisse, we had rehearsed the song several times with the choir marching around a car park. With her music stand gaffer taped into the back of a pick up truck, she roused the choir to drown out the clatter of machinery.

Marching in front of the church, they chanted ‘Here It Comes’ as Trinity rolled into town providing a surreal end to the day, and a fitting finale for the film.

Monster Moves 2 Production Team Alex Tate, Bettina Truemper, Carlo Massarella, Jamie Lochhead and local Russel Bruhn (Left to Right)

We would like to thank the congregation of Trinity Lutheran Church, Iowa for allowing us to film the church’s move across the prairies and the residents of Manning who made us so welcome and assisted in this mammoth shoot.

Carlo Massarella, Feb 2007.