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Disney comes to Minden:
Film crew tours North Sails loft
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by Joey Crandall, jcrandall@recordcourier.com
June 22, 2007
A large tour bus pulled
up in front of the North Sails 3DL loft in Minden
Saturday morning and out poured a crop of 15 athletes who might as well have
walked straight out of the pages of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog.
Stepping off at the rear of the group was Roy Disney - yes, that Roy Disney -
and behind him trailed a small crew carrying cameras, boom microphones and
various duffle bags.
Even set nearly 300 miles from the nearest ocean, Carson Valley found its way
into a feature-length documentary film that producers are hoping will do for the
sport of sailing what March of the Penguins did for its species.
The cast and crew of The Morning Light project, a film that will chronicle the
venture of the youngest crew to ever compete in the Transpacific Yacht Race,
was in town last weekend to tour the 3DL facility, which produced the sails for
their Transpac 52.
North Sails 3DL, long-known internationally for producing the sails for many of
the world's top sail racing teams, has become a nearly mythic place for aspiring
sailors across the globe.
"I've always heard about this loft," said Piet Van Os, the watch captain and co-
navigator for the Morning Light, who is the team's oldest member at 23. "It's
really cool to be here.
"Once they told us we'd be coming up to Northern Nevada, I knew they
would be bringing us here. It's really great seeing how the sails get made. You
don't realize how much work goes into it when you're busy using the sails."
Crew members got to ask questions of the various workers at North Sails and
a couple even got a ride in the patented gantry bags that hover over the sail
during the production process.
"These guys are in the process of becoming full-blown celebrities," said North
Sails spokesman J. Brandon. "We're glad to have them here and we're very
interested to see how this movie turns out."
The Morning Light project got its berth when Tom Pollack, the TP 52 class
executive director, approached Disney about getting a young crew together to
sail the Transpac race, which runs from Los Angeles to Honolulu while
covering a distance of 2,225 nautical miles.
Disney, a longtime sailor and 16-time competitor in the Transpac, jumped at
the idea.
Tom gave me the idea and I expanded on it a bit," Disney said. "I wrote up a
two-page synopsis of the idea, sent it over to the people at Disney and it
started from there. It's just grown and grown and grown ever since and it's a
really big project now."
The crew is set to compete next month in the big-boat class of the race starting
July 15. It is set for a theatrical release by the Walt Disney Company in 2008.
The filming process, however, started last summer with an open casting call for
experienced sailors between the ages of 18 and 23.
"I was actually offshore on a ship when I head about the casting call," Van Os,
of La Jolla, Calif., said. "I sent in my application over e- mail, got accepted and
had to fly off the ship from Chile."
More than 500 sailors applied, but only 30 got invited to the team trials. From
there the crew was narrowed down to 15 and 11 or 12 of those will actually
compete in the race with the remaining serving as alternates.
"The sailing community is pretty small, so people were talking about this
project," said Chris Branning, the team's other co-navigator, 21 of Sarasota,
Fla. "We had eight days of selection trials and at the end of that we had 15.
"We started training in January all the way through the beginning of May. We
came together very well as a team.
"I've worked with a lot of crews in my life, but this is by far the closest group
I've ever been in. I've sailed against a few of them but never with any of them
prior to this."
The premise of the movie is that it will be unscripted, with no preconceived
outcome. Filming began as soon as the applicants stepped off the plane for the
trials last summer.
"It was really weird the first two weeks or so because we always had these
cameras in our face," Van Os said. "After that, we were just so used to it, we
barely even saw them any more. The camera is in your face, the boom is over
your head and it just stops phasing you."
Even so, the crew hadn't been filmed in nearly a month before entering the
North Sails loft and several crew members mentioned jitters about being on
camera again.
"It'll be great for the sport," Branning said. "We're hoping it will really raise
sailing's profile. The cameras have been with us through the whole process.
"Hopefully, we'll be able to give the people a great story."
The film is being shot in high definition from the air, from the water and
onboard the sailboat by a crew that features previous Emmy winners, Oscar
nominees, and even an Olympic gold medalist.
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Disney said he
and the producers of the film went strictly away from the growing method of pairing a
group of volatile personalities for some cheap drama onscreen.
"The most important thing we're trying to do is show a group of young people come together to form
a
team and understand a common objective," Disney said. "We want to show people what happens
on a
boat once it disappears over the horizon. There is a hell of a lot that goes on out there.
"It'll be a lot of young people with strong character doing their best to win a race."
Early on, the crew has performed well. They most took fifth out of 15 big boats in the First Team Real
Estate Regatta for the Hoag Cup at Newport Beach earlier this month.
"We had a couple of knockdowns, some mistakes during training," Branning said. "Hopefully
we got that
out of our system now that the race is approaching.
"This is a great team and we are very confident heading into it."
They'll receive some friendly competition from Disney once the Transpac starts.
"Oh, I'll be out there," Disney said with a chuckle. "I'm just going to be on a different
boat."
-- Joey Crandall can be reached at jcrandall@recordcourier.comor at (775) 782-5121, ext. 212.
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TRANSPAC RACE STATUS
