Times of the Islands Spring 2021

astrolabe newsletter of the Turks & Caicos National Museum
all my batteries at least once and perhaps a couple times
during the trip. It proved most helpful!
DJI Mavic Pro
This is the drone I took. It wasn’t my best drone, but it
was my smallest drone. I knew that a long, hard hike
would probably be part of the expedition. I didn’t want
to carry a large, heavy drone for miles across treacherous
terrain, not to mention space in the travel bags.
Microphones
One Rode VideoMic Pro and two Tascam DR-10L lapel
mic/recorders made up my audio capture equipment. I
feel that audio is the most important part of any video,
so ensuring we had decent audio capture was essential—
while keeping things simple. This proved to be difficult
regardless of the equipment. Usually, you’d have an
audio person focusing on just the audio. But again, I was
a one-man crew doing run-and-gun shooting. You have
to keep it simple.
I had some issues with the DJI Mavic Pro drone, with
it operating a bit sporadically and changing how it was
capturing video randomly. I thought I was going to lose
control of the drone a couple times when it was being
unresponsive. Some of the footage was very hard to
recover with strong color changes being applied in-camera
to the video. But, the aerial footage ended up adding
some majestic imagery to the documentary.
The GoPro was a bit disappointing. Most of my underwater
filming with this camera had been in open water
Accessories
There were many other accessories needed too. A Lume
Cube light, a small travel tripod, memory cards, extra batteries,
portable hard drives, a stabilization gimbal, plus
a MacBook Pro laptop and all the charging cables needed
for the cameras and computer.
Travel
Once I had my bags packed to the max, I was ready
for the expedition to begin. My travel from the U.S. to
Providenciales was fairly uneventful. John and I packed up
the camping gear after I landed, along with all the camera
equipment, and we were ready for an early morning
start to the adventure. We took a car to the ferry dock,
the ferry to North Caicos, a rental car to Middle Caicos,
then two flats boats to get us and the gear to East Caicos.
We’d also use the boats to get from basecamp to various
places on the island to begin hiking to the caves and
other points of interest.
Mat Matlack enjoys fresh fish caught by boat captain, Leif Erickson,
and vegetables prepared by guidemaster, Daniel LeVin
with lots of sunlight coming through. The darkness of
the cave proved a bit too much for this small camera to
handle and I really missed my underwater housing for the
Canon. But, having the Energen battery bank in lieu of the
housing due to the lack of space in the luggage was the
right choice.
Filming
I was very happy with my choice of equipment. The
Sony A7iii performed fantastically. It’s low-light capability
worked great in the caves for both photos and video
capture. The Canon G7Xii kept its spot as the most convenient
camera I own and was there to capture many critical
moments of the story.
Releasing the documentary
We had plans to submit the film to the Turks & Caicos
International Film Festival in 2020. But, due to the pandemic,
it was postponed until 2021. With our eyes set on
several festivals in the coming months, the film will be
released as those come to fruition. Keep up to date with
the release of the film at EastCaicosExpedition.com. a
Times of the Islands Spring 2021 65