From the BlueGreen Archives……working with Jasper Winn and the Imax team on the production of Imax’s Ride around the World.
BIG SCREEN COWBOYS
by
Jasper Winn
© All rights reserved
A year and a half travelling across four continents. Riding the best – and the worst – of horses. Spending time with friends in Patagonia and Argentina and Spain and Morocco and Mexico. And all expenses covered. How does that sound?
Reader, it sounds like I took the offered job. I became the story consultant, location scout and horse ‘wrangler’ for the Trinity Films IMAX documentary Ride With Cowboys (finally launched as Ride Around the World). IMAX is big screen cinema. Purpose-built IMAX cinemas – there are four hundred around the world, including a good number if Europe, though none in Ireland – have screens close on twenty metres high and thirty metres wide. An IMAX screen is as tall and wide as a six storey building. If you’re making a film about cowboys, it can make a horse look as big as aeroplane.
Though most IMAX cinemas are in North America and despite the popular association of cowboys with the United States, the film’s director, Harry Lynch was keen to show the variety of cowboy cultures across the Americas, from Canada to the southern most tip of Patagonia, as well as the origins in Morocco and Spain of the horses, the saddlery and the skills that eventually went to form the reality – and the myth – of the modern cowboy.
We started by filming in South America, choosing the most inhospitable and climatically challenging location – the very tip of Patagonia, ‘next stop Antarctica’ – to roll the camera for the first time. We were going to film friends of mine, Chilean baqueanos who break horses, pack supplies into remote corners of the Torres del Paine and cowboy on the remote estancias. I was confident that I could rely on Chechin, Moncho, Pato, Chapa and the rest to provide the kind of dashing horsemanship we needed. And the patience required when filming. The challenge with shooting IMAX film – and especially action shots – is the short duration of the film magazines; just three minutes. For our opening scene the baqueanos drove a herd of close on a hundred horses at full gallop across a shallow river and exploded onto the bank mere feet from the camera, which was positioned down at knee-height. I’d mounted a horse and showed the cowboys which line to take, whilst assuring Rodney the Director of Photography, that horses wouldn’t step on anything squashy soft, like a human, or hard like the camera if they could avoid it. Trustingly, and courageously he crouched down in the path of 400 galloping hooves. The shots were magnificent, with the baqueanos guiding the herd of thundering horses within feet of the lens before veering off. The film was underway.
If this article has inspired you to ride out and work with Patagonian horsemen and horsewomen in these wild and dramatic southern lands take a look at our new Wild Horse Round up ride due to run on one end of season date on 4 April 2025