Juan Carlos Oganes' film-making and work blog.

Sunday, May 29, 2011

Second visit to the Morro Solar









As part of my second location scouting and preparing of the Morro de Arica battle scenes (the first one was back in 2009 as posted here: http://www.juancarlosoganes.net/2009/10/checking-locations-for-battle-scenes.html , some of the extras and me decided to go up to the top of the Morro Solar in Chorrillos. It is a steep, rocky and narrow road uphill that can be somewhat dangerous at times.
I wonder still how all equipment like hundreds of wardrobe, rifles, accesories, canons, sandbags and camera equipmetn are gonna be brought up there. It is a narrow road up.

The day was pretty cloudy and half way uphill it was heavily foggy not to mention the top where one could hardly see past 20 meters ahead. The wind was blowing hard and it even rained for a bit and we were all wet.

The extras wandered around to look for old bullet shells and stumbled into a few covered in green rust.

Humidity was so thick that all our shirts and hair became moist and wet. I could only show just a few parts of where I plan to shoot the scenes and Bolognesi's death.

I have to return to start preparing the scenario for the film shots.

Our navy hero Guillermo More was the commander of the Morro artillery and had at his disposal a 250 lbs. Vavasseur and two 100 lbs. Parrot cannons. As it would be extremely difficult to transport those very heavy large-scale artillery up there I'm planning to construct from scratch two of those cannons at natural scale replica together with their big bullets.

I'll shop around for possible materials to make it sturdy but light to carry around. Something easy to disassemble and assemble anywhere.

Sitting down to make some schematics.