In mountaineering, one wrong move can spell disaster. You pray that each anchor driven into the cliff holds, that your rope scraping along a jagged rock won’t fray, and that the line you’ve scouted to the top won’t lead you into trouble. Each moment is a life-and-death drill in risk assessment. That means there’s an amazing amount of trust that must exist within mountain climbing: trust between you and your partner, trust in your equipment and the weather forecaster, and, most importantly, trust that Mother Nature won’t mess shit up. It’s a lot of unpredictability to manage, but it’s that challenge of taming (as best they can) the elements that gives adrenaline junkies a high. This week’s Staff Pick Premiere takes us to similar heights. On the edge of a mountain cliff in Slovenia, two unnamed young climbers learn some of life’s lessons the hard way in Mark Ram’s aptly titled, acrophobia-inducing short film, “Balance.”
Over 20 years in the making and yet a mere 10 minutes in length, this nearly dialogue-free film will have you on the edge of your seat, white-knuckling your armrests as you dangle hundreds of feet above the ground. After two climbers make their way up a mountain, a loss of oversight leads to one of them falling and a rapid daisy chain of events leaves them suspended above the abyss, precariously balanced via one rope and one still-holding anchor. Using only a few telling glances, close ups, and wide shots to establish the situation they’re in, Ram concocts a simple, yet visceral thriller that gets back to the basics of terror. With no budget, a cast working for free, and a freezing crew suspended in mid-air on the side of a mountain he manages to place the audience in the same precarious position he is filming. It’s exhilarating. What Ram gets right about the thriller genre is competency — he climbers are not idiots making dumb decisions, but instead are experienced and diligent, which makes it all the more upsetting when nothing seems to go according to plan.
The parallels that start to appear between filmmaking and mountaineering are interesting. In each, no matter how much planning and preparation goes into the act, it’s ultimately a leap of faith. For Ram, this reality was even more acute, because “Balance” is his first short film. Despite painstaking rehearsals, intricate scheduling, and detailed storyboards, things still inevitably went wrong. “Originally, I wanted to use a hang glider to shoot the mountains and make a flyby shot in order to establish the height, depth and distance of the climbers. The wind prevented the hang glider to take a good shot, so we canceled it,” explains Ram. “Then I wanted to make a drone shot that shoots alongside the rope and goes all the way up to the climber (like you would see in a Hollywood movie). When we shot the film, drones where just becoming fashionable and barely good enough to use. The drone that we used broke down. We had to travel during the night to the Swiss country to repair the drone and then drove back to try it again, but again it broke down. I ended up with three seconds of a drone shot that I could use, which we slowed a bit down in post, and that’s how we have a 4.5 second shot from a drone that was usable in the movie.” Some days it took the crew up to seven hours to climb up to set and secure the equipment in that altitude. So they needed to be extremely economical and use every single shot they filmed, which is a true testament to bootstrap filmmaking.
Check out more of Vimeo’s Staff Pick Premieres here.
If you’re interested in premiering your short film as a Staff Pick Premiere, please check out www.vimeo.com/submit for more information.
