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I have some experience as a video boater myself. It's great fun to shoot the boats going over the rapids. However, after you've shot the same river every day for a month in a row, sheer boredom causes a video boater to spice things up. This means ... skits!
I worked as a video boater for Moxie Outdoor Adventures one summer in the late '90's and we had some good ones. Guide introductions are fun: I'd walk around the campground and wake up the guides in their various sleeping places: under the raft, in the river, hanging from the rafters, in the outhouse, passed out on the floor of the bus.
Arnold Morrison, river manager at Moxie, was in a lot of my skits. As a guide, he is willing to sacrifice his own body to get a laugh from the customers.
"I'll take minor scrapes and bruises any day, all in the name of a laugh," he said.
Of course, embarrassing a guide can be just as funny on a video as physically harming one.
"We do one where we pack a whole bunch of women into the outhouse and then get a really shy guide to go in there with them. Then they all come out and he comes out last adjusting his shorts. That's funny," said Charlie Seavey, a video boater with River Drivers.
Three Rivers video boater Jake Hewke works with guide J.J. to create this gem:
"We do Guide confessions in the morning and there's J.J. saying he's been real good lately. Then later I find him in the backroom wearing a belly shirt with those snap-on lights on his chest. It's great; the shirt is so tight when he swings his arms the lights come on. We filmed him behind an inflatable donkey..."
Needless to say, the sight of a belly-shirt clad J.J. embracing an inflatable donkey is something most Catholics would feel compelled to confess.
Kyle Hockmeyer has been video boating for eight years.
"The Katahdin Beer Commercial was pretty money," recalls Kyle. "Me and Boonie - when Boonie was still fresh and creative - thought it up the night before: Beer Commercial! It was a simple concept and we did it right: Here's Boonie rafting, the big hero raft guide, and he says, 'When I'm rafting there's three things I can't live without: my paddle, my p.f.d. and Katahdin Malt Liquor.' Then I did a sequence of all of Boonie's carnage for the whole year, spliced with images of him trying to kiss women, chugging beer, puking, spilling beer. 'Katahdin Malt Liquor.' That was the first really funny one we did. It was a trendsetter as far as I'm concerned."
Kyle also noted that physical comedy is always effective in a rafting video.
"You can have poor actors, but if they can take a hit or a fall, we can find a useful way to get into a skit," he said.
Kyle worked for Northern Outdoors, but his video boating experience led him to go to school for video production. He has recently accepted a job at Ursus Production, an outdoor film company out of Waterville.
Current Northern Outdoors video boater Jamie Owens uses this skit:
"In the morning we have people put their keys in the key basket to keep them safe. Then in the skit we'll grab a set of keys, usually mine, jump into the car and crash it."
Jamie said he has yet to actually drive his car into a tree.
"Usually we slam on the brakes right before we hit the tree and I shake the camera," he said.
These skits are not available for sale, unless you go whitewater rafting.
But not every video is going to have seasoned actors getting whacked over the head with paddles, busses rolling over and guides having mud fights.
Some video boaters simply like to focus on the action on the river.
"Skits. I don’t do skits," said Chris Hull, video boater for River Drivers.
Email nick [at] noumbrella [dot] com with your questions, comments and concerns.
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