12. One Night in Bangkok

June 23^rd. We’ve now been in Myanmar for more than three weeks. Typically, visas are valid for three months from issue, for a total stay of 28 days. David’s visa was about to expire, and mine would run out at the end of the week. Ordinarily, this is not a big deal: you simply pay a $3 / day fee for overstaying the visa. But since we have to present our passports to security personnel every time we visit the various Ministries, our papers have to be in order. We needed to renew our visas. We could have done this in Yangon, but some crazed Korean business man had brutally stabbed his wife (repeatedly) in one of the top Yangon hotels over the weekend. She died and he was arrested and extradited. Old habits of distrust of foreigners resurfaced and we were required to leave the country to renew our visas. Our closest option was the Myanmar Embassy in Bangkok – so we boarded a flight on Tuesday and headed to Thailand.

In May 2012, just prior to our departure, Wargaming had engaged two veteran filmmakers who had recently left National Geographic to form their own company named Room608. I’d worked on a special project for National Geographic for a few months back in 2007-2008, so I knew of them by reputation. They had been waiting for the green light to come to Myanmar. I finally gave the go-ahead right before our second trip to Naypyidaw – when we thought we might still secure permission to dig. In retrospect it was the right call, since we needed to capture the race against our competitors, our efforts to navigate the bureaucracy, and the challenges of doing business in Myanmar. The film was happening now. We needed the film team in Myanmar. Since we all needed to transit through Bangkok anyway, we decided to meet there on June 24^th. What was supposed to be one night in Bangkok turned into four.

We are planning to shoot the film on a cinematic quality Red Epic HD camera, which records a gorgeous image in 4K – that’s 4,096 x 2160 resolution, four times a 1080p screen. To store all this data, we brought a steel pelican case full of terabyte drives to capture footage. Unfortunately, the backup Red Epic fizzed out on us during some test shooting in Bangkok. We didn’t want to risk flying in to Yangon with only one operational camera, so we had to have a second one flown in from the equipment house in California, along with a courier (Oksana) to deliver it safely. We shot some footage of David and waited. Bangkok is not the worst place to get stranded for a few days, especially at the wonderful Shangri-La Hotel. We picked up our new visas on June 26^th, got the backup camera on June 27^th, and arrived back in Yangon on June 28^th.  We had 27 cases of gear, not counting personal baggage, which is rather a lot for “tourists.” Fortunately all our paperwork was in order so the customs officials waved us through.

We drove straight on to Naypyidaw, our third trip to the capital, where we hoped to meet with one of the key Ministers on June 29^th. Unfortunately the Minister was not available to meet with us. We did however meet with another official, who gave us some advice on how to move the project forward. On June 30^th we piled back into the vans and drove back to Yangon. We stopped to film some scenes of rural life along the way, including a farmer ploughing with oxen and a young girl pouring water on a water buffalo, which was wallowing in a pond. Over the next few days we shot b-roll of the Theingyi market, the water taxis on the Yangon River, and Shwedagon pagoda – and got drenched on more than one occasion!