Men of La Mancha Production Photos

The Suzuki V-Strom 1100 was a superfast and smooth bike on the highways, but not that great off road, too heavy and not limber. On this road it kept bottoming out. The metal panniers are super strong though only the top one survived the accident.

I can't remember the name of this helmet but it was very useful flipping up and was only about $100. The Tourmaster jacket is very good, the shoulder pads were ripped to shreds in the accident but my shoulders were fine. The jacket also has cooling in the arms which was great.

I bought these pants online for less than $50 and they held up well in the accident. They were cut later to get off my broken legs. I wish I had had bigger boots though as my ankle was smashed up.

One of the people in Guatemala trying to help me standing next to the wrecked motorcycle that was in storage for a few months until I retrieved it. The guy that recklessly hit me, Johnny Santiago, was in jail the whole time until I signed a waiver.

         My first ever video camera, the Canon HV30 was smashed in the motorcycle accident.                                             

On the next trip Mike and I took the Subaru Baja Turbo. We had a custom winch built up front and a nice rack on top. This is San Diego Mission Bay Park.

We bought the first Panasonic GH1 we could find. It took months to get as everyone wanted one. We had to pay double from a nice guy in Canada that had two and believed in the project we were working on to film in charities and such. You can also see the extra tire and rim up top.

Again the Panasonic GH1 all fitted out with wireless recording on a dual system and the small Sennheiser Video Mic which I don't like, it sounds very tinny compared to the Rode Video Mic. The recorder was the LS-10 by Olympus which I still use. We recorded most of the sound in the film with this.

The trailer we built to pick up the motorcycle. We bought this in a box and put it together. It was manufactured in China and cost about $200 I think. Really good deal but it did totally fall apart.

The trailer worked ok as you can see here but was falling apart, we reinforced the back with ties because it was breaking.

For the first few hundred miles we had the trailer on top of the car, we thought this would be best before putting bike on, but did not work as it was totally inefficient and made our gas mileage go to crap and the wind noise was outrageous so we pulled it instead.

We had these cool suction cups to hold our camera to film outside. This is near Monterrey, Mexico.

This was a very hard road on the Subaru. We spent several hours going only 1 mph through this area near Chisec, Guatemala.

Mike talks with a guy we met in the middle of no where in Belize. He was a house sitter for a tiny shack out here 10 miles from any services.

The GH1 did not do well in low light at all. But fortunately Neat Video plug in for Premiere Pro helped get some of the noise out of the image. The 720p video was better so we used it alot and shot with the nice little 20mm 1.7 Lumix lens.

We used a tripod sometime but often just used this monopod from Manfrotto, it is great but it falls down all the time unless you prop it.

As you can see we recorded sound sometime direct into the Olympus LS-10 recorder which was not great as it picked up all the sounds around (not directional).

The monopod allowed for some cool shots. This is in Santa Maria orphanage in a place that gives food to the homeless in the town of Colon.

Fr Mike consoling one of the children at Santa Maria. The kid was really upset over what turned out to be something very minor.

One of the sisters with Mother Antonia delivering peanut butter and jelly sandwiches inside Tijuana jail.

This is a small taser. I carried it everywhere. I never had to use it on anybody and Mike hated me carrying it but I wanted protection since I was still handicapped and could not run, only limp away from any bad guys that might come to steal from us.

                                 One of the nicest cabanas. I loved the rain on the tin roof all night.                                                                

Mike filmed with a little Sanyo underwater camera that shot in 720p. We got a few cool underwater shots we put in the film.

We used the HP 8410w with blu ray burner to make extra copies of footage to send back to USA while we kept second copy with us on hard drives.

 Bill Neilson, Chairman of the Board of Directors for Baptist St. Anthony Hospital in Amarillo, Texas where Moises was accepted.

 Ken Kelley, private jet owner in Amarillo, Texas that flew down to pick up Moises, his mother and doctor.

Tim Tam, founder of the Word at Work charity based in Amarillo, Texas and working in Belize. He is with Moises'  mother, Magdelena here in Belize.

          Shooting some scenes in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, some of which show up in the film at the end.           

This is also near Puerto Escondido, we also use the 14-140 kit lens most of the time and this Joby tripod and lots of beer.

Here is a broken rod from the Subaru Baja. This is not shown in the film but as we got close to the USA after about 10,000 miles the rod broke and we had to get it fixed. It took long time and lots of cash. I would not buy another Subaru Turbo unless I was going to use it in light off road use, not anything heavy like we did. The transmission blew two weeks later, the car was only 4 years old.