Tom Putnam & Brenna Sanchez are the directors/producers of the feature documentary Burn, told through the eyes of Detroit firefighters, who are charged with the thankless task of saving a city that many have written off as dead.

What made you decide to make a documentary about the Detroit Fire Department?
The film is dedicated to a Detroit firefighter named Walter Harris. In late 2008 I read a news story about Walter, who was killed fighting a fire in an abandoned building in Detroit. I called Brenna Sanchez, who is a filmmaker friend from Detroit, and she called me about an hour later from a Detroit firehouse. We started by asking ourselves why someone would risk their lives fighting a fire in an abandoned building in a city that has over 80,000 abandoned structures, and the answers turned out to be much more nuanced than we thought. Then in 2009 we went out with a small film crew and filmed two 24-hour shifts with Engine Company 50, which is the jumping off point for our film. We went to 21 structure fires with them, which is more fires than some suburban firefighters will see in their entire career. After that we knew we had to stick with this and tell their story.

What specific challenges did filming fires bring and what kind of equipment was used?
No one had ever filmed fires in a meaningful way before. No one had sent cameras into fires. So we tried a number of different cameras and techniques to capture it since we knew we wanted to show firefighting from the point of view of the guys running into the burning buildings. We ultimately ended up using Contour HD helmet cameras to go into the buildings, and Canon 5d and 7d DSLR cameras to film the more traditional documentary footage. We approached the fires like a sporting event, and used a combination of action sports camerapeople and traditional documentary shooters to cover the scenes. Continue reading →