Dust, gravel and broken gear.
-
logo
Dust, gravel and broken gear.
It all started when I get a message from my friend Niklas that I hadn’t heard from in like
Hey, I saw the stuff you did at Gotland! I have this gravel race between Sweden and Norway that I think would be great if you could join and film?
After a few planning meetings I was in my car on my way up mid-north in Sweden. I arrived a day earlier than the others so I could have a full day of solo-recon.
No second chances
The thing I both love and hate with this type of filming is the total lack of second chances. If I fuck up there are no all-nighters in the world that can fix it. Therefore preparation have become über important for me.
I always try to scout a location ahead of an upcoming shoot. Testing lights, lenses, and angles. But also saying hi to anyone working there to see if something unusual will happen at the time of the shoot: construction work, loud noises, or anything that might interfere with the shoot …
In this case I wanted to drive as much of the trail before we started filmning. Then I can scout locations, plus I can shoot a ton of b-roll and drone footage that would just slow down us all when we have started filmning.
Images: Ride appen m karta. Drone på taket. Porlande å. Cykel på cykelställ.
During my recon day I noticed that the gravel was super dry. Anything above
Trip music
Quite often these long drive shoots ends up in a song on repeat. This turned out to be ”Nattbuss” and ”Puff Daddy issues” by Fricky. I think it has to do with me trying to plan, think through and visualize as mch as possible beforehand … then the same song becomes a catalysator for that. I don’t have to think about the music.
The setup
In Gotland we used a
Worked perfect!
Going from black to gray
As I suspected the dust on the first day was heavy. To worsen it dust and air was backdraughted into the trunk while driving. We had to drive with open windows to even out the airflow.
Litterally everything got covered in dust, even so that my sd cards malfunctioned and about
The zero day edit
The Zero Day Edit has become super important in my projects. It’s basically me spending a few hours in the evening of the first day of filmning. I do a rough cut of the clips from the first day of shooting.
At breakfast day
Why is the Zero Day edit important?
It gets the team engaged and involved in the project if they early can see what the end result can feel and look like … or not look like … Without the Zero Day Edit all they see is me running around with what looks like a sub-standard camera rig.
I’ve had team members saying “Now I feel really inspired to push harder”. I’v had mothers of subjects tear up saying that no-one has portrayed riding in this way.
So after showing the Zero Day Edit we are more glued together and works as one unit.
The landscape
This area of Sweden and Norway is pretty amazing. The distances are huge, climbs are steep and the roads are narrow and sometimes hard to access.
So shooting b-roll takes forever. Google Mapping and driving to get a few minutes of drone footage or a rippling stream can take hours.