CASE STUDY: RACE ACROSS AMERICA
It was as much of a test for me, the filmmaker, as it was for the bicyclists themselves. As a team of eight riders from Durham North Carolina raced their bicycles non-stop from San-Diego, CA to Annapolis, MD in 7 days, I was to shoot and edit 7 three-minute videos (one each day of the race) with a laptop, a Canon 5D Mk II, and an assistant/driver.
The Race Across America is 50% longer than the Tour du France. For me, this meant shooting a non-stop/no-retake event that traveled over 400 miles per day, varying landscapes from 10,000 ft altitudes to the burning heat of the desert within 24 hours of each other, editing in the back of a Jeep, uploading from McDonald’s AT&T Hotspots as we passed them, and sleeping whenever I could… doing this everyday for 7 days straight and finishing with a project that I was proud of. Initially, I was excited by the project, but knew this was new ground for me and that I would need to plan for the worst but hope for the best.
From conception, I was asked to create a series of daily videos for DurhamCares capturing all the emotions of the race: excitement, pain, tiredness, and triumph that would be released on the web as well as TV-WRAL in Raleigh, NC for the folks back home to follow the journey their team was embarking on. It was clear that there must be character development and that it wasn’t to be just a highlight video of people riding bikes to a soundtrack. Since I didn’t know exactly what to expect each day, I decided to film a brief sit-down interview with each of the riders the first morning of the race. This would provide me with a narrative to overlay the riding footage each day, regardless of whether or not I had time to do interviews down the road. I tried to ask questions that would chart their fears for the trip, places they were most excited to ride through, and what would inspire them during the hard times. This footage served me well on more than one occasion.
While on the road, the riders would leapfrog each other in 2 support vans. One van would follow the bike currently riding, while another van drove 30 miles ahead and waited with a 2nd rider who would take-off with his support van as soon as the 1st rider arrived. This leap frog process left 5-10 minute film-able “moments” with the waiting team for me to interview and get updates on the action. The recurring question I told the team to expect from me was the question: “Where are you at?” By this I wanted them to tell me where they were at GEOGRAPHICALLY (“I’m 100 miles into Arizona”), where they were at PHYSICALLY (“My legs are killing me right now”), and where they were at EMOTIONALLY (“The scenery is amazing and is really inspiring me despite the pain I’m in.”). Then I asked them to tie this back to the “WHY” of the race: “You know as I ride it really helps to know that people back home are supporting us, and that the work we’re putting into this is going to make a big difference in the lives of people in need in Durham.” The time available for these interviews was brief, but the riders were vary gracious with me and answered the questions as often as possible despite their exhaustion and focus on the race. There were many times when interviews were cut short as the approaching rider came into sight, especially at night when it was so dangerous standing on the side of the road in the dark, but overall this strategy worked well.
[Nerd Warning: Things a get a little technical after this, so if you get bored just skip to the end and watch the last video, it's my fav .]
When I wasn’t interviewing, I had 2 shooting set-ups. The first was to drive ahead of the current rider, scouting scenic locations to set-up the tripod and “get the shot” roadside. I tried to vary these to include landscapes that depicted the current geography, shots of the passing rider, and close-ups of natural beauty. My Zacuto Z-finder Pro 2.5x was indispensable for this. Their anti-fog lens totally lived up to its repuation, even on Day 3 where I began the day shooting the buttes of Monument Park, Utah and wrapped at 10,000 ft in the snowcovered peaks of the Colorado Rockies. Well done Zacutos!
The lenses I brought with me on this trip were the Canon 24-70mm L f/2.8, Canon 50mm f/1.2 (interviews and night shooting), Zeiss 18mm wide-angle, and Canon 100-400m IS f/4.5. A 10 day rental from www.LensRentals.com ran me around $350.
I packed my shouldermount (the Mighty-Wonder-Cam from my DVX days) and follow focus (JBK Cinequipt) but after about 10 minutes I realized those would be totally impractical for the pace of this project. Basically, since I changed lenses somewhat often, the follow focus add a step to the process and I just didn’t want to deal with it. As for the shoulder-mount, there isn’t a quick-release on it, so to switch between that and a tripod was also too much work. So I opted to shoot handheld or on sticks. There are a few handheld shots I would have liked to have been more stable (something the shouldermount would have brought), but I was a compromise I needed to make for the sake of time.
The second set-up was for moving shots from the back of our Jeep Liberty SUV. The back seats were folded down and the rear glass lift-gate up. I used a Vinten tripod, SmallHD DP1x field monitor mounted to the tripod with a Noga arm, and shot mostly with a Canon 100-400mm IS lens. Race rules stipulate that no crew vehicle may drive closer than 100ft in front of a rider. With the lens fully zoomed to 400mm I wasn’t able to get quite as close as I had hoped but I made do.
When I wasn’t using the zoom lens I shot with a Canon 50mm f/1.2 L out the back which gave a sharper focal separation between the rider and background on a wide shot than I experienced with the zoom. The most challenging aspect of this experience was knowing when to set-up in the vehicle and when not to. It took about 15 minutes to get the vehicle rig set-up so if we did that we were more-or-less committed to it for an hour or so. I definitely missed some good shot opportunities because of this.
I did some pre-race testing (watch the test videos) with this vehicle set-up, because I was worried about the rolling shutter issues that plague this camera (Canon 5D Mk II). Surprisingly this was less of an issue that I expected. In the tests we noticed it when the rider would pass fencing and other vertical lines. But most of the time they were just riding through organic/natural landscapes, so if the rolling shutter WAS present it wasn’t that noticeable. There is only one shot in the final edits where I see a blatant rolling shutter issue – but it wasn’t a problem that I felt pressure to constantly “edit around”.
One thing I was particularly nervous about was getting pulled over by the police when shooting like this. Our vehicle had “MEDIA” and “RACE ACROSS AMERICA” stickers all over it… I wasn’t sure if that helped or hurt. We were cruising backroads all across the country, and while the Race had contacted all the towns we were traveling through, I personally didn’t have any express permission to film out the back of a moving vehicle. Luckily I was never stopped for this. We were pulled over twice for traffic violations, but it was never while I was in the trunk filming.
AUDIO
For audio, I used the Zoom H4N with a Sennheiser ME66 shotgun mic. My assistant would run sound as needed since I clearly had my hands full. I think each day we would shoot 5-10 shots with “good” sound. There were a few moments early on when I didn’t have the Zoom ready and was forced to use the on-camera “reference” audio. The Zoom just took sooo long to turn on that we missed our takes with it because we turned it off after every shot to conserve batteries. After a few days of this, we just decided to leave the thing on most of the time. This was a bit risky since we were in the field and only had 2 AC outlets in the car with which to charge all of our batteries, but since AA batteries were pretty accessible at gas stations I figured if we got into a real pickle I could just buy some fresh ones and not use our standard rechargables. Once we were editing I used Pluraleyes to sync everything which, as always, worked like a charm.
EDITING
Editing was hands-down the toughest aspect of this project. Most days I would shoot for 12 hours, edit for 8 hours, and sleep for around 4 hours. Since we were on the road, I didn’t have a workstation but instead edited on my MacBook Pro from the passenger’s seat with a stack of OWC external hard-drives wedged between my leg and the center console. In the desert of Arizona things got really hot, between the weather and the heat from the laptop and drives. AC was cranked to the max most of the time.
One thing I was really worried about was the transcoding time need to convert the 5D footage from H.264 to an editable codec. I didn’t want to get myself into a situation where I was editing all night and didn’t have any time to sleep. Typically I convert to Apple ProRes LT, but because of the quick turn-over needed each day of this project I was looking for a solution that would save as much time as possible. After benchmarking a number of different options, and reading some posts by Phillip Bloom, I decided to transcode my footage to the XDCAM EX 1080/24p codec using MPEG STREAMCLIP. The file size was half-that of ProRes and I could transcode 16GB of footage in around 45 min (Pro-Res was taking 1 hour and 20 minutes) and since I wasn’t planning to do any major color-grading (no time) this seemed like a good solution for my needs. It worked great. In the future, I will continue to use Pro-Res from my studio workstation, but in this situation it met my needs: I never found myself waiting around for renders longer than I thought I should. After I had edited a piece, I used Compressor’s YouTube pre-set (H.264) customized for 5MB bitrate. Each 3-minute 1080p video ended up being in the 130MB size-range, which felt like a good compromise to me considering the same file would be used by TV-WRAL for their daily news reports (I didn’t have time to compress and upload 2 different files web/broadcast). The engineers at WRAL were happy with the quality from the files, so it seems to be a win-win.
One other item of note, was that because the licensing agreement on the production music, TV-WRAL was not able to broadcast the soundtracks. So each day I exported a “vocals only” audio track for them to use with their news reports as needed. However the full version was available on the web.
Overall, I’m very happy with the way this project turned out. Physically, it was exhausting just to be able to get the work done in the harsh environments. But I feel that I was able to turn out a reasonably high production quality in the midst of everything. Especially the last video… I had been shooting for 24-hours straight, and mastered the edit just 3 HOURS after the team crossed the finish line. That’s something I’m very proud of. Yes there are things that could have been improved in every single edit, but I think it’s pretty amazing that we achieved what we did in the short amount of time available to us.
Team DurhamCares raised over $100,000 for their partners as well as over 9,000 in volunteer service hours from their community.
Special thanks for my musician-friends who kindly donated use of their music to this project! Songs featured in the videos include: “Be The Change” by Brandon Grissom. “All We Need” by Jessica Sonner. ”Breaking Hearts Tonight” by Dan Craig. “Still Be Here” by Jessica Sonner. If you like it – Buy it!
