My job as a cinematographer is to stay true to whatever story I’m telling and making sure that my presence goes unnoticed, unless of course there’s a specific reason for it. Normally that’s a fairly easy thing to do; you take an objective approach when your shooting and you don’t interfere with what’s going on in front of camera. Simple. In the case of this trip, it’s not that simple.
The challenge that I’m faced with on this journey is incorporating myself into the story while still doing my thing behind the camera. Don’t get me wrong, I’m by no means interested in being in front of camera, however the truth of it is that I’m just as involved in the story as Marco & Bruno are. This experience is new for us all and it’s important to show each one of our perspectives on a trip like this.
When Marco first presented the idea to me about doing a motorcycle trip across the country I knew right away that we’d be shooting the whole process. We began doing research on TV shows & documentaries that have been created already on the road to get an idea of what we could do to hopefully create our own documentary/series. Our favorite by far was Long Way Round & Long Way Down which had Ewan McGregor and his good friend Charley Boorman going from the UK to NY in Season 1 and the UK to South Africa in Season 2.
I’d like to point out that these guys had a full fledged production team behind them; Director, Producers, 2 Cinematographers/Camera Ops, proper funding, sponsors, brand new motorcycles & gear, prep time, behind the scenes coverage of their prep and probably the most important is time. Time is a big one. Obviously we don’t have the same resources as their team did but that certainly didn’t keep us from wanting to create our own thing. In fact, it inspired us to try even harder and use what we have available to us to make it work.
So far, this trip has presented some interesting challenges for us all: bike maintenance, fatigue after riding all day, covering a reasonable amount of miles everyday so we stay on schedule while still making time to shoot, dumping footage & charging batteries every night, logging & editing footage to have content for you all to see; the list goes on. Despite all of this, an opportunity to do a cross country motorcycle trip with 2 of your closest friends and document it for us to see years down the road and share with our kids is priceless and totally worth the struggle.
I’ll be posting a more technical breakdown of what I’m using to capture the trip soon so keep your eyes open for that.
🙂 be safe have fun