Trek Bikes - Domane SLR: A Monumental Advantage

A couple months ago, I had the opportunity to travel to the Flanders region of Belgium in to DP a video for Trek Bicycle's new Domane SLR with a few of the Trek-Segafredo professional riders.  This bike became well known a few years ago with the introduction of Trek's IsoSpeed decoupler technology and is the bike of choice for Fabian Cancellara.  With this new bike, Trek has introduced a front Isospeed decoupler and the ability to manually adjust the sensitivity of the rear one.  For more information on the bike and its technology, check out the Trek website:  http://www.trekbikes.com/us/en_US/editorial/domane_tech/.

Muur van Geraardsbergen

Muur van Geraardsbergen

For this project, the director (Stephen Spurlock - http://www.spurlockcreative.com/) and I, decided to shoot with a few different Sony DSLR cameras:  the a7s II, a7s and RX100 IV, mostly for their size.  We wanted to keep things small for a couple reasons:  there were only two of us on the video team, and we had been in Belgium for about a week prior to this project shooting a few other videos for Trek, and by this point we had stayed in four different hotels in the seven days we had been there.  With that much moving around, smaller was definitely better.  In addition, we have had a lot of success with the a7s platform, and with the ability to shoot at 120fps on the a7s II, we new we were covered for any slow motion needs we would have.  We brought the RX100 IV along on a whim to sort of see how it performed, but not really expecting to use it in a real way.  That camera was the surprise of the shoot - it worked incredibly (mostly at 240fps) and the footage cut in seamlessly to the final product. 

In addition to the Sony cameras, we used the Freefly Systems' Movi M5 and a Rhino 2' slider.

From a production perspective, we did not have a ton of time to bring this project to life - we were only given one day to scout and one day to shoot.  That said, we knew we needed to have the creative locked down before we got there, and had a really good sense of what we needed to make this project come to life.  We had a great day of scouting, but then when the time came to shoot, the Belgian weather reared its ugly head.  The temperature dropped drastically overnight and it was too icy for us to safely shoot in the places we wanted to for the project (ie: cobblestones), at least in the morning.  Needless to say, a lot of improvisation happened and everybody involved from Trek and the Trek-Segafredo team was super helpful, flexible and supportive in how things were changing on the fly.  Of the locations you'll see in the finished video, we only scouted one of them.  But while that wasn't ideal, because we were so confident in the creative and what we needed for it, we were able to move quickly on the fly and acquire all the assets we needed.

Lastly, Travis Whitty (https://vimeo.com/whittyremarks) killed it on the edit and sound design, really bringing the project to life.

Take a gander below and enjoy!

Trek Bikes - Bicycle Advocacy in South Africa

I was extremely fortunate recently to be a part of a small team documenting the story of two talented young women, Bud & Lentine, traveling to South Africa to do bicycle advocacy work, as well as race in the Cape Epic (an 8 day mountain bike stage race).  They've spent the last 9 months fundraising, and with the money they've raised, they were able to give children in underprivileged areas the chance to experience life from a new perspective through the use of a bicycle.  The story we told paralleled Bud & Lentine with one of the recipients of the bikes, Olwethu, who lives in a township (or shanty town) outside of Cape Town.  It may not seem like a lot, but having a bicycle opens up an entirely new world to the students receiving the bikes in these townships.  They now have a means to get out of where they are living and experience new things, whereas before, they could not afford to do so.  To do this, the girls teamed up with an organization called Qhubeka (http://qhubeka.org/2013/), whose mission is to:  "mobilize people with bicycles."  As a whole, the experience was incredible for me.  I'm grateful to have been a part of this awesome story, and cannot wait to see it come together.  Stay tuned for updates as the edit starts to take shape.

Frame grab of Lentine (left) & Bud (right)

Frame grab of Olwethu

Sneak peak at one of the scenes we shot with Olwethu.