14 Apr Losing Footy by Gabriel Pitman
“Doing my daily TCU check up I found Chris Zep’s “12 Steps To Film with a DSLR,” and could’t help but be reminded of a recent mini DV tragedy.
Rick Nicholls and I haven’t filmed in about two years. The same two years Rick has not been filming the riding that he has had a chance to between work and school. Which is a good and bad thing. It’s good because he logs clips with so much ease per film session, due in large part to the non filming riding where he has been able to progress at his own speed comfortably. This is also bad because at the same time, from my point of view, he really pushes himself once the camera is pointed in his direction, progressing him that much further. I also think that people will really enjoy his style and bag of tricks.
In any case, Rick and I managed to meet up and get some filming done in Hedley BC (if you know Hedley BC at all you will find this just as surprising as we did) and Princeton BC. Both of these towns are super pinner and the lack of street spots area direct reflection of the town’s pinnerness. Another thing I should mention that Rick seems to spend a lot of time riding chainless. So we film for a few hours, gather at least a one minute 20 second edit, he 360’s off a pile of snow, goes upside down, and gets hurt on an outlet box that’s open on the side of a little kids mini ramp at the end of the day. Needless to say Rick threw down.
I’m always the filmier who say’s he won’t show anyone the clip after it’s filmed, it’s just a preference, and now with HD camera’s being a dime a dozen I feel like there’s that much more of a reason to put as little wear on the heads as possible. It’s old technology now. RIP 33CD.
Got home, watched a few seconds and found the tape was scrambled to shit. This has always been my worst nightmare because you have to tell whomever you were filming that footage is lost and all of their hard work was in vein basically. I waited to return to the coast to capture through a capture cam but the tape was done. Non recoverable… Fuck. I went back to the capture cam and recovered as much as possible but what I was left with could not be complied into an edit in any way. Just not enough in the timeline to keep someone watching without feeling duped at the end.
This may seem like a lot of writing for something so common but the ordeal was seriously stressful given that we hadn’t filmed in two years, he was pushing the whole time and he drove me from spot to spot to film.
Maybe this will encourage some people to make the move to HD, like myself, if they haven’t already. Not to say that filming in HD does not pose it’s own set of problems. This this shpeal is really just an attempt to have something come out of that day for people to see, as it was the initial goal of the trip.”
Gabriel Pitman
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