Blog Marco

Did you know that a lot of our news are produced from News Releases? Some are pure news like reports from government and things. Some are commercial. You may be being sold a product without your knowledge. I was reading through the paper and I found probably the most unconvincing story which most probably originated from a press release. I thought they were going to talk about cycling around Vietnam but really they're selling some tech gear. Screw them. (Although for disclosure I do own a FreeAgent drive which does a pretty good job, but I own a JVC HD Camera and not the Sony HD cam as advertised by the article)

In March last year, documentary filmmaker David Smith had no intention of following 30 cyclists from one end of Vietnam to the other perched on the back of a motorbike.

But two weeks later, armed with a digital high definition camera and no script, that's exactly what he and his son Denby were doing.

"We found ourselves dropped into this amazing 10-day exercise, and interviewing them as they went," Mr Smith says.

The result is a documentary, Boris' Brilliant Bike Ride, which has helped the cyclists raise $430,000 for muscular dystrophy research and further pushed the boundaries of what digital technology brings to filmmaking.

Working with a Sony HVR-Z1 high-definition camera, a tripod and a shotgun microphone, Mr Smith and his son set about documenting the fund-raising effort of Muscular Dystrophy Australia executive director Boris Struk, former boxing champion Barry Michael and 30 other cyclists.

Perched precariously as he was, Mr Smith soon became accustomed to the dangers of Vietnam's roads.

"There was a high risk of road accidents with the huge traffic flow of trucks and motorbikes," he says. "One of our riders went over the handlebars because he was videoing with a little camera and pulled the front handbrake - they'd been set up opposite to the usual arrangement. He dislocated his shoulder.

"I had no dramas at all but riding backwards on the pillion seat means you can hear the truck engines and horns coming at your back."

Over the past nine months Mr Smith has taken 22 hours of digital tape and created a documentary that he is showing to Australian and US networks.

Mr Smith got to know Mr Struk earlier this decade at the launch of a neuroscience facility in Melbourne. He had been asked to make the introductory video and so became accustomed with the story of muscular dystrophy. The two went on to become friends, with Mr Struk making additional films for MDA.

David Smith has been working with digital for most of this decade, and decided in this instance to handle all the post-production himself to keep costs down. But the 22 hours of footage on his hands equalled 15 gigabytes per hour - expanded threefold by the time it is rendered out for further image manipulation.

Mr Smith says managing and editing that footage was made easier by a donation from Seagate of two FreeAgent Pro 750 gigabyte storage drives, which have enabled him to better manage his media and finally back up his work.

"The key to the whole exercise was just being incredibly fussy with my file folders and organisation, otherwise I'd get completely lost," Mr Smith says. "Having such large capacity on these FreeAgent drives means I have simplified the whole process, and the office looks almost tidy."

He says it is hard to underestimate the impact that digital technology has had on documentary filmmaking, from benefits in the field such as longer-duration tapes to the new post-production capabilities for effects, colour correction and sound mixing.

"One of the outcomes of the switch to digital is that it has become possible for people like me to do everything themselves," Mr Smith says.

"My son does some photography and sound recording, but for a lot of projects I just write it, shoot it, edit and make the DVD - every step of the process.

"I do everything, which is good because I don't have to spell it out to someone else, but it also means that there's a lot of hours of work involved."

The documentary itself was edited using Sony Vegas Pro 8 and DVDArchitect 4.5, working on a Pentium 4 PC. Mr Smith says that in the future he'd consider taking digital storage into the field with him, as a back-up.

"The tapes become incredibly precious after you film them - they're like gold, because there is so much blood, sweat and tears gone into them," Mr Smith says. "I'm very concerned not to lose good material." He has made a number of documentaries over the years, some of them for Channel Seven's The World Around Us and the ABC's EarthWatch. "They were fairly typical wildlife documentaries, where you go off into the bush and film beautiful things and come back and tell the story," he says.

"This was completely different."

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