BMX World Championships

We have just returned from, what was, one of the most intense filming schedules I have done to date. We were filming for the 2012 BMX World Championships at the Birmingham NIA. It had taken many weeks of emailing and phone calls to gain access to this event but it was worth it in the end.

The track on the first day 

It was very hard to co-ordinate the three of us because we all had to film to give us full track coverage and the information from the organisers was less than adequate but after a few hours on the first day we all settled into a good routine and the following days were far more successful.

Michaela and Tim in the press meeting!

Due to the documentary still being in the development stages I decided to have coverage of all the GB BMX riders so this has resulted in a large amount of footage at this point. Across the four days we shot nearly 200Gb from two panasonic P2's and three Digital SLR's (1x Canon 5D and 2x Canon 1D's). This is an excessive amount of footage for a ten minute documentary but a large proportion wont make it into the edit once we have fully established who we have as contributors on the doc.
The Director, producer and D.O.P all shot this weekend and enjoyed practising our skills of following the action and trying to capture riders as they whizz past at speeds of 35 mph. it was a tough weekend but also a very rewarding experience and I hope that the end result we be able to get across some of the action, drama and excitement of the events.

As the director on this documentary, it has always been a hard idea to get into a script for a ten minute piece, the fear is with an extreme sports subject that you end up making a promotional film and not a televisual programme. With that in mind I'am glad that I have a strong team which worked so well on the previous documentary.