Sunday, November 04, 2007

Long way Down - continues


Looking on Wadi Rum whilst travelling through Jordan

Second week of watching Long Way Down (LWD) with Ewan Macgregor and Charley Boorman, in which an old friend Claudio is one of the cameraman/ Directors of Photography. (see front page of viewmagazine.tv) bottom corner where Claudio talks about how he works, with nothing more than a A1 and Laptop and this guys being doing it for 20 years.

Goodness the shoot on LWD is about eight cameras!

Not a big deal if you're used to multicamera or worked a film set.

But still how much video must have been shot and pity the production manager supervising logging shots and subsequently the edit?

I shot a traveologue across Jordan and a series in Africa ( South Africa) some years back and I remember practically sleeping in the edit room for a fortnight. And even though it was a VJ shoot, we overshot to compensate for pick-ups, which we knew we'd have no way of retrieving.

One thing that is evident from the shoot which Ewan tocuhed upon is they're peltering at the rate of knots, hardly getting the chance to savour the places visited. "Egypt/libyan in 5 days, I don't know how we're going to do that", he said

The pros and cons work both ways with "hard" edits that can yield harsh sequences.

This works well for the MTV generation and those viewers with premptive televisual language, but it may have your mother fretting for something else if she's been used to Michael Python Palin's travels

The added saga, an interesting predicament is that drama, and the worse that could happen makes for a far better doc, than having to make up loose banter ( sometimes)

If you get a chance watch the BBC's early Rough Guides and early Lonely Planet series.

I'm loving this series all the same.

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