Back in 1999 Paul Beaton and I went cycling, from England, via Scandinavia, to Istanbul, Turkey. We took along with us one of those small Sony mini dv video cameras (although they are smaller now, of course) which rode upfront in the handle bar bag. Each tape that we shot, we mailed back to England, thereby testing the postal system in around 14 countries across Scandinavia and Eastern Europe.
All 18 hours of tapes flew back to England successfully, and after 3 years of messing around, getting usable hardware and software and desperately trying to make time (!), we are in the process of making the film of the cycle ride.
The first section, aptly enough, is England. Three minutes of footage, travelling from Stafford to Newcastle in no particular order, has made a rough cut. Last night we wrote and recorded a preliminary voice over with Kevin. Once we have built all fifteen sections of the film with these rough voice overs, we will be re doing the voice overs for consistencies sake.
Each section of our film will be appearing, as we cut them, on the El Star Loser website and streamed in glorious Quicktime (alright, not a stream, but an upfront header). We're hopeing to have the first section up on the site shortly, along with other bits and pieces from the cycle trip including emails sent during the trip - progress reports.
And finally, El Star Loser, the name of the our production effort, is so named after the consumption of an Elstar Lose apple in East Germany, 3 days outside of Berlin. Hence the forth coming upside down apple logo. Lets hope we don't get sued.
Posted by tom at July 16, 2003 10:11 AM