Mountain Biking in
Northern Ireland, that was the entire speck for the filming competition anything else goes. The film highlights a group on
Facebook called “Just
Ride Your
Bike NI” and all the riders. It highlights off some of Northern Ireland’s amazing
MTB spots and shows what our riders are capable of!
How it started!
So was posting things on reddit and got a comment from a guy suggesting that I should try make something for a competition, he then directed me to the group “Just Ride your Bike NI”. I added my self to the group and posted that I would love to enter something for the competition showed a few examples of work and then got talking to
Keith. Keith and I met up talked about a few ideas, organised some dates, spend a day scouting location and then filming started.
Working in the
Terrain
Mountain biking is done over a wide area and the majority of it starts at the top of the hill, that hill being rough terrain usually forest ground. One of the biggest eye opener’s was moving the production gear we need to each location usually up hill and at least a mile in each movement, one day we had walked 5 miles in total. You defiantly need some sort of off road small transport device a quad would probably be best bet as its small and could tow the gear in a small trailer, in saying that there were places we were that even a quad couldn’t go but definitely would help
Competing for light
A lot of filming was done in a forest with thick tall larch trees reaching hight of up to 45 metres tall, on the ground at some
point this was almost like filming indoors. If doing it again think lights would be a good idea if if we had the man power on person just using lights, a reflector wouldn’t have even worked cause there was no direct light to reflect with. This made shooting with the GoPro difficult any footage with it was grainy and was difficulty to pick a good setting to get a good result, but was learnt a lot when shooting this how much functionality the GoPro has.
Mountain Biking
Hurts
At one of the shoots Lee was Practicing a jump and came off it was scary biscuits, took him a while to get up he went home after that and I discovered on the way home he had to go to hospital, he had broken bones in his back, he’s ok now in fact he was out riding two’s week later
. In the space of the time that I was filming on the guys Darryl had ended up in a neck brace and saw on the
Facebook group that mountain rescue had to bring two guys down from the
Forest. When out mountain biking don't expect to get hurt, plan for it!
GoPro on mountain bike
Shooting mountain biking on the GoPro I had too main issues stability and the angle. Trying to put the camera on a bike its just too rough a terrain, footage is too shaky and it is very much the same on the rider, I found that trying to attach the camera to something that is going to stay steady in the shot (helmet) is the best way to make the footage appear steady. In terms of an angel is is really hard to get a full body shoot on a mountain bike it just tried a few different angles and just ended up being too shaky I had only seen after shooting a good shot was to attach the GoPro to a stick and then that the helmet, the chicken neck effect kicks in and you get a full body shot.
The
Backflip
Ya just get a the film edited week early, ready for submission everything perfect and organised, ya get a phone call from
Nathan “what are you doing tomorrow i’ve got the backflip ready.”
Hell yea! canceled a full day shoot and was sitting ready in the morning first thing. This was the first time he was attempting it in the wild, fresh ramp carved out and ready to go, it took about an hour to get geared up to do it, was it worth it, totally was, was an amazing shot!!
Ryan Loney (
BNL Productions) |
Producer /
Director
Paddy O’Kane (BNL Productions) | Editor /
Camera person
Jason Joy (Corepolo) |
Animation /
Camera Person
Keith Williams (Just Ride Your Bike NI) |
Rider / Producer
Nathan
Mccomb | Rider
Ryan Shaw | Rider
Archie Axten | Rider
Lee Sofley | Rider
Darryl
Aston | Rider
Frazer Morrison | Rider
Alan Walker |
Fade |
Music
- published: 09 May 2015
- views: 10220