TALISKER WHISKY ATLANTIC CHALLENGE
Three months ago I received an email from a contact at Kessels Kramer asking, “how would you like to spend a couple of months on a yacht crossing the Atlantic?”, as a sailor who has rarely been beyond the site of land for more than a few days and with an ocean crossing in my bucket list, of course I said yes. 2 and a half weeks later, after a mad rush of reorganising my life so I could walk away from it for 3 months, after buying and preparing equipment I arrive in La Gomera, Canary Islands, to begin this incredible adventure.
My first task was to spend 2 weeks in San Sebastian, La Gomera, filming preparations and interviewing all 46 rowers. The films would be following these incredible characters. The challenge was more about endurance than a sporting pursuit the huge variety of personalities was what interested me most about the challenge. In the Canary Islands Andy McLeod of Film Canary Islands gave excellent local support and provided a second unit to film over the last few days leading up to race start.
The second stage of the project was to travel on board the support yacht Aurora to film the progress of the rowers. I chose due to the size, stability and hopefully dryness of Aurora a rig of Canon 7D with Zacuto shoulder brace, 17-50mm 2.8 Tamron, 50mm 1.4 Canon, Beach box, gun mic and radio mic’s. The kit and I become inseparable and I am very pleased with the results. This event deserved a high standard of filmic story telling and footage, the chosen rig helped me achieve this.
My biggest concern was of course, sea sickness and being unable to work, added to this, how would I be able to edit (MacBook Pro with FCP) down below under way and up to 30 angles? I don’t know why, perhaps with the boating experience I already had I had great luck in not suffering and apart from having to find ways of fixing the laptop to the salon table, the edits were completed fairly easily. The finished films were compressed to a degree that kept the resolution as high as possible but didn’t blow the satellite broadband budget. They were then uploaded to the agency server before client approval and broadcasting on the TWAC website.
The final stage was to spend whatever time between our arrival in Barbados and the rowing boats arrival making films of the magic moment of completion, the crews were interviewed as a group within an hour or so of stepping off to get their raw response to the experience then the film was cut with a mix of their own footage and mine. Not managing to be in Barbados at the first arrivals and not being there for the last boat my other task was to brief and set up a local crew to cover boats I wasn’t available to film myself.
I spent 47 days on the yacht acting as a full member of the crew when not film making, we traveled 5,600 miles - equivalent to 2.3 crossings between the Canaries and Barbados, I cooked 11 evening meals, did 141 watches of 2 hours each day or night, 23 days worth of night sailing and made over 40 films of around 2.5 minutes.
The http://www.taliskerwhiskyatlanticchallenge.com is online and all the films I are available to view.
Two examples are also on my Vimeo site
here http://vimeo.com/36639630
and here http://vimeo.com/36640243
