Promotionnal clip for the Easy Rider Vietnam tour

Direction / Cinematography / Editing

Approximately 5min

Story:

Less than technically competent & having a go at Canon (entering the HD age on the home front, too) for the first time, the most memorable thing about Easy Rider (my first commercial venture, purely on my own time) was accidentally pushing a button doing an awkward overhead shot on the first day of shooting thus disabling all manual functions except for the focus.

With hindsight the silly ‘lock’ button would be an easy thing to locate, but under the blazing sun (sometimes 40 celcius or more), totally stressed, insisting I’d drive on my own with bubs on the back (a pioneer to Mr Chin’s knowledge & thus having to ‘cheat’ in all the shots Bub’s on the back of Mr Chin). And technically ignorant -just happy the ‘fuckin Canon could still run’, I wasn’t even close to solving the problem.
Can you imagine the difficulty in framing a wide shot with a relatively dark-skinned guy in 16:9 with what he was talking about totally whitened in the background – on auto?
Almost all exteriors with Mr Chin of course turned out rubbish, the sound in camera laziness strategy too (of course), but looking at it, I’m pleased that it’s the images, sound (effects & music) & not a talking head running the show. It leaves room for moving freely with the camera and subsequently in the editing.

This film was about turning people on to taking the trip (and most likely the first of its kind in Vietnam), so that Kim, my Danish friend in Nha Thrang, could make some more business, simple as that! And in that respect I think it works.

And funnily enough -   it’s infinitely better exposed than The Cacti Hunters which I shot, exposing manually, almost a year later! Sure, there were pans I’d have to omit when the light changed so dramatically that it simply didn’t hold up. But several times the ‘flashes’ that you get when shooting auto are very useful (when trimmed, usually shortened) and let’s face it: These new cameras know quite a bit about light (sound also is now actually fair straight-in-camera, but as is custom in this business, sound’s often a brutally low priority) but what’s more, their reaction time adapting to new environments is decidedly shorter than ours.