24H DUBAI
Client Riot House Production
24H DUBAI 2013 – with JC Battut & Boutsen Ginion Racing Team
THE PROJECT
Between 8 and 14 January 2013, we were in the United Arab Emirates to follow the racing driver Jean-Charles Battut during the Dubai 24 Hour Race (Team Boutsen Ginion with Renault Mégane). A first in motorsports, but also the opportunity to create our first portrait – documentary. The main objective was to create an immersive race video lived through the eyes of a pilot.
THE SHOOTING
With only 2 days on-site, we had a very tight schedule! Shooting on a car race is a unique and extremely impressive experience, but it is also a difficult exercise with many constraints. In addition to noise and heat, journalists, photographers and cameramen are often limited to a frustrating, security perimeter. So it is sometimes necessary to play with the limits in order to bring THE shot that could make the difference. This is what Adi did during the night by climbing an abandoned 40-storey building, from which he brought back nocturnal images of the race.
Regarding the material we used, most of the slow-motions were shot with the Sony FS700, the rest of the shots being recorded with 2 Canon 5D Mark III, also used for time-lapses with the help of a CineSlider Kessler. A wide range of focal lengths – Canon L-series lenses – was used to cover the 5 kilometers-circuit. As a result, a lot of sleep to catch up on, many kilometers and more than a terabyte of rushes, which means 48 hours almost as exhausting for our team as for the drivers!
As soon as we arrived in France, a second challenge was waiting for us: a very long work of post-production such as video logging, editing, color grading and sound mixing. We spread the work on several weeks in order to get the excepted result. On this project we have chosen to make the pilot narrate his own experience. We played with calm and dynamic parts in order to highlight the different stages experienced by the drivers before, during and after the race. We collaborated with Mix & Mouse for the sound design part and for the voice-overs recording.
To get back to the sport performance : after 24 hours of challenging races and a lot of technical problems, the JC Battut Team finished in 3rd place: a nice reward for the amount of work provided by the team members!
