Written by:
SPEED Staff
SPEEDtv.com
After all the time, effort and eating dust my team and I put into making last year’s Two Roads to Baja, you’d think we’d want to take a breather from making documentaries about long-distance off road races. But since we had so much fun, met so many fascinating people, were so happy with the final product, and received such a positive response from critics and viewers, we were eager to create a sequel of sorts for Two Roads to Baja.
Two Roads to The Taupo 1000, which follows the same two groups of guys from the first Two Roads as they compete in the biennial Taupo 1000 in New Zealand, is what we came up with.
This is much more a documentary about people who race than it is a documentary about a race. We all watch racing on TV, and certainly the race coverage on SPEED is at a very high level of style and content, but we didn’t want to go down that route. What I wanted to do was get an insider’s story on taking on a challenge and chasing a goal, but do it from two differing perspectives. The two perspectives come from Team Necessary and Ryan Millen and his team – two great groups of people, but very different in their approach.
The Necessarys, as we quickly found out when making Two Roads to Baja, are truly a good-time group of guys who have a lot of passion for what they do, but want to have maximum fun doing it. That certainly comes across in the show, I think.
As for the Millen side of things, it’s great, because I’ve known Rod Millen for 25 years and he’s just an amazing competitor, an amazing businessperson, and an amazing team organizer. To see his son, Ryan, come up through there and basically take on the same pursuit and challenge, and see how he approaches it _ that really shows the professional side of things versus the amateur side of things, which is what the Necessary guys represent.
I think what’s nice for us, as filmmakers, is that you end up rooting for both teams for different reasons. You root for the Necessarys because they’re the underdogs, and you root for Ryan Millen because he’s the polished professional taking on the local heroes.
And because racing is so unpredictable, you never know what you’ll get once the event starts and the cameras are rolling. To see these two teams both take on the same basic challenge, but in such different ways and with such different outcomes is a fascinating process. When we’re filming, everything’s out of our control, and I guess you can say we’re merely observers of the drama. Our role is to capture that drama, be in the right place at the right time, so that we can tell those stories afterward.
Once we get back from the event, we have a small army of editors and producers that work on the project. I’ve been there for the whole event; I’ve been behind the camera and lived through the whole thing. I’ve also competed in this style of event many times, so I kind of know the sorts of trials and tribulations that a participant will face. So when we get back with all our footage, we take the bullet points of what I feel define the best of the preparations and the best moments of the race and build the footage that represents those bullet points into little short stories.
Then we take the rest of the footage and bridge those shorter stories to each other so we have one complete story to tell in the end. Generally after an event, we have tons of short stories to use; unfortunately, we end up cutting a lot of them in the end so the whole thing fits within the allotted length. There are obviously times when you want to develop things further, but what you look for in the end is a balance within the space you’re given to work with. And I think we were able to find that balance with this film. I think we’ve told another really great story.
Click here for more on the Two Roads to the Taupo 1000 on SPEED!
