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Making Two Roads to the Taupo: Part 2
Filmmaker Jeff Zwart talks about how much time, effort and equipment is involved in making the Two Roads to The Taupo 1000...
When you watch Two Roads to The Taupo 1000 on SPEED, you might not realize quite how much equipment was used, how many people were involved, and how much time was spent planning, recording the event, and compiling a one-hour show out of all that footage. Suffice to say, it’s not something the average Joe could go out and do with two buddies and a single camcorder, so here’s an idea what’s involved when we go about making a documentary on this scale.
We actually started filming about four months before the race. A lot of the build and preparation of the FJ Cruiser race trucks looks pretty similar, so we weren’t at the Millen and Necessary race shops filming all day every day. But we’d be in and out of sponsor meetings, as well as keeping an eye on the vehicle builds, making sure we got all the key stuff.
Luckily for us, the guys involved got used to us being there fairly quickly and acted naturally around the cameras. They also made for great interview subjects all through the process. We kind of came in and out of the story during those four months, but spent a lot more time with both teams in the final days before the vehicles were shipped to New Zealand.
Once the FJs were shipped, we had some downtime, but pretty soon it was time to head over there for the race. I arrived a week in advance to scout locations along the course, as well as the places where Team Necessary and Ryan were staying. We shot the buildup to the race, and the entirety of the race itself, and made sure we stuck around for the aftermath, too – the final parties and final words. It’s always nice to hear from these guys after the dust has settled, because your perspective on the race changes a lot when the adrenaline rush is over and you’ve had time to think about it.
Filming the event took a lot of coordination, a lot of cameras and a lot of manpower. I’m not sure how many hours of material we shot in total, but it was a lot. It goes a long way to explaining why the editing process took another couple of months.
Like with Two Roads to Baja, I did most of my directing from the helicopter and shot most of the aerial stuff myself. The helicopter just gives me a unique and perfect platform to follow things and see what’s playing out. It’s pretty interesting to be able to fly ahead and see difficult areas and cover our “hero vehicles” as they negotiate that difficult terrain.
All the while I’ve got five or six other camera crews on the ground in different places (there were between 25 and 30 of us in total down there directly involved with this project), and the whole effort gets to be pretty monumental. We also had a number of local crews to cut down on the number of people we had to bring over from the U.S., and because I do a lot of other work down in New Zealand, I was confident we’d be able to get good people.
Those ground crews don’t get much rest either. When the FJ Cruisers aren’t racing, they’re getting repaired, or there’s some other drama playing out, so those guys are on it for the duration. It may not have been as rough as Baja was, but it was still a very difficult event to cover, and it’s gratifying to know that we had the best people out there to do it. The biggest thing I’m concerned about is wanting to be there in the middle of everything but never distracting the people you’re filming, and I think the crews did a very good job of that.
As for equipment, we brought a lot over from the States, but the helicopter camera system that we used so much was already down there, as was our great pilot, who’d actually done all the aerial coverage for the New Zealand World Rally Championship event a week earlier. We filmed everything in HD, which is recorded on either tapes or memory cards. For on-boards, we used the RaceCam system, which allows us to run the smallest of cameras anywhere we want in the car (three of them per car). The nice thing about the camera is that it’s not that expensive, so it isn’t the end of the world if the racers lost or destroyed one.
So, those are some of the facts and figures for the production of Two Roads to the Taupo 1000. Enjoy the show!
We actually started filming about four months before the race. A lot of the build and preparation of the FJ Cruiser race trucks looks pretty similar, so we weren’t at the Millen and Necessary race shops filming all day every day. But we’d be in and out of sponsor meetings, as well as keeping an eye on the vehicle builds, making sure we got all the key stuff.
Luckily for us, the guys involved got used to us being there fairly quickly and acted naturally around the cameras. They also made for great interview subjects all through the process. We kind of came in and out of the story during those four months, but spent a lot more time with both teams in the final days before the vehicles were shipped to New Zealand.
Once the FJs were shipped, we had some downtime, but pretty soon it was time to head over there for the race. I arrived a week in advance to scout locations along the course, as well as the places where Team Necessary and Ryan were staying. We shot the buildup to the race, and the entirety of the race itself, and made sure we stuck around for the aftermath, too – the final parties and final words. It’s always nice to hear from these guys after the dust has settled, because your perspective on the race changes a lot when the adrenaline rush is over and you’ve had time to think about it.
Filming the event took a lot of coordination, a lot of cameras and a lot of manpower. I’m not sure how many hours of material we shot in total, but it was a lot. It goes a long way to explaining why the editing process took another couple of months.
Like with Two Roads to Baja, I did most of my directing from the helicopter and shot most of the aerial stuff myself. The helicopter just gives me a unique and perfect platform to follow things and see what’s playing out. It’s pretty interesting to be able to fly ahead and see difficult areas and cover our “hero vehicles” as they negotiate that difficult terrain.
All the while I’ve got five or six other camera crews on the ground in different places (there were between 25 and 30 of us in total down there directly involved with this project), and the whole effort gets to be pretty monumental. We also had a number of local crews to cut down on the number of people we had to bring over from the U.S., and because I do a lot of other work down in New Zealand, I was confident we’d be able to get good people.
Those ground crews don’t get much rest either. When the FJ Cruisers aren’t racing, they’re getting repaired, or there’s some other drama playing out, so those guys are on it for the duration. It may not have been as rough as Baja was, but it was still a very difficult event to cover, and it’s gratifying to know that we had the best people out there to do it. The biggest thing I’m concerned about is wanting to be there in the middle of everything but never distracting the people you’re filming, and I think the crews did a very good job of that.
As for equipment, we brought a lot over from the States, but the helicopter camera system that we used so much was already down there, as was our great pilot, who’d actually done all the aerial coverage for the New Zealand World Rally Championship event a week earlier. We filmed everything in HD, which is recorded on either tapes or memory cards. For on-boards, we used the RaceCam system, which allows us to run the smallest of cameras anywhere we want in the car (three of them per car). The nice thing about the camera is that it’s not that expensive, so it isn’t the end of the world if the racers lost or destroyed one.
So, those are some of the facts and figures for the production of Two Roads to the Taupo 1000. Enjoy the show!
Click here for more on the Two Roads to the Taupo 1000 on SPEED!
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