OP
They produced a great video for you Jack. Enjoyed it. I'm curious how much actual footage is taken to result in a quality 9 minute video.
All I got to say is, if you do focus your automobile efforts on that one 911 the rest of your life, I'm sure it will be the fastest darn Porsche on the planet! (And it will probably still make less than 300hp)
Keep up the fine work.
Yeah. I think the real skill to making one of these things is to be able to find a thread through all the interview footage that is simple, interesting -- and is something you can piece together with the video you actually got and the audio of what the subject actually said.
The whole thing was shot in the course of three afternoons. First, the guys came out and met me when I was out for a regular track day at Willow Springs. The idea was to get some footage of the track, of my car out on it, and some footage from inside the car. It went fine, except that the new uprights for the rear wing that I was testing collapsed about a half hour after they got there. So all the footage of me under the car adjusting the rear swaybar and taking off the front spoiler is because I had to do that in order to keep running the car that day. The result is that there's a little bit of footage of the car with the wing and splitter on, but then a larger amount with all that stuff taken off. I think the car looks better without that stuff, so I guess I'm happy the uprights gave out. At the end of the day, we all left at the same time -- so they also shot some footage of me driving home through the desert.
Then they came out for an afternoon (maybe three hours) to shoot some footage of the garage and interview me. I'm really surprised that the shot of me looks as good as it does, since a pretty-sudden windstorm moved me out of the chair they were going to shoot all of that in to a place further back in the garage -- they literally just moved my chair and turned the two cameras. You'd think there would be lighting to set up, but no. Digital cameras make this stuff look a lot better than it used to.
You can see leaves getting blown into the shop in some of the shots. And the director took some quick shots as they were leaving. You can see piles of leaves that had been blowing around as we shot inside.
Then we went out for a final afternoon to some of the local canyon roads. They wanted shots from cameras mounted both inside and on the outside of the car. This part went really quickly. I guess they've done it enough so that they're able to keep track of what they're getting and how it will edit together. The most time-consuming part was finding a few stretches of road where we wouldn't have people's houses and driveways in the background. We stopped at one point to change the camera mounts, and that's where the car ended up in a place where it looked nice enough to shoot some footage of it sitting there while the sun was going down.
And that was it. What surprises me (I guess based on the kind of work I normally do) was how little planning seemed to go into any part of it. We never talked about what the 'bigger picture' of the clip would be -- of how they would relate the garage to the car or if there was anything really unique or interesting about my thoughts about either of them. Once they'd done their shooting, I watched some similar clips online and thought they really needed some kind of audio clip that would give the finished video some kind of 'hook' -- some overall perspective on my car and garage that could be reduced down to a few sentences. The stuff you remember after you watch a clip like this. I recorded a few sound bites on my laptop and emailed them to the director. He was polite about it, but I don't think any of those recordings made it into the final clip. That's good, because the stuff I recorded sitting alone in my office made sense to me while I was recording it. But when I listened to it again after sending it off, I thought I sounded like a complete jack-***. If I heard that voice in a video, I'd hate that guy. It made me think the audio they recorded would have the same effect. But the audio in the finished clip sounds fine to me -- much less of that condescending, overly-recise, 'mister-teacher-dad' tone that I heard in the clips I recorded by myself.
The lesson? Don't quit your day job, Jack. Leave the documentary filmmaking to the pros.
The audio you hear in the finished clip is also surprising to me because they did a lot of editing on it. Sentences that sound like they came right after the other actually have big pieces edited out, or have been rearranged. The end result is that the talking you hear is free of the digressions and over-detail that I'm prone to. I talked a lot about the guy who came up with the ideas for my car's suspension (he's the 'genius' I make reference to around the five-minute mark), but they clipped that talk down to something simple. I'm bummed that Tyson's name ended up on the cutting room floor, but the truth is it would get boring to listen to everything I said -- the director and editor have a great ear for how much and how little of my talk to let through.
So let me edit myself a little right now and give you the short answer. They spent about ten hours with me. Some of that time was spent shooting footage and some was spent setting equipment up. They ran multiple cameras for some of it, so there was no doubt hours of footage to go through. I'd be surprised if the hours spent editing were less than ten. I think that the editing is the biggest part of a project like this. First you have to put together the words people are going to be listening to and then you have to find visuals that support those words.
I think they did an awesome job of it. My kids (and their kids) will now have a little document that shows grandpa Jack back when he still had his driver's license, his hearing, and enough of his wits to get his old car out on a racetrack. They'll learn that there was a time when the old guy could really make an air-cooled engine sing.
And because we're on a new page again, here's one more link to the video.
Link.
