Snapshots from last week in Colorado Springs.
The ID Agency brought Matt and Ryan and I out there to document the Pikes Peak Hill Climb for Ducati. Basically this is a race that has been going on forever where all sorts of random cars and bikes speed up this super tall mountain.
Practice lasts a week. The schedule was intense to say the least. Wake up calls were between 1:30AM and 2:30AM.
The base of the mountain was about 9,000 feet high while the apex was just over 14,000 feet. Not sure if you guys have ever been up that high, outside of a plane, but it doesn't feel great.
Few stills from a timelapse we set up at sunrise on top of the mountain.
We started the day shooting in freezing cold temperatures but later on when we were off the mountain it would get as hot as 90ยบ. Makes dressing yourself at 2AM really interesting.
We'd shoot practice from 5:30AM til 10. Then some interviews or other random b-roll stuff. We'd grab lunch at Chick-fil-A and make it back to the hotel somewhere around 2 or 3PM. We'd start downloading and backing up the footage from all 3 cameras right away. Later in the week we got smart and started dumping the footage in the car on the way down the mountain.
Everyday we'd edit a short video recapping the day's events which Ducati would post online at the end of the night. All told - between editing, selecting music, generating title cards, finding interview sound bites and making revisions - we'd usually finish the daily edits somewhere around midnight. Then we'd sleep for 2 hours and start the whole process over.
We've worked long hours before but this was without a doubt the most intense schedule and working conditions we've ever handled. We literally worked 22 hours some days and only took breaks for 20 minutes at a time to inhale junk food and caffeine.
A team from Contour came out and mounted cameras to all the riders' bikes and helmets for us each day which yielded some pretty sick point-of-view footage.
We got to drive up the mountain with 6-time champion Greg Tracy on day one and he pointed out all sorts of cool parts and features of the Pikes Peak. Very nice guy. All of the drivers and Ducati crew were super friendly and easy to work with.
Here's the 4th daily video we produced out there. Enjoy.
