As I write this we will have just released our 65th video road test. Since we uploaded our first video at the beginning of last year, we have put ‘in the can’ more than 500 hours of filming and more than 20,000 miles of road-testing, and so I thought it was about time I took you behind the scenes and gave you a brief insight into how the films come into being.
We do not use any stock footage: every second of every video is shot by our own team and edited in-house at our production facility in north London.
The film is shot on public highways, mainly in Surrey and Sussex, using two high-definition cameras. Circuit footage is shot at the Lotus test track in Hethel. Some of the public roads you may recognise although many of them are tucked away in places where the traffic is light and we can work largely undisturbed. (Yes, there are still such places, but they are well off the beaten track.) The cars are the same ones that appear in my corresponding written road tests: for example, the Nissan Qashqai video corresponds to the Qashqai road test.
We use a combination of filming techniques: rolling footage from our film car (a Range Rover G4); drive-through and pan shots; and static footage, often filmed at a farm in Surrey. We have a second camera mounted on-board the test car, on which we capture cross-car and over-the-shoulder footage. Sound is always ‘live’ and not dubbed from other sources.
We have a film crew of three. I drive the film car; Terri Dean, another experienced motor journalist, drives the test car; and our cameraman is Ed Morris, one of the finest young cameramen ever to be associated with Ealing. (That’s Ealing Common, not Studios.) All sequences are co-ordinated car-to-car using hands-free radio. In addition to the actual film crew, we also have a backroom team whose job it is to edit and voice the video, using a script written by me.
Quite apart from the editing and post-production work, it takes a full day to shoot enough material to compile a single 3-minute video. Before filming, I spend the best part of a week with the car so that I become entirely familiar with its handling, ride-quality and salient features. My impressions result in a virtual story board from which we plan the various sequences. I hope you agree that the results speak for themselves.
thanks for the insight into how you guys put together the video content.
I must say that on the whole I really enjoy them, and the production values seem to be getting better with each one.
I have extensive experience of working in broadcast and I know how difficult it is to put these kind of videos together and with only a crew of 3 I am impressed. Keep up the good work.
Alex Smith | 26 Nov 07 - 18:54