Personal View site logo
Make sure to join PV on Telegram or Facebook! Perfect to keep up with community on your smartphone.
FAST and FURIOUS made in China. 9 minutes Making Of
  • eurocameramaneurocameraman

    STREET OF FURY: I directed, edited and partly shot this 9 minutes Making Of video, a documentary related to a unique and huge project shot in China, near Shanghai, during 4 months. An international team of 300 people was build up around Gary Hymes, the stunt director of famous movie series "Fast and Furious" for shooting a 3D feature film filled up with car and motorcycle chases and crashes.

    All team was fantastic and very helpful on the Making Of, with a special thanks to Gary Hymes who is both a great director, a great technician and a very humble person.

    This is the first time in China, a project of that kind is produced at such scale. Interesting thing is that all those effort were made for a theme park, not for a theater release.

    On a technical point, shots for the making if were done by 3 cameramen (including myself) working with Sony EX1, Canon 5D2, Panasonic AF100 and GH3. We collected more than 20 hours of footage and I had a hard time to choose among all the great stuff we had. Finally, I succeed to compress the best of it into a 9 minutes exciting piece (edited in Premiere CS6). Enjoy!

  • 12 Replies sorted by
  • WhiteRabbitWhiteRabbit

    ecm, thanks for sharing, I enjoyed the BTS, seeing some of the camera setups, lighting, etc. 20 hours into less than 10 minutes, I don't envy some of the decision making that had to be done, and then perhaps being told to make changes from producer(s) with your progressive edits. Interesting, yet tiring work to shoot and put all this together in post.

  • eurocameramaneurocameraman

    @WhiteRabbit Thanks for your comment. You are perfectly right, directing/shooting/editing such a documentary is complicated on every level, but everything depends on relationship with agency producer and client. I am working in Shanghai since 9 years and I was the first to produce Making Of for TV commercial in China. Nowadays, people are contacting me to do this type of work and they trust me enough to leave me free handed. Most of my requirement are mandatory: having a quiet room (which is always challenging in China) with my light set up for several interviews, having access to the action as close a possible... Editing is the most painful part, but it also depends on the care and the speed of decision from the client. This video could had been finished 3 monts earlier in this particular case...

  • MRfannyMRfanny

    that was just just 9mins of awesome. well done.

  • eurocameramaneurocameraman

    @MRfanny Thanks for your comment. I tried to make this Making of also interesting by describing the difficulties to work in China as well, something often understimated by westrn based production asking us to shoot something for them in thi spart of the world. It is hard to imagine how simple requirement can become so complicated here and one of the best reward is to be able to finalize the project whatever happened on the way. For exemple, on the flying car crash, the distance was miscalculated and 1 of our camera was destroyed ( it is the reason why the footage stop abruptly). The last file was corrupted in ths shock and we just could use the start of the action when the car goes through the trailer.

  • WhiteRabbitWhiteRabbit

    ecm, yes, I now recall that you're located in China, observing your posts and excellent footage/edit in your thread last year. Yes, editing can be the most painful part, I am often handed folders of undocumented footage from three cam shoot and have to figure out the jig-saw puzzle of an event. Nothing remotely as interesting as Street of Fury. Love/hate relationship with editing here. Yeah, awesome project you shot the BTS, and post production.

  • eurocameramaneurocameraman

    @WhiteRabbit I am having the same love/hate relation with editing, especially when shots are coming from different cameras and different guys while being myself in charge of the complete project (my responsability if things get wrong). While importing the shots, I discover mistakes or waste of great footage due to unwised camera move or set up. I always try to educate my camera crew before any project being as precise as possible to teach them what I am looking for and what type of mistake or move they should avoid. It works well on this project and as I didnt want to deal with all the footage, I hired a local team to pre-select the best shot and start up the basic edit. Problem, local Chinese have no clue how to properly organize a project with logical folder classification. Plus, they got all folder name and some document in Chinese mixed up with brken English (worst than mine). THis caused me some great bugs in the past as previous version of Premiere were not abe to accept Chinese file name in an English project... Globally, they still save me lots of time, but I had to work harder to compensate the mess they started with.

  • jleojleo

    Great stuff, always enjoy your videos! Thanks!

  • eurocameramaneurocameraman

    @jleo Thanks a lot for your comment. Highly appreciated. People sometime get me wrong when I post my video here and think I am selling something, but as I am based in China and as 99% of the people surfing on this type of website are from another part of the world, it is not an efficient way to advertize myself. I am just happy to share things I am doing in a location many viewer here doesn't know. And best of all is when people appreciate my work. By the way, do not hesitate to click on the "like" button in Vimeo if you do like it. So far, I got more than 100 plays and 300 loads, but not a single "like"...

  • WhiteRabbitWhiteRabbit

    ecm, since mostly editing for a few years, it raises my awareness of some camera techniques and issues confronted when cutting. I hope to soon shoot more and then edit. I understand some of the concerns you have when viewing/editing footage from others. I hope to be a better camera operator in the future, in part because of my editing time, coupled with putting more hours in behind the camera and gaining more experience. Baby steps.

  • eurocameramaneurocameraman

    @WhiteRabbit You are on the good track! I had a chance to start my career as a photo journalist (very long ago) and I was very early trained to consider my creation on the field (both pictures and notes) as only the starting point of a complete workflow needed to tell the story properly to readers. It means I had to come back with plenty of information and lots of shots variation (point of view and composition) to both cover the whole story and to offer enough room for the designer to build up an exciting layout. I am just doing the same thing nowadays in video production as a one man crew most of the time (directing/lighting/shooting/editing) and I think that to become an efficient director or cameraman, it is important to leanr FIRST how to do a proper edit. It is the best way to understand what is mandatory on a shoot and what type of things you abslolutely need to take care of.

  • WhiteRabbitWhiteRabbit

    20+ years in/out of production and post. Started mostly with ENG on the shoulder cams in SD in the 90's. Just not shot a lot lately. Things will change in a few weeks when my camera and lenses are returned from lens tech, all serviced, collimated, adapter shimmed to my camera. Taken 7+ months so far, don't ask...

    Thanks for the feedback and motivation.

  • eurocameramaneurocameraman

    Sorry Guys. Client asked to remove the video and I have to respect that decision! Sorry about that

Add a Comment