Bikes for Africa doco

EXCITING TIMES!

A little excited Happa writes this post. Sich and I have just finished our first day of filming, well actually Sich does the filming, I just do would I would do normally while he holds the camera getting all excited about the light, atmosphere and exposure (I don’t know what exposure is, I just put that in there, to me exposure is what the guy wearing the trench coat at the playground does).

Due to the big budget nature of our Bikes for Africa doco, Sich has been put up in the finest accommodation Melbourne has to offer, yip you guessed it, our couch. To think Sich was walking down the aisle with NZ celebrity Lisa Chappell from McLeod’s Daughters a few days ago to now sleeping in a shoe box apartment lounge room that he shares with two bikes. Sich is like a cucumber floating down the river, he’s cool and goes with the flow.

It’s bloody gold, it’s one big creative nest in here at the moment, I’m writing away, Sich working his cinematic magic trying to make the tall skinny guy with patchy facial hair look remotely camera worthy (so much for the lens adding a couple of kgs!) and Mandy working away at Beer Bikes and Bands whilst cooking us pumpkin risotto.

It’s been awesome, great working with Sich, a man who’s super talented but yet so darn chilled out and down to earth. We’ve been talking a lot about the doco, his ideas for it, what I have to get filmed in Africa. It’s pretty funny, we both come from polar opposite ends of the filming spectrum, Sich an award winner, and me who probably comes in somewhere towards the chimpanzee holding a video camera hitting buttons end. An example, I pulled my all my camera equipment out, which I haven’t even had time to look at, I go through it and innocently say to Sich:

“Sich bro, I brought this $20 wide angle lens, you want to have a look at it and let me know if it’s any good?”

“I can tell you now, it’s shit.”

“Oh real? How much you pay for a lens?”

“The one I’m wanting is $3-4K.”

“Ohhh, I suppose my $10 no name batteries won’t be good either.”

Today we spent the afternoon capturing some footage of me getting my bike ready. I learnt pretty quickly that the chimpanzee I talked about before may also be better at multi tasking than me. Sich wanted me talking whilst working on the bike, but it was like I had a switch for talking and a switch for working on the bike but both couldn’t be switched on simultaneously. There were great patches of me talking away but I would be staring mindlessly at the wheel in my hand that I was meant to be fixing, or vice versa I would be fixing the wheel whilst making noises like “ummmm, ahhhhhhh, what the f#*#K am I talking about Sich.” My lack of multi tasking reminds me of one of my supervisors on the rigs who would always say to me whilst I asked him questions mid task, “I can’t bloody walk and chew gum!”

But from the whole afternoon, less than 30 seconds will make it into the final cut. Check out the time lapse Sich has whipped up for the afternoon, pretty bloody good.