Fast & Furious

In 2003, documentary filmmaker Dana Brown (Step Into Liquid) and a crew of 70 headed south to cover the most dangerous road race in the world. Imagine an event that crosses Mad Max with the Indy 500 and you begin to get some idea of what the Baja 1000 – the longest point-to-point race in the world – is all about, with hundreds of entrants racing non-stop around the clock until they reach the finish line. The result is the documentary Dust to Glory, shot using a mix of film, DV and HD formats.

"The biggest technical challenge was just getting coverage, and to do that we used 55 cameras," reports Brown. These were deployed among 13 ground units, four helicopters, a chase unit equipped with specialized camera mounts, and four solo roving cameramen, as well as in many of the vehicles taking part in the race. "It was mind-boggling, because once you start putting pins in the map just to see what ground coverage you have, for instance, you see just how far apart they are, and how much of the race you’re going to miss. And then you just pray that all the guys following in the helicopters are going to make the right choices. So right away, I realized there’s no real way to cover it all without using literally thousands of cameras and having a budget of millions and millions."

In fact, Brown and his team of road warriors had a total budget of just $2 million to prep, shoot and edit the film. Pre-production took nine weeks, including an arduous tech scout. "We pre-ran the course backwards to get all the locations and figure out our GPS coordinates," says producer Scott Waugh (Step Into Liquid, Release). "That alone took five days."

Back in LA, DP Kevin Ward (The Perfect Moment) – himself a racing enthusiast – plotted out a huge wall map showing all the locations, "just like a big military exercise," notes Brown. "Then we spent weeks figuring how to do it, and thank God we had Kevin. He’s such a veteran of the race and the terrain, and he knew all these shortcuts and access roads."

"Obviously our choice of camera packages was crucial, and some of our choices were already made for us, as with the helicopter aerial footage," Ward explains. "The operators would have a Wescam or Tyler mount, and we also had a 35mm set-up with a Tyler Major Mount and a brand new gyro-stabilized HD set-up with a ball mount, which was perfect for us as it gave us 40-minute tape loads. So we knew we’d get great coverage with that, and they helped make our decisions for us."

The 13 three-man ground teams were each equipped with one of two primary cameras – "either a Sony F900 HD camera or an Arri SR3 Super 16 high-speed camera," says Ward. "And they all also carried a Panasonic DVX100 [a DV camcorder], which we shot in the 24p mode with very impressive results. The footage from these upresed to D5 with a minimal amount of artifacts, which then cut well with the other HD footage."

These lightweight DVX100s proved very effective. "We’d go right up to the pits and just stick our hand in and get shots you’d never get with a regular camera, as it’s so small and compact," says Brown. "We actually didn’t know if it’d work out that well, but it blew up great and we ended up using a ton of that footage in the film, along with great audio, which was another big plus."

But Brown’s plan to use multiple in-car cameras along with embedded cameramen "to really try and capture what the race actually feels like if you’re in it" proved to be trickier. "For a start, no driver wants a bulky camera in their car because of all their gear, so right off we knew we’d have to go with the small lipstick cameras instead," he explains. The production used a Toshiba three-chip ice-cube camera and a Sony lipstick camera, according to the DP. "Those were recording to a Sony DV clamshell," says Ward. "But that raised the question: If we use those cameras, can we go all the way out to 35mm for the final print?"

Ward used the widest lenses he could find on the ice-cube and cigar cams: 4mm and 8mm. That footage was recorded to Sony DSR-V10 clamshell decks.

The Sony F900s were fitted with Fujinon HD zooms, ranging from a 4.8-62mm (with 2X) on the wide end and a 7.3-160mm (with 2x) on the long side.

The 16mm lens package included everything from a complete set of Zeiss primes and a 5.5mm Optex prime and a 6mm Century prime to zooms: a 8-64mm Canon, an 11-110 Zeiss, an 11.5-138mm Angenieux and a 150-600mm Canon/Century with a 2x extender.

The 35mm cameras in the Helicopters were fitted with 25-250mm HR Angenieux Zoom lenses.

To make sure, Brown and Ward ran tests. "We took it back to HD and then out to 35mm, and it held up fine," says Brown. "It did pick up some grain, but that’s OK as it fits the mood of the camera angle itself being inside the car. So the lipstick cameras worked well for the most part, though some broke down, mainly due to so much intense vibration, dust, or electrical problems. But enough of them worked that we got what we needed and some amazing footage."

"One of the by-products of upresing this lipstick camera footage to D5 was a narrow-shutter effect, like you’d achieve with a film camera," adds Ward. "We really liked that look."

The team also used a specially built and equipped Bug that could race at up to 130 mph. "It has various custom-built 35mm mounts that allow you to shoot car to car, so we sent that out first, equipped with an Arri SR3," says Waugh. "It had an extension arm that was counterweighted with springs as well as a remote fluid head that let us pan and tilt. It was able to take a lot of punishment over terrain that’d destroy most gear."

"It was pretty awesome and it ran with the actual guys in the race – until it broke an axle," recalls Brown. "But can you imagine racing down ravines and gullies at 90 mph and shooting while you go? That gave us some great coverage, and then we also had a guy on a motorcycle with a helmet-cam [another Toshiba ice-cube camera] who was part of the official race, and that gave us another unbeatable POV." In addition, Ward wore a Super 16 IVN camera made by Photosonics and shot a lot of footage as he rode his motorcycle.

What were the hardest scenes to shoot? "It was all tough, but the night footage was very tricky as we simply didn’t know how it’d turn out," says Brown. "It was so dark and moonless out on the course, and then any lights at the pits were so bright. And in Mexico everything’s such low wattage. Even the baseball stadium’s lit with just 40-watt bulbs, so it was very hard to judge what we should focus on."

To deal with all the night shooting, the DP and his crew worked with Panavision to adapt some military "image intensifiers" usually used for nighttime surveillance. "These were mounted between the cameras and our lenses and allowed us to find light when the naked eye couldn’t," Ward explains.

The image intensifiers were built by Dan Sasaki at Panavision in Woodland Hills, CA. "He took the best consumer grade night-vision scopes available and fitted them with relay lenses so that they mounted between the taking lens and the camera body," reports Ward. "There are about five of these in the U.S. that have been built and are privately owned, and Panavision Tarzana now has two or three of them available – but you won’t find them on their rental list, as they are very difficult to work with."

Despite the hammering the camera gear took, the team ultimately only lost one camera, a DVX100. "One of our cameramen was trying to get this real low angle on this road, and he placed the camera down and luckily moved back," reports Brown. "What he’d forgotten on this live course was that civilian traffic could come from the opposite direction, and someone just ran over the camera and destroyed it."

After an exhausting shoot that spanned 12 days, Brown and Waugh, who also edited Step Into Liquid, returned to L.A., where they began editing the 250 hours of footage at home – Brown on an Avid Film Composer 10.1 and Waugh on an Avid DV Xpress 3.5. "We’d make dupes of all the dailies – Beta SP for his machine, DVCAMs for mine, everything with matching time codes," says Waugh. "That way we could send each other sequences over the Internet as we went. Then at the end, we jumped onto my machine and finished together." Then the entire film – including the online assembly, titling and color timing – was completed on Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects. (For the complete post-production story, see the February’05 issue of our sister magazine, studio/monthly.)

"Form followed function throughout this whole project," declares Ward, "from choice of lenses to cameras. For instance, we used everything from 1200mm lenses to 5.5mm, the latter for handheld, up-close-and-dangerous type shots. So depending on the action and the specific location, we’d go from one extreme to another."

Ward, who’s shot hundreds of car and motorcycle commercials, including current campaigns for Nissan and Kia, has been involved in the racing scene for over 20 years. "But this is the hardest shoot I’ve ever done," he says. "This race is the ultimate."