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Video - what a perfect day

As you know, I have been waiting to video my mountain biking DVD for a few weeks now and on Sunday it finally happened. I had basically been waiting for the weather to be good and for my brother (the subject) to not be busy. The location is 'Coed (forest) Llandegla' in north east Wales. Roughly one hour from my home in St.Helens. Basically I picked this location as it is close to home, has a good range of terrain and beautiful scenery. I arrived around 10 o'clock on Sunday morning and the sun was cracking the fire track. The bikes where is the boot of the car and my brother and I where edging to get out on our bikes. As we rolled up the 2killmoiter drive way to the shop and car park, we began to see a queue of cars about 20 deep. Now this is very unusual for Llandegla as it is only really a small place and as we always go during the week, we have never seen it busy. We contemplated going somewhere else because we imagined there to be a mountain biking event on we hadn’t heard of, hence the traffic. However, we proceeded and eventually found a parking space. Set up the bikes and decided how I was going to go about filming.

In Llandegla there are four roots of which to choose to ride on. There is a family root, 4km, beginner root, 8km, intermediate root, 18km and a black run; 2km. usually we take the intermediate trail as does 98% of the people who go to Llandegla; however on Sunday this would have been an impossible task to film. The forest, for safety reasons works on a one way system with mounting bikers going above 30Mph on some sections. Especially as it was so busy, this would have been too dangerous to film on. The tracks are very small, windy and as I want footage filmed up to three times, it wouldn’t have been possible to back track to re-film. However, we where now there and needed to make my DVD. So we decided to do the family root which doesn’t sound very exciting, but it was the best and safest option for filming.

We started the trail and already we had superb places to film, wide tracks and not very busy. The hardest bit was coming up with some good shots to film. I ended up with a mixture of long shots and fast shots that I will edit together to make a nice DVD. Well that’s the plan...

posted by Martin Crosbie @ 1:24 PM