The Blockhead Energy Downhill Team was established in 2013, with the fundamental aim of the team being based around coaching and training team rider Josh Lowe, through Ian Warby of Firecrest Skills Coaching. With expert coaching and training in place, Josh went on to win two rounds of the Shimano British Downhill Series in the Expert Category and came 2nd overall in the series. Due to this success, for 2014, the Blockhead Energy Downhill Team has grown into a larger project with the addition of two up-and-coming racers from the south-east of England, Fergus Ryan and Conor Ingham.
The team will have an eye-catching pit presence at all of the rounds of the Shimano British Downhill Series, and all the team riders will be racing in the iXS European Cup as well as regional races in the UK, with Josh also competing at several rounds of the UCI World Cup, including the season opener at Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.
Due to his results in 2013, Josh has moved into the Elite Category and will be competing against the world’s best riders on an international level.
"I'm super happy to be on the Blockhead Energy Downhill Team once again for this season. Blockhead is such an exciting new company with a great product and to be working alongside them, Biketart.com, Kore, Kenny Racing and geebeebee media is an absolute pleasure. I have been training out in New Zealand during the off-season and am coming into the season better than I have ever been before. With both the mix of training and support, I hope to be up there with some of the best in the world." - Josh Lowe
After taking a break from racing for a year to be a Morzine seasonaire, Fergus Ryan is back for the 2014 season. Fergus has already secured an impressive 5th place at the opening round of the 2014 Shimano British Downhill Series at Antur Stiniog, and is keen to surpass that achievement at the next round at Fort William in May.
"I'm looking forward to a great season and I would like to thank Blockhead Energy for the opportunity to ride for them. There's great support and a really good atmosphere amongst everyone. It's going to be a mint season." - Fergus Ryan
Conor Ingham, the team's third rider, is also super excited for the season.
"For 2014, I am looking to have a consistent and successful year. It's my first season in the Senior Category and with the support from the Blockhead Energy Downhill Team, I am aiming to reach my full potential. The race calendar this year looks amazing, we have some great sponsors and I am really looking forward to racing and riding with the team." - Conor Ingham
The team is set to have a great season, and would like to thank their sponsors: Blockhead Energy Gum, Kenny Racing, Kore, Biketart and geebeebee media. Thanks also to Saracen, Whisper Bikes and Zagway.
Website: block-head.com
Facebook: BlockheadEnergy
Twitter: @BlockheadEnergy
Producer: geebeebee media
Director: Oli da Costa
Camera: Oli da Costa
Editor & VFX: Oli da Costa
Director: Oli da Costa
Camera: Oli da Costa
Editor & VFX: Oli da Costa
Music: In The Morning by Junior Boys
- Behind The Scenes -
Working with the Blockhead Energy team was a real pleasure for us, from start to finish, and as we knew Josh, Fergus and Conor personally, and had filmed with Josh previously, we knew we were in for a great shoot with professional and talented athletes.
The film's concept was based around the packaging for Blockhead Energy Gum's product, but we didn't want to make the film too product-centric as the promo was strictly for the amateur race team rather than the product. As such, we decided to open the film with a slightly tongue-in-cheek play on how athletes are often seen as 'packaged', by placing the team members in their very own pack of gum. We achieved this by photographing the riders on our Canon 7D individually in a studio, as full body shots, and then in Adobe Photoshop, meticulously created a blister pack style sachet, complete with the characteristic 'bubbles' over their cut-out images which had been carefully removed from the studio backdrop. It was a painstaking process to go about recreating this design element from scratch – which ultimately only appears for a few seconds in the film – but it really helped to convey a different feel to the film, unlike any other content usually seen in action sports film-making.
The film's concept was based around the packaging for Blockhead Energy Gum's product, but we didn't want to make the film too product-centric as the promo was strictly for the amateur race team rather than the product. As such, we decided to open the film with a slightly tongue-in-cheek play on how athletes are often seen as 'packaged', by placing the team members in their very own pack of gum. We achieved this by photographing the riders on our Canon 7D individually in a studio, as full body shots, and then in Adobe Photoshop, meticulously created a blister pack style sachet, complete with the characteristic 'bubbles' over their cut-out images which had been carefully removed from the studio backdrop. It was a painstaking process to go about recreating this design element from scratch – which ultimately only appears for a few seconds in the film – but it really helped to convey a different feel to the film, unlike any other content usually seen in action sports film-making.
We next moved on to the live-action shoot, and wanted to introduce the team members through a series of quick cuts, essentially giving us a 'who's who?' moment before the riders came into contact with their riding gear and bikes. This section worked particularly well with the music's quick pace, and was shot partially outdoors and partially in the studio, necessitating some compositing for background replacements.
With the riders introduced on screen, if not yet by name, we were into the main body of the film...the riding action sequences. We kicked off this section with the idea that the three riders would ride together initially, then separate to ride their own specific sections of track, to then reunite and ride off into the distance. As it happened, the spot that the team had chosen for the shoot – a private site in Kent in the south east of the UK – was a relatively short piece of hillside, so this meant we had to get quite creative in terms of showing the gradient, terrain, and action shots we'd planned. After a short reccy to assess shots and angles so as not to have any repetition in the film, we started rolling.
Our Sony FS700 was the tool of choice for this shoot, as we planned to capture numerous segments in 200 frame-per-second slow motion to add dynamism to the overall promo. However, on this shoot we were going to do things a little differently, opting to shoot for the first time entirely in the Sony SLog-2 picture profile, albeit to the internal AVCHD HD CODEC rather than an external recorder. Without a 3D LUT-enabled monitor, this proved a little tough to do, but our SmallHD DP4 gave us its best, and we managed (for the most part) not to over-expose during the course of the shoot. Armed with our Samyang 14mm and Canon 50mm primes and Canon 70-200mm zoom, we set about capturing the team as they hurtled down the hill, carving through the dirt, leaves and bracken.
When it came to the riders' individual sections, we had roughly planned their angles and trajectories, and how these would come across on screen in the edit, and all we had left to do was get some appropriate shots where we could insert some infographics to introduce the riders individually. We wanted to incorporate the same packaging style virtual 3D panel of data writing-up alongside them, and realised we needed some scenes where the riders or their bikes cut through the picture, to allow us to 'wipe' the information on or off the screen. After a few tests, we got the shots in the can and left the rest to be dealt with in post.
With the sun starting to set, we soon wrapped up filming, having the riders reunite at the bottom of the hill, before launching themselves off a jump to complete the live-action shots. It was then straight in to post production, to start building the 2D and 3D graphic elements in Adobe Photoshop and After Effects, whilst the edit commenced in Premiere Pro.
In terms of editing, this was a pretty straightforward process, where we combined our regular speed shots with time-ramped slow-motion shots, although we did get a little creative with some crash zoom cuts to and from slo-mos, using a nice little technique we developed. Of course editing took place entirely using the SLog-2 colour spaces rushes, which aren't the most inspiring thing to look at whatever the camera, given their flat colour profile, so our first job was to use Premiere Pro's powerful Lumetri colour engine plugin to apply a non-destructive SLog-2 to Rec.709 LUT to the rushes to balance them up temporarily during the offline edit. This instantly made things look a lot nicer, and through the process of playing around with some of Lumetri's built-in Speedgrade looks, gave us a few thoughts on where we would ultimately go with the final grade.
Back on the visual effects side, after receiving the packaging templates as Adobe Illustrator files from Blockhead's head honcho, Danny Lowe, we set about creating some alternative packaging designs, more sympathetic to our idea of branding the team as a pack of gum. Once completed, and with the layers in After Effects, we could build our virtual 3D packaging box and incorporate the remaining animated elements. Using Dynamic Link between Premiere Pro and After Effects, we could seamlessly move back and forth as we started to incorporate the footage into the intro sequence, and after some extensive use of the RotoBrush, masking and a fair bit of motion tracking and stabilisation, we had our intro sequence nailed.
The next job was to create the virtual 3D infographics to display the riders' names and stats alongside their slo-mo clips. For this we turned to After Effects' 3D camera tracker to firstly gain a solid 3D camera solve for each selected scene, before placing the animated panel into the scene, locked to the 3D movement of the camera. Diving into the RotoBrush tool again, this allowed us to create the wipes to reveal each virtual panel from behind each rider's motion through the scene, with some additional compositing to re-introduce elements such as the leaves in front of the panel in some scenes. With these three shots completed, a final 'reunite' shot enhanced with some motion-tracked names applied, the film's outro sequence was a relatively simple affair, mimicking the intro sequence and the 3D product box. With VFX done and the offline largely complete, we then moved on to the final task of grading.
During the offline, we noticed that the British spring weather had given us a few headaches in terms of inconsistent lighting, which became our first task to fix. On top of that, we found that one of our lenses had given us a bit of an odd colour cast, so that became our second line of colour correction. With those two tasks resolved, we moved on to developing the overall grade, which we'd conceived as a mid-to-low contrast, cold shadows but warmish mid-tones, slightly antique looking style, so we set about creating this through a combination of Red Giant's Colorista II and Magic Bullet Looks, with some grain added via FilmConvert Pro and a final colour pass applied as a LUT through the Speedgrade/Lumeti preset looks available in Premiere Pro. As with most grades, this took us a little while to perfect, adapting the grade's density on a shot-by-shot basis, but finally, we were satisfied and we were ready to hit render. Below is a comparison of the raw ungraded edit versus the final graded edit.
Overall, we're really pleased with the result, as have been the team, and within the mountain biking community, the video's gone down a storm, with lots of compliments about its unique use of graphics, 3D elements and the grade. As we'd been warned, SLog-2 recorded to 8-bit AVCHD isn't the easiest or most forgiving format to work with in terms of latitude (even given the FS700's huge dynamic range), but we're learning fast and hoping to shoot upcoming projects using the Sony AXS-R5 or Convergent Design Odyssey 7Q in 4K raw.
