Lane Splitting: A Southern California Motorcycle Story

thetvirus513

thetvirus513

Well-known member
Hey Guys,

A group of friends and I are doing a documentary and I thought I would put it on the site just to get it out there. The doc is about lane splitting and motorcycle culture in Southern California. I am fully aware that the audio in the trailer is unusable, our mic broke beforehand, but we fixed that and just spent the weekend re-doing all of these interviews, as well as some others. Hopefully we will put together another trailer in which case I will put it up here but I just wanted to put something up at the moment. It will probably end up being fairly short, somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes but we are really looking forward to how it will turn out. We think it should end up being very unique as we were able to get interviews and footage with some pretty exclusive motorcycle clubs and members in the area. We are shooting this with literally a $0 budget, besides gas, and using two HVX200's Below is a link to our trailer as well as our production blog. This is the first time any of us have worked on a documentary, so let me know what you think and if you have any advice!



http://www.vimeo.com/7107142

http://lanesplitting.wordpress.com/

-Bobby
 
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Cool, Audio is actually fixed already. We redid all the interviews and more, but we haven't put together a new trailer as this was what we had to turn in for a class and we had a deadline at the time. Hopefully we will put another one together in which case it will replace this one.
 
Yesterday I sat in traffic for an hour because this dude could not split proper: http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stor...e-rear-ender-death/?northcounty&zIndex=185369

fatal.jpg
 
thats intense man... yah we have had multiple people including chp officers stress the need for lane splitting but that you need to do it right and that if you do it 10 - 20 miles over the speed of traffic and you give yourself enough room you'll be good and it will save you countless amounts of time. However you always see those guys goin 75 in between lanes when traffic is stopped. That is not the way to do it and sadly sometimes that is the outcome. It's a weird thing that is extremely unique to socal or California in general and people have some very opposing views on it.
 
wow, really nice footage.

Im currently filming a documentary for a class, (actually im about 95% done with editing already). Im a little envious of your footage turned out really well.

I didnt have much time to setup for my interviews (only had about 2.5 hours to get all my footage because of schedules), and my audio was also crappy because the guy donig my audio lost the tape (arghhh!) so i had to just use my onboard audio from my D90.

Cant wait to see the whole thing, interesting concept.
 
BTW, Bobby, I have to say I liked the footage. As for comments, at 0:07 I expected to see a biker riding over the lane markings. 0:15 is too slow and dare I say, amateurish, with camera shake. What you can do is go from focus into unfocus, then play it backwards, works for static scenes like this. 0:50 is better but still too slow. Snap to focus faster. Watch more Top Gear :) 0:53 just has to be cut out, along with 0:56. Would be nice if you had a closeup on the CHP officer for a change of framing/angle sake.

BTW, I have to check CVC, but I think that lane splitting aka driving between the lanes is not allowed. Lane sharing, that is, driving in one lane with another vehicle, is allowed, like two bikes side by side. But I am not sure, I have to go read it up. You might want to do it too ;-)
 
Thanks for the comments and words of advice, I will definitely take a look into cutting or changing some of those shots. We do have a few angles of all of the people we interviewed, but we did not have them at the time the trailer was put together. As for the technical wording, the CHP officer points out that it is lane sharing when we interviewed him, but most of the people we talked/will talk to refer to it by its slang term as lane splitting. Also I need to check for sure, I am actually cinematographer, not director, and the director is much more knowledgeable about the topic but there is no law that says it is legal I believe, however on the flip side there is nothing saying it is illegal
 
P.S. Amateurish is not insulting to me at all as I am totally an amateur, just a college student at the moment and have absolutely no documentary experience, but shaky camera is inexcusable at any rate.
 
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