A Not So Little Adventure
a not so little adventure.
PREMISE
When my friend Jacob and I talked about this idea for the first time, we knew we wanted “to make something awesome”, something better than any project we’d done before. The result was this line:
“Drive from Sydney, Australia’s most iconic city
to Australia’s southernmost tip and back again within 14 days.”
On the 3rd of December we headed out on our journey, exploring incredible locations the whole way and documenting the entire thing with the goal to create these little episodes of our not so little adventure.
Equipment
Our equipment setup had to be lightweight but also had to deliver the quality that we wanted. My Sony a7Sii combined with a Canon 24-105mm f/4 L lens shot the bulk of the content. It rarely left my side and I was always looking to capture literally anything that would help tell the story, from quick conversations with shop employees to shots of us struggling up a mountain. Our second camera was Jacob's Panasonic GH4 with a lightweight 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 II Lens. Jacob used this to shoot extra footage of the locations as well as 4K timelapses. Jacob's Canon 1100D modded with Magic Lantern and my Canon 6D also acted as timelapse cameras which allowed us shoot with two units each, simultaneously, whenever we needed it.
A huge part of the location shooting was drone footage. I had ordered a DJI Mavic Pro a month in advance that didn't arrive before we left. So after a bit of asking around, my mate Gab Scanu kindly let us borrow his old DJI Phantom 3 Pro. It required its own backpack but it was perfect considering the circumstance. It allowed us to capture the landscape from an entirely new angle to what we were used to. Tasmania has so much scale and there's no way in hell that we could have captured it properly without that aerial perspective.
This map was made before we actually went on the trip to give us an idea of the scale of everything. We changed a few of the locations but this gives a pretty good indication of our route. The whole trip was about 3,400km (2,100 miles) in total.
File Management & Storage
From the beginning we knew we had to create a solid file management system. We had two hard drives, a LaCie Rugged 1TB which acted as the main drive with a WD 2TB as the backup. Within the main NSLA folder we had a "Rushes" folder. Inside that was a folder for each day, and within those were folders for each camera. Every night we would import and organise all of the content we shot that day into the respective folders and then copy the whole folder onto the backup drive. This way we knew that we always had two copies of everything which completely eliminated the chance of losing footage.
Heading back home
We finished shooting on the 11th of December and started heading back to Sydney. After 10 hours, overnight, rolling across the Bass Strait in a ship, we were in Melbourne. There we stayed for a day and a night helping Jacob move out of his apartment. The next day we woke up bright and early and drove for a little over 8 hours until we were finally home. My own bed never felt so comfortable.
In the first three weeks of January I edited and released 11 films that I like to describe as "cinematic vlogs". The only thing to make after that was a final montage that celebrated the our whole journey.
Give it a look, I think you'll like it.
