Tom’s Bike Trip[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/57023486[/vimeo]
The funny thing about this, the third in the series of deleted scenes (#1 and #2), is that it encapsulates better than anything else the day-to-day camaraderie that occurs between bicycle travellers and the people with whom they come into contact. Demonstrating this today is the inimitable Andy and a group of Georgian fishermen selling their wares on the roadside.
The second in this series of Janapar bonus video clips will raise a smile with many cycle-tourists. For some of the best two-wheeled travel tales derive from overnighting under the most unlikely of circumstances.
On this particular evening, Andy and I found ourselves kindly gifted the use of a small-town football field changing room somewhere in rural Turkey, in which I had the chance to demonstrate my highly sophisticated sleeping system to the camera.
This scene didn’t make the final cut for a similar reason to the first clip: there was a limited opportunity to encapsulate the six months for which Andy and I rode together before the film’s attention had to return to why we went our separate ways and the story that unfolded as a result.
Many short scenes of our journey between England to Armenia were assembled in order to do this, including the cashpoint incident, the Stambouli musicians, and the spontaneous roadside party you’ll see in the full-length feature. This clip (as well as next week’s) is an example of a perfectly good scene that couldn’t make the cut.
Janapar: Love on a Bike is available instantly as an iTunes-compatible HD digital download from janapar.com. There’s also a handful of first-batch DVDs still available (purchases of which now include a free digital download too).
Alternatively, you may find that one of the public screenings I’m hosting this summer happens to be in your area.
One of the tragedies of art is how much perfectly decent stuff is chucked away. The 300 hours of footage I shot for Janapar is a case in point. The finished film is 79 minutes long, so for every minute of footage I shot, another four hours were binned. (Admittedly, plenty of it was shite, but a lot of it wasn’t.)
Beginning today, then, I’ll be bringing the best of this extra material back to life. For those who’ve seen Janapar, these clips will explain a few things glossed over in the main feature. For those who haven’t seen it, they’ll be entertaining glimpses of life on the road in their own right.
The first clip answers the question of why Tom appears to be exhibiting the remains of a black eye in some of the Armenian winter shots.
This dramatic scene was included in the main feature until quite a late stage in the edit, but it needed to be quite lengthy to make sense, and so it stalled the momentum of the story, which at that point was resolving the earlier question of how Tom & Andy came to be separated.
We found that we could ‘hide’ the injury in later scenes and explain the conflict more concisely and poetically through Andy’s parallel love interest, and so it had to go. (This particular tale is fully recounted in the book, as it did become a significant turning point.)
As always, your questions and comments are very much welcomed. Next week’s clip will bring a touch of comedy in some rather unusual sleeping arrangements.
A lot’s happened since Janapar’s premiere at Raindance last year, but one of the nicest moments was winning one of the top awards at Sheffield Adventure Film Festival, one of the UK’s main fixtures in the adventure & outdoor festival calendar.
It was particularly rewarding given the ridiculous amount of work that had gone into putting it together — four years of shooting, two years of production and 6 months of distribution so far, unpaid, and the ongoing storytelling project still occupies a large chunk of my time.
I learned a huge amount during the production process — as did James, who’d spent half a decade cutting his teeth in the TV industry. And there are plenty of articles on the way for those of you who are interested in trying your hands at adventure filmmaking — hopefully on a more sensible scale! (If you’re not interested, don’t worry; tales from the road in Iran and new adventure cycling projects are coming too.)
Today I’d like to share a special 12-minute documentary, going behind the scenes in the studios, edit suites, voiceover booths and broom cupboards we worked in — a rare insight into the production process of an adventure film.
This short featurette originally appeared in Janapar’s DVD extras, and in the online bonus material for the instant HD download of the film (both of which are currently available at a discount).
Feel free to ask any questions about this filmmaking process in the comments — I’d be more than happy to answer them!
I’m on a train, speeding north from London for an event tonight in Kendal. It’s the fourth in a run of film screenings I’m doing over the next two weeks. I’m knackered. My body-clock is trashed. And I’m wearing the same clothes I was wearing in my sleeping bag last week on an island in the English Lakes that I swam to with two friends, Al and Ferg.
It was a foolhardy plan, concocted by three blokes desperate to justify why they weren’t spending Valentine’s Eve with their other halves. At least the plan was a simple one: swim to an island and sleep on it. The island in question? Peel Island, also known as ‘Wildcat Island’ in Ransome’s classic Swallows & Amazons.
A one-hundred-metre swim doesn’t sound like much. Just four lengths of a swimming pool. It begins to sound more unpleasant, though, once you factor in the water temperature, which sat that day at around 4 degrees above zero. Fresh water begins to solidify at 2 degrees. (Wetsuits, of course, were a luxuriant fantasy.)
Why do this? For me, it was a reaction against a winter of self-imposed slave-labour in my own self-built cubicle. Leave the house; have an adventure in the space of an evening; return home with the reset button well and truly pressed.
And the swim itself sat just on the right side of daunting. I had seriously considered ditching the idea and taking a canoe instead. I stood ankle-deep in the painfully-cold shallows with a sick feeling in my stomach and a suspicion that this might be a really stupid thing to do.
But this meant that when I dragged my stinging body clumsily onto the island — convinced I could not swim another stroke, that my heart would cop out, unable to wrestle my T‑shirt back over my head and get wrapped up warm again — it was a victory that tasted all the sweeter. (For as long as I ignored the fact that I’d have to swim back in the morning.)
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/59917561[/vimeo]
Watch Al’s masterfully-constructed video of the trip.
And do check out his Microadventures campaign — simple, accessible adventures (mostly not involving wintertime wild-swimming!) that can be fitted around everyday life.
I’m on the road for the rest of the month, with screenings coming up in Kendal (tonight), Newcastle, Ayr, Edinburgh and Sheffield. Check out the calendar/map and come along if you can!