Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Guerrilla Filmmaking





my friend ard has the below video posted on his site.

i saw it a long time ago and couldn't help but be inspired by viewing it again.  proof of what one camera and a little creativity can come up with.  i wanted to do some similar shots with tyler's roadster for One California Day but we were never able to put it together (above are a few of the original storyboards i drew to map out the sequence).  Chris Reynolds was going to help me mount cameras but we were worried about el gundo police, who tend to be bored and in large numbers... we were going to shoot early with no permit - much like the video below.  in the end, we were never able to find a day that tyler could help us get the shots- damn,  it would have been rad.

about the video - as ard matthews tells it:
On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris early in the morning. The film was limited, for technical reasons, to ten minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur.

No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit. The driver completed the course in about nine minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets.

Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground.