Regular visitors to this blog will be aware that I’ve got a more than passing interest in film making.
It all started a couple of years ago when I was inspired to film, direct and produce my first feature-length documentary.
Despite having a passion for photography, capturing moving images was a brand new experience for me.
I spent months reading books and watching tutorials on YouTube before conducting interviews with experts, editing the footage and turning it into a 63 minute social documentary.
Earlier this year, a friend of ours from the livery yard where we keep our horse asked me if I would be interested in a new film project, working with the international riders of the GB TREC Team.
TREC is horse riding discipline brought to the UK in the late nineties.
It’s a sport designed to test the skills of a horse and rider in planning and executing a long distance ride in unfamiliar country. The sport originated in France as a way of testing and improving the skills of trail ride leaders.
This weekend, six riders from the GB TREC team attended a training camp at Woolgars Farm Cross Country Course in the Surrey Hills.
I spent all day Saturday and most of Sunday following them around the countryside with an array of cameras, accompanied by an assistant camera operator, three professional photographers and the editor of Horse Magazine.
It was fascinating to see the trusted working relationship these athletes have with their horses and their passion for the sport, which is still fairly niche here in the UK. In fact, it was suggested by a few of them that for anyone who wanted to represent their country at the top level, TREC was probably a very good sport to consider!
On Saturday morning the team plotted a route on their maps and spent a couple of hours orienteering, before spending the afternoon tackling a range of obstacles on the course.
During our ride back to base, I was able to capture some of my favourite footage from the weekend, sitting in the back of a 4×4 with the car boot wide open as the six riders galloped up the hill behind me – probably the scariest and most exciting thing I’ve done to date this year!
On Sunday morning, some of the riders were interviewed for the magazine, before each team member accompanied a group of novice TREC riders on an orienteering course and then demonstrated each of the obstacles.
The film footage I captured over the weekend now needs to be edited to create two things; a short promotional film to help the GB TREC Team acquire more sponsorship, and a short 6-7 minute long documentary feature about this sport.
Once these films are edited, I will share the links here.
