Filming in Jackson Bridge

Story of our filming at Jackson BridgeSo Thursday, all exams over with and had a free summer ahead! what better way to start it off than do some filming for a quick edit.
Went into school in the morning to finish some work off, got a call off Chris at the last minute asking if I fancied getting some shots of a local trail, which is a pretty decent free ride track, I was up for it!

Had to drive up to collect the tripod to find that the mounting block was still at home, instead of trekking back I used some strapping and tied the camera down to the tripod, eventually got there and it was pretty windy, the light was starting to be intermittent due to cloud cover and with the bodged up tripod, things were not looking good for filming.
I started the ball rolling with getting some normal wheel and zoom shots then we worked our way down the track, documenting each corner, straight and rock section.
The problem in being just a kid with a handy cam is that you've not got a full set of guys behind lenses capturing different angles of the same piece of track. after editing is done, four angles of the same bit of track all add up to about 2 seconds of film once put into the video, I'd say it wasn't so hard on the cameraman, but definitely hard on the rider.
They're constantly trekking back up to the top and pumping it past the camera, it really puts the pressure on the camera man to get the shots that are needed, and the hardest thing to do after the riders been past three times already is to say "sorry mate, missed that shot, do it again if you can" you know how tired they are, and you can just feel that punch coming for you! Luckily I was working with a super cool rider and friend, Chris Tyler. He's really willing to put the blood, sweat and tears into a shoot to come out with something half decent, its great working with him as well, he's got a lot of patience for a amateur cameraman like myself and he's more than happy to keep trekking all day to get the money shot if needed.

Every time we film something its a lesson for me, I've not been doing this that long, but its something I'm really starting to enjoy a lot.
First, things started out with a £5 Chinese tripod from ebay combined with a friends cheap handycam, then I decided that I wanted to film in HD so I worked and bought a second hand Sony HDR-CX11 off ebay and so far I've really enjoyed filming with this camcorder, its enabled me to start producing videos of an acceptable quality. Although I still need to work out how to get really nice sharp images and upload them in 1080p hd, for editing software I've downloaded the demo version of sony vegas as I can't afford to buy the full version.
For the future, I've already started building various DIY bits of studio equipment such as rail cam's, camera cranes and I'm in the process of making a zipwire cam.
Since filming with the new sony handycam i've decided that I really want to try and get into filming in a big way and I'm looking to purchase a professional level camcorder so I can progress in the videography world.
Anyway, enough of my rambling, check out the video, and please comment/fave!

Cheers
George Milner