Once in a while you get a request to do some work and tick off a few points on the bucketlist. This trip to Japan was definitely one of those occasions. The itenerary was straight from Narita Tokyo, up to Fukushima way up in the mountains to a legendary place called Ebisu – a Zoo slash race track facility. Only in Japan right. A few days up there, down to Tokyo for a day, onwards south to Osaka before the trip lead on to Fuji all in a 12 days trip.

I flew to Japan on behalf of the third season of Gatebil TV, a tv-series running on national television in Norway. Specifically following Fredric Aasbø, whom I the year before made a documentary about in California. While I was there I had another mission, which was to shoot and make a short commercial, which you can see below, together with Fredric for RS-R, who is his main sponsor for his drift program in Japan and Asia. Above you can see the feature-length version I made of the 43 hours worth of footage I got during my week and a half in Japan.

Above is what resulted in the commercial inbetween everything else going on. From shooting for the tv-series to Fredric being busy doing interviews, preparing and competing. It made it into a few stressful days on my end, and I found myself literally running around to get everything I needed.

Being a one man band on something like this is a challenge. The first hurdle to overcome is the fact that you only have two hands and can only be in one place at the time. That’s fine and dandy when the possibility of doing several takes so you can move around or fix your mistakes – but that’s sadly not always a luxury you have when you don’t have the time or it simply is impossible in a competition setting. So you gotta prioritize your efforts. The story for the tv-series naturally comes first and cool pictures a close second. Which does hurt a little as I really enjoy capturing cool shots.

As a one man band it is quite an awesome feeling when both the story and the pictures come together. The pictures lose their value if the story falls apart, for whatever reason. But this time, everything worked out the way we hoped. Thanks for following the script and winning Fredric! I also gotta thank Go, Kengo, Kumiko and the rest of the RS-R family for their hospitality throughout our stay in Osaka and Fuji. Also a special thank you to Andy and Emily Gray from powervehicles up in Ebisu. Last but not least, Fredric and Hunter deserve an applause for letting me join the trip and yet again enduring me pestering them with the camera.

The trip was a great learning experience and also really fun. We got to see some amazing places, meet some great people, eat a lot of food and not a lot of sleep. Although there’s no getting around the fact that filming these kinds of projects is really exhausting. Personally I don’t only want to deliver, I want to over-deliver. The lesson is that you will definitely not be able to get all the shots you need. When you’re filming alone in an environment you can’t fully control, you won’t have enough time. When travelling to the other side of the world and moving across a country, you will struggle to bring all the equipment you want to use. Stuff happens, plans change and things go wrong so you gotta improvise. If you have a plan on how you want your film to be, as long as you have a solid start and have planned for every possible ending, then you will find the way to make it work.

Thanks for reading,

Daniel