19th Annual Fears, Tears and Beers MTB Enduro in Ely, Nevada
I've been riding mountain bikes for a long time—more than 30 years at this point. While I've shot action sports and mountain biking in the past, I haven't had the chance to plan, direct, shoot, and edit an action sports video project myself. This summer, I was asked to shoot the oldest and longest-running Mountain Bike Enduro Race in the US.
Fears, Tears, and Beers is an old-school enduro race produced by the Great Basin Trails Alliance that consists of 6 timed sections where racers compete for the fastest time on the trail that is remote, gnarly, flowy, sometimes scary, and always fast and fun. The race takes place over the course of one Saturday in early June every summer in Ely, Nevada.
The challenge in shooting video of this event is that it's more than 35 miles of trail and it's not a loop. The riders don't ride anything twice, so this was not a shoot I could do myself. Anthony Cupaiuolo was my second shooter for this project. Anthony is an experienced videographer and photographer who lives in South Lake Tahoe, CA, and has been capturing action sports for years at First Tracks Productions.
But even with two of us, it was still going to be hard to shoot 6 stages and the start/finish. Fortunately, my friend John "@photojohnphoto" Shafer has been shooting photos at the event and gave us some indispensable beta on how to go about capturing video. You can check out John's images from the Fears, Tears and Beers here.
To shoot this, Anthony and I started with a car shuttle, me to stage 1 and Anthony to stage 2. I walked up and shot video from the ground and drone of stage 1 while Anthony did the same on stage 2, walking the 2-mile descent from top to bottom. When we were done, we got on eBikes and headed out onto the other part of the course to shoot the remaining stages. The eBikes were an indispensable way to get around the course quickly without wearing ourselves out.
Social Media Shorts
These days you can't just post the video and be done with it. Short social media videos in the vertical 9:16 format are essential for getting the video content, condensed into an even shorter format, out to the audience. It's not a matter of people not wanting to watch longer videos, or having the necessary attention span. It's about meeting the viewer where they are, having multiple points of contact with the content and giving the content the best reach possible.
We captured enough footage of the bike race that I was able to create multiple short-form vertical videos to give the race organizers content to promote the event all year long. I also took the full 5-minute feature video and broke it out into 5 short vertical videos to allow the audience to get bite-sized content wherever they are.