In June 2003 the BMX freestyle world championships came to Beja, Portugal and Flavour Productions were comisioned to do two short videos for use on the Red Bull website - a 2 minute video showing the highlights of the contests and a 2 minute profile of a Red Bull sponsered rider, Achim Kujawski featuring interview and riding footage.


With action happening symultaniously in many different parts of the contest site, our filmers were kept on their toes, turning in over 10 hours of raw footage of contest and practise action on flatland, street, halfpipe and dirt jumping.

Each discipline of BMX needs it's own filming technique, and it's essential the filmers know the sports, to be able to anticipate what the riders will do next - both to be able to get the shots, and also for the safety of everybody involved.

Cameramen often have to film very close to the riders to get that perfect angle, and in this case we were fortunate that our opperator has more than 15 years of BMX experience to draw on.


For the interview parts of the rider profile we filmed in Beja's old city castle, creating a relaxed atmosphere and drawing in some of the ancient background of this part of Portugal.

That formed a perfect contrast to Achim's spectacular halfpipe riding, which was filmed during practise sessions after discussing the best angles for each of the tricks he wanted to do - sometimes soaring more than 20 feet above the ground.


During the inital editing the event report was cut as an action video, to music supllied by the client, rider names were overlaid and title, credit and timer countdown motion graphics produced.


For the rider profile the 20 minutes of questions and answers had to be cut to fit a 2 minute piece, while still showing Achim's personality and charactor. Digital cleaning and noise reduction also helped bring the audio to life. Motion graphics were used to enhance the points covered on audio, and title, credit and countdown motion graphics were created, following the style of the event report.

After the videos had been through the initial editing the shots were then all digitally processed, firstly to pull out the full quality of the individual images, and then to pull everything together visually, giving the videos a consistent style and a distinctive look.

In this case we used a new method of handling the image post production which greatly speeded up the process, and still allowed us full control over the final image, and which will definately stay in our bag of tricks for future use.