An Early Evening Odyssey

The sun has finally crept for cover as the shadows grow longer and the air valiantly tries a last ditch effort to hold its breath. Cling to the last remaining hints of a summers’ warmth in the early spring. It’s a lukewarm ambling kind of air that’s somehow both mellow and yet slightly biting. Feeling both cool and yet refreshingly comfortable as what’s left of the day begins to ease into the early evening.

As I watch the last bits of light run away from the west coast, the lack of illumination finally forced me to flick my darkly tinted faceshield up. It’s a desperate attempt to encourage what’s left of the light to head my way. But it doesn’t. Instead the act merely forces more of the surprisingly soft and meandering air my way. Instantly I’m overcome with an explosion of smells. The air suddenly seems soaked in ice tea and holding hints of crackling fireplaces. Two extremes from different points on the calendar during a moment of environmental transition.

Beneath me the ST3 gently churns among the surprisingly free-flowing rush-hour freeway traffic, people making the long trek home after a lengthy day’s work. I on the other hand am not returning from the office, but rather my first ride of the New Year.

After six, seven, maybe eight weeks, spent off a bike – any bike – and after wrapping up a weeks worth of paperwork in an afternoon, the idea of spending any more time inside on what clearly was a brilliant day seemed damn near impossible. So instead I did what I always fantasize about, but rarely do. I blew off the rest of the workday, hopped on the bike and headed south.

To say this was a much-needed break is a bit of an understatement — Earlier in the week, after months plugging away in the edit suite, we delivered the final master tapes for the sportbike project we’ve been working on for Discovery, called “Twist The Throttle”. When I have release dates I’ll post something more substantial about it, but the bottom line is that it has been an immense and immersive project, the likes of which I’ve never had the pleasure of working my way through. The final total is a whopping four hours of beautiful HD sportbike content that reaches around the globe and goes inside eight of the major motorcycle brands, covering their amazing histories, their factories and their latest and greatest sportbikes. As I’m sure you can tell already, I’m very proud of the work. I think it’s some of the best stuff we’ve ever done and I’m excited to see how other motorcyclists react to it. Of course like any documentary project you never know how the audience will ultimately respond – and in that vein this project is no different.

What does feel unusual however is the residual emotional hangover that I’ve felt ever since dropping the tapes off at FedEx. Unlike previous projects, this time around I’ve found myself existing in a very strange space that’s an odd combination of excitement and sadness – it’s truly unlike any other post-project feeling I’ve ever felt. And I can’t quite figure out why I’m feeling this way…

Usually when a project wraps up I’m so sick of seeing the images and hearing the various soundbites for the 400th time that I can’t wait to just roll the thing to tape and get it in the mail. The last few weeks of a documentary project truthfully are anything but fun; you’re spending your time tying up loose ends, prepping timelines for the audio post house, dealing with legal paperwork, color correcting, rendering and exporting. All in all it’s not a very creative point in the process, but rather it’s a very systematic experience. You spend your time mentally working your way through the appropriate workflows and determining the best, most time effective courses of action for various tasks.

Yet this particular time felt remarkably different; I’m excited that motorcyclists and non-motorcyclists are finally going to be able to see what we’ve been working on and I’m really stoked about the way everything worked out – from the shoots, to the interviews, to the experiences captured on tape – yet I feel oddly bummed out about having to let it go. I find myself wishing I could keep working on it, even though in reality there’s absolutely nothing left to do. It’s like having post-partum depression for a documentary. And yet you can’t hang on to it forever. The whole point to being in this business is to get it out there, get it seen, let it run its course out in the open.

Getting off the freeway, I notice that the instrument panel has started glowing. According to the ST3 daytime has officially become nighttime. A corner later, the warmth still hanging in the air works it way over me and somehow in the darkness it ceases to feel like I’m actually riding the bike, but rather floating on top of it as we work our way up and over the hill under the stars.