THE NEW MARIN ALPINE TRAIL CARBON: HANDS ON FUN

Goal: Show the new carbon Alpine Trail bike in a range of terrain, showing it as a fun freeriding bike and also a fast trail riding and race bike. Including fun and humour

Notes in no particular order

• Action shots always with rider side-on and central in frame, always same or similar scale, always panning right (to give it a cartoony/surreal feel. Some sort of weird colouring might help achieve this)
• Original soundtrack, voice over and sound effects will be added at the end by Victor Lucas timed to the visuals
• The hands are those of Jon Gregory — 1-1.5 days expected time working together
• Ideally filmed with one rider only in 1-1.5 days to streamline and to limit Covid complications
• We only see the desk from the cartoonist’s point of view with the riding video playing centrally on their desk. There is clutter all over the desk
• From the cartoonist point of view, the action video playing on their desk is achieved in post. (Hopefully obviously — but just to be clear)
• Riding action filmed first so JG can doodle stuff similar to what is in the riding scene
• Hands view shots probably sped up (or speed varied) to give it a more surreal feel

Overview

• Begins zoomed into riding video (not seeing the cartoonist POV at this point), a few random objects appear as obstacles (giant JG desk stuff like a pencil eraser — can be achieved by using a stand-in object for filming and either overlaying an animation in its place or overlaying a video of an actual cut out doodle)
• Then an animated/doodled obstacle comes out of nowhere and knocks him/her off the bike (fake OTB). Mattha says ‘What the f-un?‘ while looking up/out of frame
• Zoom out, Mattha video is just one part of a mess of stuff on JG’s desk (Video could be ‘playing’ on an iPad or just hovering magically) — random doodles, notes, cuttings, clutter, etc on the desk for decoration
• JG’s hands are drawing stuff and ‘throwing it’ at Mattha or feeding it into the riding scene as s/he rides (all riding filmed side-on panning horizontally): JG draws stuff like a pile of rocks, a jump, rain, etc then feeds it into the riding action (the doodle being fed behind the iPad/action and so disappearing) and something similar appears into the frame of the riding action (e.g. he doodles a double jump, then with much difficulty of timing it comes into the action frame as Mattha hits a jump. Or doodles a woodland scene and Mattha heads into some forest)
• Voice over is JG humming to himself (voice acted by our sound scientist), thinking up new stuff to test the bike on. E.g. ‘Humdy dum dee dum, hmmm, log ride’ and then feeds a doodled log into the scene
• Zooms back into the riding action. Still panning right all the time. Same scale. From here, we are no longer seeing the cartoonist POV but their hands appear into the scene, dropping in doodle cut outs or doodling directly onto the scene
• Final scene zooms back out to cartoonist POV, see scene description below

Transitions

• Transitions between locations/shots in the riding scene always happen as a fast swipe through the frame — e.g. Mattha is riding in the woods, then open rocky stuff appears from right to left, cleverly (and complicatedly) leaving Mattha bang in the centre of shot, but everything around him/her changes
• This is to signify JG feeding stuff in, even when we aren’t seeing him doing that (in the zoomed-in scenes)

References:

Honda. Ignore that it’s stop motion. Just that we want something like this scene for the desk/hands view.

Right Here. Constant panning. Stuff appearing in shot. We could also have doodled cut out scenery whizzing past (in foreground only in our case).

Wes. The colouring/scale/perspective on the brief outdoors scenes 1:35-1:38.

Potential taglines:

Takes you to the mountains. And back.

Made for fun. Anywhere.

Handles the unexpected.

Always fun.

Hands on fun.

Tested everywhere.