Daytona 500

Kicking off the NASCAR season with the biggest race of the year means it’s time to pull out all the stops and bring your A game. Seeing and experiencing the big race at Daytona is an experience not to be forgotten. Starting with the hanger shoot, where crews spent two days constructing sets, which would be used to capture drivers for various promo tidbits. Seeing the whole thing go together was an amazing site to see as grips, electricians, cameras, and lights were orchestrated together to create six different rooms inside an airplane hangar, each with its own theme.

Drivers would make their way from room to room spending a few minutes getting all the shots and sometimes some sound bites. Skip Clark used some new Ultra Prime Lenses mounted on his Panasonic Varicam to create a unique look and feel for his room titled “Portraits”. Sometimes using a Wally Dolly, he was able get some great shots of the drivers in a set that looked like the inside of a garage. What was incredible was the speed of the shoot. Over 40 drivers came in that day and we had only about 5 minutes with each of them to get the shots we needed. This required many set ups in a small amount of time.

The days leading up the race were a flurry of various shoots, ranging from interviews to skits created and acted by some of the NASCAR celebrities. One skit in particular was a mockup of the TV show “TMZ”. It was a multi-camera shoot with 8 people on camera. We also had a great time with a little race with R/C cars that were incredibly fast. Tom Wells tried to get some great lower angle shots and was often struck by the cars themselves as they raced around and around.

Skip Clark got a chance to try out his new camera, a Sony F3. Coupled with the new Ultra Prime lenses, we spent some time getting some great shots of Daytona. It was great to learn about different ways of pulling off some amazing time lapse footage, something Skip really likes to do and does very well.

Finally race day was upon us and the crowds filled the track. Most of the time, I was always trying to keep up and stay with Skip as he went through the crowds. I was ready to hand him any lens he needed throughout the day and made sure to do it as fast as possible. It was awesome to be there and experience it all, definitely challenging at times, but fun too, knowing that I got a chance to do a lot of things others might never get to do. A highlight of my time in Daytona would definitely be getting a chance to ride around the track in a limousine full of people, at 120mph! If Daytona is any indication of things to come, it’s definitely going to be a wild ride!