Director of Photography
Spent the last weekend in August in Shawano, Wisconsin filming the two day drift event – Final Bout.
It was an awesome gathering of the most stylish drift teams in North America. With teams traveling from places as far west as California, as far east as Massachusetts, and as far north as Alberta, Canada.
The second and longer documentary video follows BBI Autosport as they prepare Jeff Zwart’s 997 GT3 Cup Turbo – Hill Climb Special for the 2014 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. BBI Autosport is based in Huntington Beach, California they specialize in Porsche and exotic car performance tuning.
In this 10 minute documentary I wanted to capture what made Betim Berisha’s story so special. It is his determination and commitment. Betim didn’t take an easy road to becoming a race engineer – he took on lots of risk and challenged himself. He left his life in Washington state and was homeless for a few months while trying to make a career in Southern California. It paid off when he eventually was hired by Porsche Motorsport North America. After a few years of building customer cars in his spare time, Betim started BBI Autosport and recruited talented friends to come work with him. Their commitment to doing things with passion and creativity caught the attention of Pikes Peak International Hill Climb champion Jeff Zwart who hired BBI to build his next Hill Climb race car.
We conducted interviews in Colorado Springs during the week of the hill climb as well as shot BBI’s facilities while they were prepping the car. Due to a fuel pump failure, we weren’t given the championship winning ending that looked certain during practice and qualifying – however that made the overall message more important. To me, that message is don’t quit. Keep pushing and taking opportunities. Passion will make you successful.
Director of Photography: Will Roegge
Camera Operators: Joshua Herron, Will Roegge, and Skylar Smith
Motion Graphics: Skylar Smith
Edited by: Will Roegge with additional help from Joshua Herron
While cars and racing action usually make up most of my year’s work – I took on a fun project traveling to 6 of the nation’s best BBQ joints with a production called Eats! The show focuses on a variety of restaurants and their back stories. For these episodes we explored some of the highest rated BBQ spots. Most of the places had a background in competitive BBQ. All of them were friendly, busy, and delicious. I’ve picked out a few of my favorite episodes and posted them here.
We shot on the Canon C300 with Zeiss and Canon Cine Primes. As well as with Canon EF glass for a super 8 mm handheld look for certain b-roll shots.
It was awesome to light interviews and pick out different areas of the restaurants to cover.
2014 marks my fifth year covering the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb and the fourth film I’ve done with Jeff Zwart. With the road being fully paved for the past 3 years now – I really wanted to emphasize speed in this year’s film. In 2013 we shot the film with a combination of cameras and this year we decided to produce the film in 4k UHD resolution. It looks great at maximum resolution, if you have a resolution and connection bandwidth I recommend changing the settings to 2k or 4k.
Commercial Director/Racer Jeff Zwart and I exchange photos our cars being pushed to the limit. Whether its drifting or Jeff rallying – its a fun exchange.
When Jeff sent me a video of his Porsche 356 Pre-A sliding through the snow in Colorado – I knew we had to make a film about it. It turns out, like many cars, there is a great story behind that 356. Jeff originally purchased it after searching for a rental 356 for a Porsche Cayenne commercial. When his search returned no good options, he decided to try and buy one instead. He had no intention of keeping the 356 long term, however the car grew on him and turned out to be fun to wheel.
Thanks to Jeff Zwart for being one to drive cars to their full potential and for sharing the desire to create things constantly.
Compare my storyboard frames on the left with their finished video frames on the right – taken from my short film: The Porsche from the Winter of 53.
Frame direction has been changed on some to accommodate the real locations and available conditions when I arrived in Colorado to shoot. Also worth noting the Barn Frame changed from my original script. I originally thought it would be interesting to have Jeff’s Cayenne in front of the 356 and the reveal being the 356 driving out from behind it. However, I decided to simplify the story and leave the Cayenne out all together focusing entirely on the 356.
Shot in Woody Creek, Colorado at the end of March, 2014. Using my RED Epic camera Zeiss Lenses and my DJI s1000 Octocopter with a 5D MIII.
Its crazy to think I met Matt Powers right around when he started his professional drift career. So when Matt told me he wanted to try a 360 mid drift, on one of the trickiest parts of the down hill section of Willow Spring’s Horse Thief Mile track, I was intrigued. Horse Thief has some awesome elevation changes, tight corners, and was originally built as a motorcycle track. All of that means that its not very wide like other race circuits specifically built for cars. So to pull off a 360 it would require a lot of commitment. Watch the video and see for yourself how Matt did with the 360.
Special thanks to Just Drift, who hosts the Top Drift series and Just Drift practice events. They are the best drift events around and they were nice enough to let us try this 360 during an event! Thanks Charlie.
Also to Larry Chen, for being a crazy chase car driver and allowing me to mount my camera setup to his classic 240z. Without Larry, this cool angle would not have been possible.
As of 2020, this video has over 5 million plays on YouTube. Enjoy a really enjoyable day with Hert at Just Drift All Star Bash and Toy Drive.
When Porsche started out of a small village in Austria – they built the Gmünd.
Excited to be able to share some of my recent Directing work. As Director and Director of Photography, I helped to launch the 2015 Subaru WRX in the most Hoon-tastic way possible: by having 5 hardcore Subaru owners drive the crap out of it.
The ring master for the 5 Chosen One’s adventure was skateboard legend and Subaru Rally driver Bucky Lasek. Bucky was awesome to work with on the job – he provided the comic relief, helped refine my autocross course, and ripped some really nice e-brake turns for b-roll.
It’s rare to have an opportunity to really push the limit in cars like the WRX as an enthusiast. Especially when the cars belong to Subaru.