Martyn Hollingworth: Documenting Courage
Tragically, Jane Tomlinson MBE recently lost her battle with breast cancer. Throughout her seven-year illness Jane became renowned for her courage and optimism in the face of adversity. Following her diagnosis, she undertook a remarkable series of endurance races and events, each designed to raise awareness and money for the treatment of the disease. When she embarked on a gruelling 64-day trans-America cycle ride, a swansong to her endurance event career, not only did she gain the attention of the world’s media, she also gained an additional cycling team member: freelance documentary maker Martyn Hollingworth.
Armed with a handheld HDV camera, Hollingworth cycled alongside Tomlinson for the entire 3700-mile journey from San Francisco to New York, capturing the agony and the ecstasy of the experience by day, and — using a 17-inch MacBook Pro loaded with Final Cut Studio and iLife — working on a documentary of the ride by night.
Throughout the duration of the trip, despite having to cycle up to 80 miles each day, Hollingworth managed to film and edit daily updates for Sky TV, as well as producing and editing an hour-long documentary, Jane Tomlinson: Across the USA, which was broadcast on Sky just days after Jane and her support crew arrived, exhausted and exhilarated, on the Atlantic coast.
“The mobile technology was integral to pitching the idea to Sky”, explains Hollingworth. “It meant I could offer them daily reports they could use on their news programme while also working on the documentary as we went along”. Weekly progress reports of the ride were distributed via iTunes as video podcasts; and, thanks to Apple’s GarageBand software, Martyn was even able to compose the music for the documentary in various small-town motels along the route.
Prior to embarking on the journey, Hollingworth — based near Aviemore in Scotland — invested in an off-the-shelf mobile editing suite, based around a 17” MacBook Pro with a 100GB 7200 rpm hard drive. “I chose the MacBook Pro for sheer speed and its generous screen real estate”, he explains. “It also accommodated time-critical situations where all the editing could be done on the laptop without having to use external drives, so maximising battery life”.
A freelance cameraman and editor by trade, this was to be Hollingworth’s first documentary as director. This would likely have phased a lesser man, but Martyn had no doubts: “Having access to such high-quality media tools gave me confidence that I’d be able to deliver a top-quality product from such a physically demanding project”.
“I was shooting about 40 or 50 minutes of footage a day”, he explains. “Sky wanted the film to be broadcast within five days of getting back to the UK, so there was no way I could do it other than by editing on the road. If I’d waited until the trip was over, there simply wouldn’t have been enough time”.
Editing on the road also offered the viewer a unique perspective on the challenge. Martyn was determined not only to chart Jane’s progress but also to capture the essence of what the journey meant to him personally. He wanted the film to reflect his own emotions, and that too could only be achieved if he was able to put his thoughts on record each day while they were still fresh in his mind.
The result was a punishing schedule for the filmmaker. After cycling and shooting footage throughout the day — often in blistering heat — Martyn edited for a couple of hours to create the daily diary piece for Sky. Having transmitted this to the broadcaster, Martyn would return to his edit suite later in the evening to work on the longer film, incorporating new events and ideas, and working over existing footage in order to shape and finalise the documentary into the strict time segments required for broadcast. Using GarageBand, Soundtrack and Final Cut Pro’s voiceover tool, Martyn generated each element of the film and allowed it to grow organically, with each element influencing the others.
With Final Cut Studio taking care of the picture edit and commentary, GarageBand enabled Martyn to compose a soundtrack that reflected his mood during the ride. “With GarageBand, you can just plug in your keyboard and write music”, he says. “I just love its immediacy. When you get an idea in your head, the last thing you want to do is start messing around with kit, only to find that you’ve forgotten what you were going to do”.
GarageBand provided a musical sketchpad for Martyn, but the program also enabled him to fully orchestrate his musical ideas, combining material written on the road with guitar samples he had pre-recorded before he left the UK.
Hollingworth never doubted the equipment would enable him to deliver the results he wanted: “On a project like this, the last thing you want to be worried about is technical difficulties”, he says. “You need everything to work first time. And with this system, everything did”.
Indeed, while the Apple solution performed perfectly on the road, it also delivered back in the UK. When Hollingworth visited the Sky studios to finish off the film, he turned down the offer of using one of their non-linear edit suites, requesting instead only a desk on which he could set up his Mac. “Using Final Cut meant that even when I was close to finishing, I could still go into the project and refine individual sections of the film”, he says.
Having enjoyed the freedom of the road, Martyn feels Apple’s mobile technology has expanded his creative horizons, freeing him from studio-based editing facilities: “When I’m editing on the road, my work is influenced by what’s around me. I can work on whatever I want wherever I want, and that means I feel more inspired”.
