A few years ago we had the dumb idea to ride mopeds across America and accidentally became first-time filmmakers. Our movie, Slow Ride Home, was published to Amazon Prime yesterday and we'd love to share our story with r/movies

The backstory:

Through a crazy series of events (including the ride itself) we ended up making a feature-length documentary and the final result was not terrible - we even won a few awards for it.

The ride was an 11-day journey from Florida to Washington state. Eight of us made the journey on 125cc scooters that topped out at 55mph so it was pretty much backroads the whole way. One guy had the crazy idea to bring a buddy with a camera along and film the thing - and who hasn't dreamed of having a camera follow them around while they do something they'd love to share later. Months later we had a successful Kickstarter and enough money to pay for a small crew and rent some good gear.

I'll leave out the part about the ride for sake of spoilers, but it was definitely one of the more memorable experiences of my life... one we all wanted to share... so back to the movie...

Well, long story short, our original plan fell through... we were left with a hard drive full of TERABYTES worth of footage and tasked with making a movie with almost zero no film experience. But we know that this movie was going to get made - we were going to have to do it ourselves. There was a LOT to go through, but we began to catalog footage: key shots, b-roll, transcribing dialogue of interview footage so it could be searched later, etc. Thankfully one of us knew their way around Adobe Premier fairly well, but the files quickly became overwhelming.

We took to the analog way and created a massive serial-killer-hunter-style board and began to put up sticky notes of key moments, bits of dialogue and transitions. At this point, we knew what needed to be shown and then came a stack of library books about filmmaking. How do you pull together a good story? How do you make documentary footage compelling? What is a three-act structure? We slowly massaged the story so that there was a rhythm of highs and lows, and did the best we could to develop each character (it's a weird thing deciding "ok I guess I am sort of the idiot of this movie").

We finally began to share the movie with some friends in the industry and they all were surprised at how not-bad this movie was... maybe it was even good? A few more cuts of adjusting and trimming and we had a feature-length doc. It was a surreal moment showing it to a group of about 200 peers and watching everyone truly enjoy the movie.

The whole process took about 3 months of editing, and then another year or so of showing it around at scooter and motorcycle shops, small theaters and some film festivals. Yesterday we reached our final milestone, getting the film on a streaming platform that can be watched by all. Especially given the time we are in when people seem to need something lighthearted to watch, we hope our film can be enjoyed by as many people as possible. Thanks for taking the time to read our story!

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TLDR: Rode scooters across the country, ended up with a bunch of footage, made a movie and it was actually pretty good. Check out Slow Ride Home on Amazon Prime. 

Submitted April 29, 2020 at 09:05AM by goodeyemite https://ift.tt/3bL6E6U