Usually if I’m shooting for SPEED it means I’m in Charlotte. However, this time SPEED came to me. We ended up shooting three features in two days.
The first day we shot a feature on the old Fairgrounds Speedway located in Nashville. I was rocking the HDX 900, 5D, and Contour POV camera. We were rolling as the sun came up. Shooting all the track beauty shots with that beautiful golden hour light added this “epic” quality to the footage. We then shot interviews with the track owner, a NASCAR historian, and Sterling Marlin. I then attached my Contour to the front of the producer’s car. He did a few laps on the track, which gave us some really cool POV footage. Before leaving the track we also shot old photographs with elements of the track in the background on the 5D.
We spent the rest of the day in Clarksville, TN with former NASCAR driver, Jeff Purvis. The first stop was at his sheet metal business. We filmed him doing what he does there and got some sound bites. We finished the day at Jeff’s house where we shot a sit down interview.
The second day was spent down in Columbia, TN at Sterling Marlin’s family farm. We shot footage of Marlin feeding his cows, knocking down trees with his bulldozer, and working on his race cars. We shot a sit down interview in his race shop where we not only used the HDX 900 but the 5D as well. We even got some b-roll of Sterling’s Civil War artifact collection. SPEED should come out to the Music City more often!
