Inside the Bicycle Film Festival
New York filmmaker Julian Doran teamed up with 'Discosalt's' editor-in-chief, Joseph Vele, to do a short film about the Bicycle Film Festival. The piece gives a rare insight into Brendt Barbur; the man who fell off a bicycle and started a festival
"I knew of the Bicycle Film Festival through filmmakers like the Neistat Bros, who are bike aficionados. Their videos 'Bike Lanes’, and 'Stealing a bike in NY' both went viral worldwide. You also may know them from a recent ad Casey Neistat shot for Nike. He was given money to make a TVC…and instead ran off around the world shooting! He shot an ad, of course, but I think it was different from what was originally agreed upon. So, anyway, among others, I knew of the BFF through them"
"It's a great festival running all over the world now, which is why 'Discosalt' wanted to do a video article with Brendt. I really enjoyed doing the edit on this piece because we could afford to be a lit bit quirky. Because the film festival is a bit on the quirky side, it meant that we could reflect that in the interview. My coproducer, Joseph Vele is also a designer, so we were able to have some fun with the graphics too."
"The first time we met Brendt, it was a really easy conversation where he explained how he fell into doing the festival. He is such a wonderfully quirky character, which I guess is why the festival is so much fun. During our first meeting he asked me if he could do the interview with a captain's hat on! We were all for it, though unfortunately in the end that's not the way it worked out."
"It's so important that you gain the trust of the person you are interviewing so that you can portray them as authentically as possible. As soon as you are on camera, you become a lot more self conscious and more aware of how you are going to look. With a video interview - like the one we did with Brendt - it's easy to take the message and change the context. And that's a trust that you have to place in the person who's interviewing you. I'm really aware of that."
Julia is currently a producer with Thomson Reuters and a contributing video journalist to the creative arts online magazine, Discosalt. Her documentary collaborations with Joseph Vele of Discosalt, also include the award winning documentary 'Sound of Vision.' Julia and Joseph were members of the International Documentary Challenge team, 20Coop, which won five awards for 'Sound of Vision' at the 2012 Documentary Challenge.
