factory47 - A History

factory47. That's the name of the production company founded by Ian Maclachlan (Macca) and I. Macca has a long history in the sport of bmx racing and his race number was 47. And after he stopped competing, his long term goal was to open an action sports venue similar to the ones in America (Camp Woodward). He'd hoped to call it The Factory. Voila! The name factory47 was born for our company. The venue is a goal now for the both of us. But we can't call it The Factory anymore. If you put that into a google search you come up with a gay and lesbian nightclub in Beverley Hills, amongst other things. Which is fine, but we just can't compete with that. The venue will be called factory47 Base Camp.

In 2006 we were shooting a short film with some bmxers on the Gold Coast, which was our entry into a film festival at work when one of the guys, Glenn Codega commented that it would be good if a documentary was made on the debut of bmx racing at the Olympics. He wanted people to see the sport as a serious entry into the Olympic program because there are 2 general opinions on bmx racing:

Opinion 1 - It's a sport for little kids.

Opinion 2 - It's a sport where the guys do tricks (like backflips) on their bikes.

The fact that the sport is in the Olympics already proves Opinion 1 wrong and bmx freestyle is the sport in Opinion 2.

We jumped at the idea and chose 5 Australian bmxers to follow. They are Glenn Codega, Luke Madill, Jared Graves, Jamie Gray and Khalen Young. We also introduced Kamakazi later on in the year. Only 3 guys could be chosen to represent Australia so we followed each of the guys, filming their private lives and training as they competed for the three spots. We're very independent and haven't received any funding or sponsorship, so for us to follow these guys, capturing their interstate and international competitions has been expensive. Macca and I are putting everything on the line for this film.

We've finished filming and are now right into the editing process. It was so overwhelming to start with, we have over 70 hours of footage and we need to squeeze that down to 90 minutes. The whole time we've been filming and editing we've both been working over 40 hours a week. Gotta pay those bills ya know. We're experts at editing from 6pm - 2am, we're at our best with bleary eyes I reckon.

So the Olympics were in 2008 and we had major problems for most of 2009 with compatibility of our camera and our editing system. We couldn't feed our footage into our computer, but finally, finally things are going our way and we are full steam ahead. I've given us a six month deadline to have the majority of the doco edited, so we'll see.....we'd like the film to be ready for release before the next Olympics, so we can ride that Olympic hype to cinematic success!!!

Almost forgot! The film title is:

LIFE BEHIND BARS

PEDAL TO MEDAL