Formula Drift 2009 from Joshua Herron on Vimeo.

First off, I’d like to thank everyone who stuck around to watch the premier of my newest film, “Formula Drift 2009″. It really meant a lot to me, and was a great experience! All up to the point where an angry Colts fan complained because his brain couldn’t comprehend how awesome drifting is!! With less than 30 seconds left, the video was cut off resulting in mixed emotions. Most of us were bummed, some were frustrated, and a couple of two we’re ecstatic. Too bad they didn’t realize we took over the restaurant and got the manager to play the video a SECOND time, the full way through.

Take that, angry Colts fan!!!

I spent a great deal of time on this video, working non stop from the time I woke up to just about daybreak the next morning. Everything went really smooth, until Friday night. I encountered problem after problem with a group of footage that was shot at Irwindale with a 35mm lens adapter. The way 35mm adapters work (for those who are curious) is they grant you the ability to mount photography lenses to the front of a fixed lens camera (camera without the ability to change lenses) such as my Panasonic HMC150. Once the image comes through it is flipped upside-down into the camera in which is recorded as “flipped” footage. The fix to this is a “flip module” (which is standard on most newer adapters). The module flips the image upright before it enters the optical sensor on the camera leaving the footage looking as it should…right side up. Because the adapter I was using did not have the module, I was left with flipping all of the footage over in post. The problem then surfaced when it came time to export my footage. As soon as it would export, all of the flipped footage was upside-down…again! After hours of being frustrated, I came up with a work-around to correct this, and exporting was no longer a problem….Sweet! I left the project to export and decided to get a few hours of sleep before waking up and heading to the track, with the intention of being there by 9 am.

Saturday, I wake up and immediately hop onto my laptop to see if everything was good and ready to go….The footage looked great, but there was one problem. The audio had somehow been switched to a different format leaving it in mono….damn it. So once again I work to fix the problem and wait another hour to export (this actually took a few hours due to me exporting multiple times with no avail on fixing the problem). I check the video again and the audio sounds great…but ONE clip is still flipped upside-down. At this point it is 1:30 pm and the event ends in just a few short hours. I scramble to fix the problem and get it exported, one last time. Everything worked great, and the video was ready to go. I packed my bags with the hope of still being able to grab a little bit of footage before the end of the day, but I failed to realize it was now almost 3 pm, and I still had to convert the video from 1280 x 720 to 720 x 480 for the DVD copy, and then I had the burn the DVD as well. I show up to the track, give my hello’s to all the friends out at the track, and immediately pull my laptop out to get to work, once again. With my workstation being the roof of my s14 I managed to get the DVD burned with 30 minutes left in the event. I had made it with just barely enough time to get everything completed.

The video itself runs for 10 minutes and 42 seconds with over 100 clips throughout from start to finish. The average video I put together for each round lasts about 3-4 minutes with an average of 25-30 clips. It covers every event I was fortunate enough to attend (with the exclusion of Atlanta and Sonoma) with highlights of the best/worst moments I was able to capture. It also shows a bit of the interaction between everyone at the event, and how humble of a sport drifting is. The best moment for me filming was witnessing driver and friend Chris Forsberg take the title as the 2009 Formula Drift Champion. Watching him throughout the season was one of the biggest eye opening experiences I’ve had in a while. Seeing the ups and downs, and seeing the friendship between all the drivers as they talked in the pits, or gave each other advice on the grid after runs was great to see. It’s really not something that you would see in any other form of racing. But seeing Chris come back after his championship winning match was nothing short of amazing. Everyone rushed to his car and literally pulled him out of his seat in pure excitement, it was a madhouse. I was lucky enough to have filmed this moment, which was also used in the NOS Energy Drink film “Portrait of a Champion” which was directed by my good friend Will Roegge along with Rod Chong from Speedhunters.com/EA.

So once again, congrats Chris, you absolutely deserved it buddy!

Thank you everyone for the support throughout 2009, I look forward to seeing what happens in 2010!!!

-Joshua “Hobo” Herron