The world of cycling videos is often glamourized, but what goes on behind the scenes of a commercial shoot can be just as exciting as the final product itself. The build-up, the conceptualization and the day of the shoot in our latest video were just as important as the final film. Here we’ll take a behind-the-scenes look and give you a sneak peek into the creative process that goes into producing such an adrenaline-fueled “when calm turns to chaos, Essentials 2023”.

The plan was to take our viewers on a journey from calm to chaos, all within a day's ride. We had originally intended to start with the calm, but as is often the case in these situations, we quickly found ourselves diving headfirst into the chaos. Gabriel, our rider, made light of the early start and got stuck in right away. Our first shot was to capture the moment of chaos as Gabriel rode through a 2.8km tunnel. Finding a tunnel that was a public road and available for closure was no small feat, but we lucked out and found the perfect location. As we set up at the mouth of the tunnel, excitement was palpable, and we couldn't wait to see what we could achieve.

Moving on to the next segment, the calm proved to be a challenging transition for everyone involved. But as we followed Gabriel along the open stretches of the road, a few kilometers away, we were all able to relax and get into the flow of things. From there on out, it all flowed effortlessly. We shot video and photography along the next 46km of long open road capturing the calm and eerie silence you can feel when you are in the zone. Here the filming was more “standard” as we covered kilometres quickly and chased Gabriel as he eat up the road in front. We knew that we wanted to capture the essence of the journey - the sense of freedom, the adventure, and the escape from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. We wanted our audience to feel like they were right there with us, experiencing the thrill of the ride.

Every so often we would take a pause and do a playback of the content, going over our storyboard checklist to make sure that what we had envisioned prior to the shoot had been captured. Before we knew it had all come together to encapsulate our initial title “when calm turns to chaos”. Of course, there was still some magic to do in the editing process to bring it to life in the right language, but what we had filmed was something that we rarely capture to a tee, and that is an emotive connection with the initial collection concept.