Output details

The Big Bike Ride

Dennis was the film editor for 'The Big Bike Ride', commissioned by BBC Scotland and produced by Triple Echo Productions. This 60-minute documentary followed two 70-year old Scottish women as they cycled 6000 miles across Canada raising funds for cancer charities. The duration of their journey, the diversions and unexpected changes of plan called for exceptional editing skills to create a coherent account of their travels. Some 40 hours of footage from a journey of several months had to be edited down and still convey the sense of the whole. The technical complexity of the task was compounded by the fact that some of the most significant events along the journey occurred when no camera was present, for instance when one rider fell sick and had to return to Scotland to have a pacemaker fitted. The other rider, now alone in a remote location was picked up, exhausted and soaked, from the roadside by a truck driver and put up in his house to recover. To convey these events called for a highly creative approach to editing the available material. The sense of loneliness and isolation was achieved by using very wide establishing shots of the riders in dramatic landscapes. Shots of the women riding alone or sitting apart in the evenings were inserted to convey their difficult and sometimes fractious relationship. Sound was crucial to create a consistent atmospheric and build a bond between the viewer and the experience of the riders. The ever-present sound of tyres rolling on tarmac, the roar of the frequent logging trucks that passed help to emphasis the frailty and vulnerability of the riders in an often wild and bleak landscape. The sound of distant trains passing, sometimes out of shot, help to create a sense of the wider out-of-frame landscape.