Ride Of Your Life started as my own personal midlife cross-country fantasy. I then thought it would be nice to share my thoughts and experiences from the road using a simple blog, perhaps with some videos, Twitter, interview a few people… Eventually it became a project. The video stuff in particular was a little challenging to plan for. I know very little about video equipment, will have very little luggage space, and in my family I am known as the one taking the worst possible home movies. So I knew that I would have to fit all of the video stuff in one backpack, and get the kind of equipment that is all-automatic and leaves very little room to express my own talents in the art of videography.
For the most part, the single piece of equipment I will use the most is my new iPhone 4: always in my pocket ready to take pictures, shoot videos, edit them with iMovie, upload, and share.
For the expert interviews, and for scenarios that allow for some setup time, I got a couple of Kodak Zi-8 cameras. Out of the simple HD camcorders out there this model stands out for having an external microphone jack, so I can connect some lav mics and get better interview audio. I also got a few battery powered lighting modules, and a few small tripods. So overall it added up to a small studio on two wheels.
A couple of before departing, my video equipment is finally packed nicely in a backpack and ready to go. A mess of cameras, chargers, cables, and mounts, on in a single, neat, pretty heavy backpack. We’ll see what happens the first time it rains…
