DAY 4: Amsterdam – Amstelveen

Today was the first productive day of filming and the first day the effects of jetlag have subsided. I woke up feeling energized and creative!

We started the day with the continuation of individual rider interviews. During breakfast we were able to wrap up two rider interviews before they commenced their official first day on the tour. Once we loaded up the car, everyone headed to the city centre to take some group photos before heading to Amstelveen. We met in Museum Square by the I AM AMSTERDAM sign, then headed to the bibliotheque to continue filming.

i am amsterdam

Filming interviews right outside the library in the heart of the city was not the best idea. During Sabrina Dominguez’s interview, one of the riders, we had to cut on almost every question due to noise complications. There were motorcycles, scooters, trucks, and bicyclists riding by in the street behind us. To add to the disruption, in the middle of filming, this old man comes right in our shot and asks Sabrina to move so he can get his bike out, as she was leaning on a bike rack. He took his time, road off for a few minutes, then decided to come back again to lock it up because he said there wasn’t enough air in his tires to ride it. LOL . What should have been a 5-10 minute interview turned into almost 25 minutes. You might be wondering why we didn’t just move. Well, we thought about it, but we would have had to reshoot her entire interview due to continuity, so we just decided to finish hers up then relocate to a quieter area for subsequent interviews. The next three went fairly smooth, although today’s entire session in Amsterdam ended up being our most costly so far. Is parking ever expensive here. I was blown away. Four Euros per hour! Unbelievable. I thought downtown Vancouver was expensive; this was a whole new ball game.  

Anyhow, we decided to continue filming once we arrived at our next destination, as the riders had to get on their way to make it to the campsite in Amstelveen before sunset and the price of parking was starting to add up quickly. Riel and I headed to the mall on our way to pick up some wires, and adapters for our equipment. We ended up getting lost again, as per usual, due to construction roadblocks, but we managed to arrive at the campsite by 7:00pm and started filming right away. We were able to wrap up two more interviews that evening while we still had natural light.

camp site

Now, it was time to find Internet! I was really excited when the guy at the registration desk told me they had Wi-Fi, although he had failed to mention that the connection sucked. So I ended up paying 5 Euros for 2 hours of internet, and spent most of that time uploading one large zip file of images to Jay Grandin at Giant Ant Media and managed to send two, maybe three emails in total. What was pretty funny is how I sent it. Because we were on a campsite there was no way to tell where the Internet router was, so I walked around the campsite holding my laptop in my hands as I searched for a stronger signal. Well, I finally found a spot that gave me 3 bars, so I parked myself right at that spot, in the middle of the road and sat there for over an hour while the images uploaded to YouSendIt! Hey, at least the file went through successfully without disconnecting, that was my main concern.

Once everything was uploaded, I headed back to the campsite, drank a bottle of 4 Euro sweet white wine with some of the riders and fell fast asleep!

Finding Internet