Glide Track - The portable dolly system

We see Glidetrack sliders being used for lots of different video shoots  – the ‘Scottish Soldier’ video for Help For heroes or The Making of Bending Steel being the most recent examples but we’ve come across a video on Vimeo that’s completely different to what we’ve seen before.

Filmed by Éric Dorchain using a Canon 550D, Manfrotto 055XPROB Tripod and 701HDV head, plus a Glidetrack SD Shooter, Handmade Portraits: Yvan & John is a really cool video about two French bakers (Yvan and John funnily enough) being filmed creating a batch of bread from start to finish in a very traditional manner.

Yvan & John (“Cassons la Croûte” Association), are Bakers from another time, they make sourdough bread cooked over a wood fire. To make bread, they use organic flour from old wheat varieties, also seeds and nuts from organic farming.

The video itself is really informative – you get to see how people baked bread hundreds of years ago, before the invention of electricity. Yvan and John only use traditional methods such as hand shaping and wood-buring ovens to bake their bread to give it a rustic taste. The technique is so basic that they actually tap the bread with their knuckles to check if it’s baked thoroughly and by the time its finished baking they have to use head torches to remove them from the oven as its dark and they have no electricity in their bakery.

There are some excellent slide shots using the SD Shooter in the video – the opening scene in the corn field and a scene where Éric pans across the varieties of bread when they have been removed from the oven are two examples of how effective the SD Shooter is for this type of shot.

The video has been really cleverly shot and edited. Eric hardly uses sound in the video but when he does its very powerful but not in an overcoming sort of way. He also shoots in black in white for the baking process then flicks to full colour for the end scenes.