Hey all. Long time forum lurker here – First post ;).
I've been planning a bit of a round the world adventure for a year now. My goal is to hitch-bike (hitchhike and cycle) around the world and film a travel documentary along the way. I hitched through Russia last year and it was an amazing experience – this will be a step up from that.
I'm a huge fan of Goddfrey Reggio and Ron Fricke's Koyaanisqatsi, Baraka, Samsara style documentaries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koyaanisqatsi). Anyone who hasn't heard of them you should check one of them out. Think nature documentary, but about humans and the earth. Spectacular movies which consist of a lot of beautifully shot scenes including a bunch of timelapse and slow motion photography.
So as a bit of a side project along the way I plan to also make a 20-30 minute film trying to tell a bit of a story in a similar way to koyaanisqqatsi. It will involve quite a few timelapses and slow-mo of city scenes and crowds of people, areas of natural beauty, startrails, sunrises and sunsets etc. Also a bit of aerial footage since I will be taking a quadcopter (at least for part of the trip)
Anywho, as you can imagine I want to go as lightweight as possible. A lot easier to do it seems with clothing, sleep systems etc, but I am struggling to find a way that I can film what I want to film and keep it all relatively lightweight. My camera gear list will probably make a lot of ultralighters feel nauseous so apologies for that, but I am a bit of a one man band operation and need to get all kinds of shots for this project. Here is my current gear list.
-Panasonic GH3. Many shooting options, fast autofocus, image stabilisation, mic input, headphone output, weather sealed. Perfect for video and stills. 19 oz (body only)
-shotgun microphone 4.7 oz
-GH3 batteries 9.4 oz
-Varavon slidecam lite (http://www.varavon.com/product/slid_detail_lite.html). Lightweight camera slide which I will motorize for timelapses. Lightest I have been able to find without building it myself. 43.2 oz
-Motion controls. Built by my brother and I. Motorised track and pan 25 oz
-Manfrotto 701HDV Fluid tripod Head 28 oz
-Benro C0180T tripod legs 28.8 oz
-DJI Phantom quadcopter. For filming my own aerial shots. hell yeah! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qchy7BVid9Q) 28.2 oz
-GoPro black. for aerial shots, timelapses, rainy filming, first person shots. Very versatile. High enough video resolution to allow software image stabilisation :D. 7 oz
-canon s100. Backup camera. 7 oz
total weight 200.3 oz = 12.52 pounds = 5.68 kg *faints*
This is also without chargers and wires, and also no lenses for the gh3 so the real total would be even more. So there it is. My extremely non-ultralight gear list. Any ideas on how I could lighten this up a bit while still keeping most of the functionality? Any advice would be much appreciated.
Cheers,
Loren
