Had enough footy yet? I'm just hitting my stride having spent a week in Lisbon cutting Follow the Cup shorts for UEFA's Champions League FB page. Produced by Ear to the Ground the films are the brainchild of long haired maverick director Ben Urwin. Ben and his cameraman sidekick Ben Falk have spent the last three months traveling the globe with the Champions League Trophy tucked under their arms and tiny bullet cams glued all over it.
Not surprisingly people went nuts wherever they produced the magic cup. Buenos Aires, Madrid, Ho Chi Minh were all subjected to the pandaemonium. The result? Some fantastic footage and a set of pacey, bonkers fan worshiping moments that couldn't have been captured any other way. The price, the mental health of several hard working editors who had to sort the wheat from the chaff, and let me tell you there was a lot of chaff.
I can't begin to calculate the quantity of footage in minutes, but once the eight and a half terabytes of moving randomness had loaded into my tired old Macpro there were no less than six and a half thousand clips (many of them longer than 2 hours) from which to select the golden two minutes forty.
Humanity of course has a long tradition of creating grand, expensive and ultimately pointless things. The Pyramids, landing on the moon, BBC3. This film must surely take it's place amongst them.