CAMERA MAN Colin Bullock
I have personally known Colin Bullock for many years; we became friends in the early ‘80s, and he has always supported my books and magazines with his excellent pictures and memories of his trials adventures. He has not just taken pictures; his back catalogue of motorcycle trials film is something he should be very proud. It’s a recorded history of trials and off-road motorcycling dating back to 1991 but do the readers know the full story of how the filming came about? I hand you over to the capable words of Colin Bullock.
When in conversation with John Hulme following this year’s Telford show, he was saying that I must have a fair old catalogue of off-road video films. It is fairly true as I started filming events in earnest in 1991. Before then I had concentrated on stills, having first started with Motor Cycling Weekly and then Trials and Motocross News in 1979. Still, photography is something I will always enjoy doing but recording events is very satisfying, especially from a few years later. The old Castrol and C H Wood films always used to be the staple diet of club nights, and without realising it at the time, the history of our sport was being
recorded for posterity. It was the Scottish Six Days Trial — where else — that got me thinking of film making, and so having purchased the hardware to start, a great lump of a JVC Super VHS camcorder, off we went.
Portable, really…
I’d had a play a year or so earlier with a VHS portable recorder — well, they said it was portable — with a separate camera and recorder pack. It was not a good idea for following trials, so it was abandoned until the relatively userfriendly camcorder came along. The JVC took a three-hour tape, which was great except it did eat batteries at a considerable rate such was the charge it was taking to run the recorder!
It was, however, shoulder-mounted, which made it fine for filming — but it did need a fairly substantial rucksack for housing it. I still have the said beast, and it still works, which is more than you can say for some of the other cameras I have bought over the years.
To do the editing, we linked it up with another similar camcorder, and away we went. It was a manual operation involving lots of forwards, backwards, record, pause, play etc. It was fine, and you could voice over the copy afterwards, but if you found you had made a mistake later on what a lot of messing about it was to put right! Thank goodness for digital footage and computer editing these days which can be so much quicker and more accurately. I don’t miss the old methods and can only thank Stuart Hay who was a trials and enduro enthusiast who spent many a long evening helping me out.
How to Ride Trials with Mick Andrews
One of the early films we did was ‘How to Ride Trials’ with Mick Andrews. It was great fun to do, watching the master at work and then spending more time with him doing the voice over. That was done at Mick’s cottage in front of a roaring log fire which you can occasionally hear when playing the film back.
I did a follow-up film many years later with Mick, and to get a view of body positioning from a different angle some bright spark suggested filming from a tractor bucket positioned above the action. It was an experience that stays imprinted on my mind to the present day!
I went on to do two training DVDs with Steve Saunders: ‘The Cotswold Way’ and ‘Trial 2000’ and two things stand out very clearly even today; first, watching him at close quarters as he would practice each section over and over until he could clean it on every attempt. Second, and much
more embarrassing, was when he said ‘bring a motorcycle along as it’s a bit of a trek to this bit of ground I want to use’. I trouped along three fields behind Steve, and his dog kept coming back to find me. It was all the fault of the camera on my back, I explained, but he did not believe me and still reminds me of it to this day!
More recently another training film was made with Dan Thorpe, a rider who has helped me considerably with my DVD productions in the past ten years.
Filming
Back to the start in 1991 and the Scottish Six Days Trial, which with the assistance of the Archers family and others, we have covered every year since. It is without a doubt my favourite place to be at the end of April and beginning of May.
1993 saw me adding the Pre-65 Scottish to the rest of events we covered and, again, a film has been made every year since; except of course 2001 when the country had the terrible foot and mouth epidemic. The following season we added the UK Trials Review to the catalogue. Not an original idea but getting 10 to 15 events on film every year since has proved to be a labour of love. In the early 2000s, we were allowed to film many world championships from home and abroad, which added much to the variety of events on the Review and, for a few years, we had to take the UK off the title, such was the wide variety of events. While most riders don’t mind being on the ‘Review’ there is one part of it they try to avoid. ‘It’s a 5’ we feature every year as one thing is for certain, everyone will take a tumble, and you just hope there are few people to witness it when it happens!
In 2018, one British Championship rider was lying in the mud on his back when another told him ‘that’s it you are on this year’s film.’ Everyone seems to take it in good part so far! Filming is one thing, but without a commentary, it’s just not complete. I have been so lucky with people who have been willing to sit down with me and talk their way through hours of footage. In alphabetical order: Mick Andrews, Wayne Braybrook, Martin Crosswaite, Colin Dommett, Steve Saunders and Dan Thorpe have all turned up on CJB films. The initial preparation for commentating is that after I have the edited film, we get together, put it on the screen and just start talking. No script has ever been written, and sitting down with these guys is just great as they impart their knowledge of the riders, motorcycles and the sections.
Off-road variety
It has not all been about trials as we have done the odd Enduro, Junior MX and probably ten Weston Beach Races, but mainly my interest has been trials. The latter was usually with the help of the late Nik Fisk, the event race commentator. One year he interviewed two Weston rookies prior to the race, and we arranged to meet them again at four o’clock after the race had finished. Neither of them turned up as they were both in hospital — no wonder no one wanted to talk to us the year after! Nik was also terrible for stopping production as he would disintegrate into laughter when he has made a ‘Fau Paux’ on the commentary.
The coming of the digital age made life a lot easier both with cameras and computer editing, although I am sure you need to have a master’s degree to work some of the editing programmes that are on the market! At least now no more VHS, VHS-C, SVHS, Hi 8, DV Cam etc., just a memory card. No more shoulder-mounted camcorders either. Whoever said a good big one beats a good small one every time has no concept of following off-road events!
The back catalogue
Fortunately, I had kept most of the old tapes, so we put them all onto DVD, which has given the back-catalogue a new lease of life and now totals nearly 200 films. It is always nice when someone says ‘I rode in the 1993 Scott Trial and lost the tape’ or ‘I have not got a VHS player anymore’ and we can sort that out for them. All the films are available on DVD from 1991 onwards, and the back catalogue has made a superb collection of trials since then. This is close on 30 years of trials and so, if you are at an age of wanting to watch yourself in action in your younger years, then get along to the website to see just what we have to offer at www.cjbphotographic.org