The Olympic Torch made its way through my home town of Sunderland and as I work for SportByte I gained access to sit on the back of the official Olympic Torch Relay media bus. This allowed me to gain some fantastic footage of the relay, the torch, the people of Sunderland and excitement the torch brought to all of the people that turned out to see it. The atmosphere around the town was great, everyone was cheering, waving flags, blowing whistles and clapping their hands. For those people who missed the Torch Relay I hope this video allows you to embrace the atmosphere of the day and to see how proud ever torch-bearers was.
This was a great experience for me as a film maker as I have never filmed from the back on a moving bus before, I quickly found out there are a number of different challenges that I had to overcome very quickly. One of them was to keep the camera steady as the bus was moving and turning around corners which I could not see. I think I did a good of keeping the camera steady and I captured some really good footage.
Whilst on the media bus it stopped for a brief moment whilst the torch-bearers changed and it stopped right next to a family member, which at the time I did not realise it was him until we drove away. Whilst I was sitting next to him he said ‘you have the best seat in the house’ and I think I did. The image show me on the far right hand side on the media bus.
