Equine Productions backs a winner with VMI

interview and copy written for VMI

Sports documentaries are never a dead cert. They are edge of the seat productions for filmmakers who can never be sure they’ll have a compelling story to sell once the season closes. Equine Productions, a specialist in filming horse racing, has beaten the odds by backing serial winners including shooting Amazon Prime’s four-part doc Horsepower.

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“Fortunately, we had a start and an ending to the series that far exceeded anything that we could have hoped for,” says Dave James, CEO/Creative Director at Equine Productions.   

The premise of Horsepower was to follow Champion jockey Oisin Murphy through the 2021 season which culminates in Royal Ascot, the pinnacle of the flat racing season. In addition, they were granted behind-the-scenes access to top UK trainer Andrew Balding and his stables at Kingsclere as they search for the next equine superstar.

They were two weeks into filming when Murphy was found to have metabolites of cocaine in his system. “That threw some spanners in the works. We weren’t sure if the whole production was going to be pulled but Oisin was keen to carry on and film the series,” says James.

Murphy was suspended for three months but returned to resume his partnership with Alcohol Free, winning the Coronation Stakes at Ascot where he was crowned champion flat jockey for a third successive season.

“It was a bit of a redemption story for him, a great story for the stable and since we’d followed them throughout the entire season, we had loads of narrative highs and lows. I say we got lucky but we created our own luck by picking the right yard, picking the right stable and jockey.”

Equine Productions had shot all its previous documentaries on Sony FS7 but for Horsepower James wanted a full frame camera. “I also wanted something I was familiar with, that I could trust. So that’s when we explored the Sony FX9. I borrowed one from Gary at VMI for a day just to have a play with and to make sure I was happy. I pretty quickly decided that the FX9 was going to be our A camera for the shoot with A7S’ as B cams mounted on gimbals.”

Horsepower didn’t employ a lot of slo-motion but James was intrigued to see if he could take the high frame rate storytelling of blue chip natural history and apply it to horse racing.

“I had a couple of small projects where I tested a variety of super slo-mo cameras but I didn’t really get on with their workflows,” he relates. “The nature of horse racing is that things happen so quickly one after another. I needed to be able to be really reactive to the environment. I can’t have a lot of messing around. I can’t have a lot of buffering. I can’t be offloading cards. I didn’t really fall in love with any of the cameras until I tried the FreeFly Ember.”

The Freefly Ember S5K had just been released and VMI had one of the first models. They loaned a unit to James to test.

“It just suited what we needed to do down to a ‘T,’” he says. “I shot some sequences at 800 frames a second of horses jumping and just put them out online where they went viral.

“Somebody in the United States saw what we were doing and that led to a commission for a bigger project, which was to cover The Preakness for promo content in a way that hadn’t been done before.”

The Preakness Stakes is held annually in May in Baltimore and is one of the jewels in the American Triple Crown for three-year old thoroughbreds alongside the Belmont Stakes and Kentucky Derby.

“I spoke to Gary at VMI again and asked if he could help us out for the two day shoot, and he absolutely did. He helped us out with all the kit. The cameras, the lenses, the works. They were incredible.”

Equine Productions also has a contract to produce content for luxury brand Cartier and has been using the FreeFly at every high-end race meet in the UK this season. Footage shot by James and his team will feature at The Cartier Racing Awards.

“They had seen what we’d done for The Preakness and they wanted that style and quality as well.”

Before starting up Equine Productions 13 years ago with co-founders Sam Fleet and Nathan Horrocks, James was making documentaries of the sailing community including of America’s Cup, Volvo Ocean Races and the World Match Racing Tour.

“I was looking for a change and a subject that didn’t demand so much travel,” he says. “Horse racing seemed ideal not least because I could see there wasn’t anything like what we were doing for sailing.  So, we dovetailed the two, bringing our experience of the sailing world and of sports docs into horse racing.”

Equine Productions tends to keep all aspects of its projects in-house including postproduction. Another part of the business is a technology innovator. It has invented a compact RF camera system for mounting in the caps of jockeys for incredible live action footage during a race from the rider’s point of view. Versions of the technology are also being used as RefCams during Rugby Union’s autumn internationals.