A Sunday in Hull

2022 revision: We absolutely didn’t have the rights to the Primal Scream song we originally used at the start. We’ve muted the video for the first nine seconds and added a disclaimer.

Not our finest work. In 2008 we went to Beverley in East Yorkshire for the British Criterium Champs and the East Yorkshire Classic. Fun was had. Hull accents were heard.

And we got in trouble for driving the commissaire car too dangerously.

We recorded the audio on an extraordinarily long microphone that cost £1. You can tell. We also didn’t have a script. You can tell that too.

What we said at the time: “We just about managed to resist using the Dean Downing hand washing scene as an homage to the meticulous bike cleaning at the opening of A Sunday in Hell. We wanted it to be its own thing, and it is, just about.

“It doesn’t quite match with what we envisioned when we got on a train to East Yorkshire armed with two handycams, but it still kicks the shit out of most ‘real’ cycling coverage. Grab a camera and make your own.”

We also gave it the tagline “UN FILM SANS MERDE” which was a little bit presumptuous really.

The Making of A Sunday in Hull

August 2008

We know what you’re thinking: How did you make such an incredibly professional looking and well-crafted film with no budget whatsoever? Well, there are a few tips and tricks used in the industry that are completely unknown to the chunky-legged, sofa-bound public. For instance:

CAMERA LENSES
There’s no need for expensive, high-quality cameras. You can achieve the exact same effect by taping a £6 fisheye lens from Hong Kong onto the end of a camcorder.

It might look obvious now we’ve explained it, but nobody can tell the difference in the real world and they’ll probably think you’re Stanley Kubrick or some other dead person. For your second camera, just grab the smallest thing you can possibly find.

EDITING
Editing can be cheap and easy when you use a cracked version of Premiere given to you by somebody you hardly know. It also installs a trojan that asks for your bank account number and you get midnight phone calls from Russian men, which is the kind of quality service that serious auteurs like us demand.

Real filmmakers don’t use expensive, powerful computers to edit. If you have a hard drive that’s too small to hold the entire film, you get the simple task of editing down two hours of footage in ten-minute chunks.

DVD BURNER
Authoring a DVD to send to very important publications such as Cycling Weekly and Tractor Farmer is an excellent way of gaining publicity for your film. If you try to do it with a version of StarForce that was included in an old version of Pro Cycling Manager and causes your computer to lock down and become completely unusable before, during, or after it does anything to do with DVD drives, that builds character. Executive producers look for that in a director.