Richmond 2013 - Monty Roberts Tour

 Richmond EC - North Yorkshire

 

Without a shadow of a doubt. The folks at Richmond Equestrian Centre, both audience and owners, were truly wonderful. The tour arrived in North Yorkshire for the second time on this first leg of five dates to a venue that provides a challenge. Monty and I were talking about a question that seems to come up time and again. Why is it that when a venue is built that is clearly equestrian, do the designers forget that big horse lorries may need to get inside? The old Towerlands arena in Essex was like this. It has a large door that could just about let a 7.5 tonne lorry in, but it was at the bottom of a slope that meant the angle was to steep! This venue, has an entrance where you can get a horse trailer or Marlborough in, but not anything larger. So how did we get round this when needing to get all the round pen, shopping, scaffold, chairs, and horse equipment in? We had a secret weapon, the tour helpers, tour team, and Jim Goddard (one of Kelly's RAs). Not only that, the venue had a Quad bike and trailer! I have to admit, having a large grin on my face as I, selfishly designated me as driver!! Seriously though, the evening went very well, and through the support of everyone wanting it to be a good evening, it was a great success. 

From a filming perspective, I continued to play with the Gopro camera, and this time mounted it inside the horse trailer for the loading. This worked extremely well on the night, and I think the footage will help a lot if it gets into a program or University lesson. Just to make you laugh though, here is a view from my scaffold and I haven’t tried to adjust the white balance. This was the colour of the lighting at the venue! 

You can see in the picture the Z1, the Mac linked by Firewire, and FCP X which is capturing straight to disk, while the camera records to tape. While I white balanced the camera, FCP does a good job of analysing the footage on the fly as well! I get the best seat in the house with Monty tours….although it can get rather cold!

If there was a single problem with the filming, it was the lighting. Huge amounts of colour casts will need to be removed from the GoPro footage! My other camera (Z1) worked impeccably!

 

For the first time on this tour, Monty had a returning horse from one of the other demonstrations on this tour. Very kindly, the owners agreed to bring the horse to the second demo, and as this picture shows, there were nail biting moments of whether the horse would work through his issues!

Finally, Richmond venue donations put them at the top of the charity league for my “Have A Heart” campaign. £127 for the charity! Thank you so much!!