The Long Ride

Range anxiety is the question every rider asks. Kestrel asked us to answer it with a journey rather than a spec sheet.

A 2-minute launch film, a 30-second spot and a road-trip series in six parts.

The launch film tells the whole journey in two minutes; the 30-second spot keeps only the moment the riders reach the mountains with charge to spare. Both were cut from the same eleven days of footage.

The six-part series is the slow version: one stage per episode, with the stops, the wrong turns and the conversations at the charger left in. It was released weekly in the run-up to the launch, so the audience arrived at the film already knowing the riders.

A crew of five followed two riders from Lisbon to the Pyrenees, charging where they slept. Most of the film was shot from a second bike.

We planned the route around the chargers and not the landscape, then found that the chargers took us to places worth filming anyway: a village square, a vineyard, a petrol station that had kept one pump for bikes.

The camera bike carried a stabilised head and a sound recordist on the pillion. Everything the riders said was recorded on the move, which is why the film has almost no voice-over: they tell the story themselves.

Pre-orders sold out in nine days; the series is still the brand's most watched content.

Dealers reported that customers came in asking about the route before they asked about the range. The question the brief started with had changed.

Kestrel has since repeated the ride as an owners' tour each spring, and the series gained a seventh episode filmed by the riders themselves.