Pedaliere Cycling Film in Jebel Jais

Pedaliere is a Dubai cycling business, bikes and kit and servicing, selling to people who ride the roads this film is set on. Jebel Jais is the highest road in the country and the climb riders in the UAE measure themselves against, which made it the only honest place to put a Pedaliere film.

Getting there is the first cost. The drive from Dubai to the top of the mountain is around two and a half hours, and the film needed the light at sunrise. That means leaving in the middle of the night, arriving in the dark, and being set up and ready on the first usable exposure. The window is short, it is the same window every day, and a morning that goes badly cannot be recovered until the next one.

Everything was shot from a vehicle moving with the riders, climbing and descending the mountain and taking a different set of angles on each pass. A road cannot be repositioned, so the road gets repeated instead. Each pass costs the length of the climb, and that arithmetic is how a mountain shoot spends its day.

There were three riders, and one of them had not ridden in clip-in shoes before. A rider locked into the pedals cannot put a foot down at will, and on a mountain descent that is not a small thing. It sets a ceiling on the riding that can be asked for, because the film is bounded by the least comfortable rider on the road rather than the most comfortable one. That is a limit you plan around rather than push against, and planning around it is cheaper than discovering it at speed.

The film gives Pedaliere the route its customers already know, ridden properly, at the hour of the morning those customers actually ride it, with the shop’s product in use on the climb rather than laid out on a table.