"The Wall of Death"

This film has been copied more than once, most visibly as a BBC One Ident, but this is the original, directed by Marco Brambilla. It was conceived as a multimedia installation on multiple screens, as part of Marco's work as a video artist.

This piece was shown as a multimedia installation at the Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery in New York:

The rider is Ken Fox, who has been risking his life for entertainment since he was old enough to climb on a motorcycle. He and his family travel the UK fairground circuit with this attraction and this Wall is one of only two left in the country - if you get the chance to see it live, take it: standing on the gallery at the top of the wall with the bikes hurtling past within arm's reach is one of the most visceral experiences you can have

We used a variety of techniques to achieve these shots, including mounting cameras on the motorcycles, mounting them on a go-kart which one of the riders drives up the wall, and using the Camera Revolution Megamount placed in the centre of the floor and suspended from a crane to follow the movement of the motorcycles. It was the only remote head capable of rotating at sufficient speed to keep up - one circuit of the Wall takes the rider about 2 seconds

We shot on 35mm and 16mm, using various colour stocks, and transferred to tape in Black & White. The gallery version was shown on multiple different-shaped screens with an ambient soundtrack created from location recordings

Marco also cut a test commercial (30 secs) from the footage:

This was a speculative use of the footage to show how it might be used in an ad. The packshot was not a commissioned product, just a generic watchface