4Speed Auto

4Speed Auto

If you’re a regular at the Shuh Huqua Review, or if you enjoy spending masses of time on youtube, you may have stumbled upon a show called 4Speed Auto, watched it, and wondered why it was made. The reason is quite simple, the people here at the Shuh Huqua review thought it would be a great idea to do some video reviews of our own and see if ours could be more entertaining than the video reviews from the professional publications. We also secretly hoped that it might catch on so that we can eventually do more in the future. Of course there were issues though.

For starters, Jesse and I thought of doing the show more as a fantasy rather than an actual possibility. We lacked any proper financial backing and more or less every interesting show idea we came up with would have cost us far beyond what we had. Then finally one day, I came up with the rough idea of what ended up in the final product, tallied up the possible costs, and conferred with Jesse. After an immense amount of planning and thought, we finally had a full length show idea.

The show name was actually decided rather quickly. The two most successful automotive programs in the world are Top Gear and Fifth Gear, so we kind of wanted to rip off those names by including something with gear in our show title, but fortunately we were slightly more creative. We wanted the show to be geared more towards everyday cars that most people can buy, and we joked that the four speed automatic transmission is what everyday cars have; so we called the show 4Speed Auto.

If you saw the show you may remember me saying that we did the show off of the same budget an elementary school play would use… and it was true. Some of our camera equipment was borrowed; we only had one shotgun microphone; we only had one proper car mount for the cameras; the cameras were literally the cheapest family camcorders you could buy; all cars except the Mustang were borrowed from friends (Mustang was rented from Hertz); we had ancient video editing software; and of course the camera crew labor was supplied for free by some of my best friends. Given the resources at hand and our fairly small budget, sourced from my personal savings, it seemed like it would take a miracle for us to make anything remotely presentable.

Another major issue we had to contend with was conflicting schedules. The CR-V review wasn’t too bad on this front because it was done while I was in Florida visiting my parents and some friends, but the main segment with the Mustang and the 3 needed a much larger crew and naturally took a lot of careful planning. Unfortunately everyone involved including Jesse and I happened to become adults in the recent past which entails jobs and places to be, so careful timing was thought up so that we’d all have time to come out and film this segment.

We weren’t let off that easily though. We only had one weekend to get the segment filmed, and we were greeted with rain while we were at Mount Rainier. Naturally we did as much filming as we could when it wasn’t raining, but as a result of the weather we lost valuable time and the chance to get more interesting footage.

After we were done at Mount Rainier, and it was impossible to get more footage, I proceeded to lock myself in my room for two weeks to do all the editing. Since we did get far less footage than I would have liked, editing was certainly a challenge. There were times when I panicked and thought that I couldn’t bridge a couple of segments, but I really dug deep and was able to get the project finished.

Despite all the difficulties we used ingenuity and enthusiasm to persevere. The end result was something that the entire crew was proud of. Sure, it doesn’t look studio grade but given what we had we were all very happy with the final product. So, hopefully this answers any questions people may have had about 4Speed Auto. Of course if you have any comments or other questions, please drop us an e-mail at 4speedauto@gmail.com and we’ll be happy to reply. I hope you enjoyed the show, and we hope to be able to make more.