Technical news website The Register (who republished my co-author Diederik Kind’s excellent article World Solar Challenge: Why the winners were so good) sent their own camera crew along the solar racing teams, and this is the fifteen-minute documentary they produced:

I still get very excited watching this video… I can hardly wait until it’s September/October 2013.

One of the University of Michigan’s sponsors put this short video online showing some images of Quantum making its way from Darwin to Adelaide:

The Turkish Saitem team has put two nice ‘mood videos’ online of their first two racing days. Day one:

Day two:

I will of course keep an eye on this team’s video channel as I expect more videos to come up.

It seems that with having most of the teams arrived home in their respective countries, one month after the race, more and more videos and documentaries are starting to appear.

The University of Calgary Solar Team published this movie which is part documentary and part mood video:

The Dutch Nuon Solar Team’s adventures were featured in an episode of Discovery Channel’s Daily Planet:

Here is episode four of the ongoing documentary about the Belgian Umicore Solar Team’s participation in the 2011 World Solar Challenge. This episode is especially interesting as it shows the severe battery problems the team experienced. The footage of this incident can be seen from 4m50s:

Desert of No Time

Students from the Academy Creative Technology department of the  Saxion University of Applied Sciences have produced a documentary about Solar Team Twente‘s participation in the 2011 World Solar Challenge. Although the documentary was not released for general distribution (as far as I know) I managed to get hold of an original copy.

The documentary comes in a nice box with a cover as shown on the right, and it contains two discs. The first disc is a Blu-ray and it contains only the movie. The second disc is a DVD which contains the movie and many extras like the daily video reports the team aired during the race, and some background video. I think it’s smart to provide both discs as relatively few people have a Blu-ray player.

The documentary has a length of a little over 52 minutes and it basically tells two stories, the story of the team’s adventures in Australia and the history and culture of Stuart Highway. By doing it this way it’s very different from the Belgian documentary which is aired in five parts at the moment as that focuses nearly exclusively on the team’s adventures.

It’s well-made, with great landscape shots and they found a few characteristic Australians to tell the story of the ‘Desert of No Time’. I have no idea whether or not the documentary will be made available for sale, but if you manage to obtain a copy, it’s certainly worth a watch.

Here is episode four of the ongoing documentary about the Belgian Umicore Solar Team’s participation in the 2011 World Solar Challenge:

Nuon Solar Team apparently loves time lapse movies Here is a nice video showing Tokai Challenger arriving at the Tennant Creek control stop, followed twelve minutes later by Nuna6. To say the situation must have been tense is probably an understatement.