Claudio von Planta (born 16 September 1962) is a Swiss cameraman, director and filmmaker, based in London.
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His best known work is as the cameraman who accompanied Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman on their Long Way Round motorcycle journey from London to New York in 2004. Shortly before the trip Claudio discovered his motorbike licence was invalid for the journey. He subsequently failed his bike test the day before the team was due to leave. He remained in London and retook the test 2 weeks later, eventually flying out to join up with the team in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic.
Claudio would often ride far ahead of the other two in order to film them going past, or trail behind getting the shots he wanted. Von Planta suffered a couple of bad falls on the journey. At one point in Mongolia his bike took such a battering it had to be sent ahead for repairs and a replacement bike was purchased by Ewan McGregor.
In 2006 he linked up again with Russ Malkin and Charley Boorman as the Director of Photography for Race to Dakar, a documentary chronicling the teams' attempt at the Rally Dakar. In 2007 he reprised his role as cameraman on Long Way Down. He would again suffer an accident on the trip, coming off and damaging the bodywork on his bike after narrowly avoiding Charley Boorman who was rapidly slowing down on a motorway in South Africa.
Racing Green Endurance (RGE) was a student-led project at Imperial College London to demonstrate the potential of zero emission cars. The team drove 136 day 26,000 km down the Pan-American Highway starting from north Alaska in July 2010 to Argentina in an open-top electric sportscar, which was filmed by Claudio as eight 22 minute episodes for the BBC World News channel.[1][2]
After leaving the Swiss Army in 1982, von Planta studied politics at Zurich University. He sold his first film in 1985 and has continued to build a portfolio of work that is not only daring and ground-breaking but also technically impressive. Having visited warzones, terrorist training camps and the Pfizer UK marketing conference, Claudio has become a very well respected member of the journalism fraternity and his services are consistently in demand.
He also claims to have spent a month in prison in Pakistan, charges unknown. He relates a brief version of the story on the DVD release of Long Way Round while discussing the ability of the Swiss embassy to help their citizens.
As of 25 October 2007, he filmed Hull Freedom Trail, a 5,000 mile road journey from Hull, England to Freetown, Sierra Leone undertaken by a group of five 4x4 vehicles. The vehicles are to be donated to charity projects working in Freetown to reunite families torn apart by the years of civil war in the country, and attempting to raise awareness of modern slavery/human trafficking issues.
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