One Camera, Five Hours: The Mini-Doc Behind London's Bicycle Jousting Craze

A 10-minute-33-second documentary about London's viral Lime Bike Jousting phenomenon was shot, edited and published in a single day, using roughly 80 minutes of footage and a five-hour edit. Photographer Simon King made the film at the second joust on October 31st, 2026, at London Fields, where thousands had RSVPed online and the location was released only two hours beforehand.

The event grew out of a joke. Cameron Carnegie-Brown — who performs as Camtholomew the First — and Jack Carden, two London creatives, turned the idea of jousting on rental e-bikes into a performance art spectacle. The first joust, earlier in October, drew hundreds to London Fields and pulled over four million Instagram views.

Lime, the bike's owner, wasn't amused. "While we appreciate the medieval spirit, safety must always come first," the company said. "Lime bikes are designed for getting around the city, not for jousting. We discourage anyone from attempting similar events to help keep riders and those around them safe." The second event went ahead anyway, with charity fundraising attached.

What does a one-day production look like?

King arrived at 2 PM, walking from Columbia Road to London Fields, where an annual Day of the Dead celebration was running. That gave him quiet interview time before the 3:30 PM start. He left around 4:45 PM, once the main jousting had wrapped and spontaneous revelry took over. Between him and second shooter Amanda Dombroski, working a Panasonic camcorder for B-roll and alternate angles, they recorded just 80 minutes of material.

His kit: a Nikon ZR with a Tamron 28-75. He calls the ZR "ideal for run-and-gun cinema" — compact, strong image quality, stabilization that doesn't feel unnatural. He wished for his 15mm in the crush of the crowd, and wanted more reach at moments, but Dombroski's camcorder covered the long end. Audio came from a cheap wired microphone that tangled around him more than once; the ZR's 32-bit float recording left room to refine it in post, and King thinks it "sounds really quite good."

Photographer Elliott Gunn, who appeared in King's first feature-length film "Everything Happens All the Time," served as an on-camera presenter for the first time, offering the microphone to "Squires," "Knights" and passers-by — and, briefly, to one of the Lime bikes, clad in makeshift armor. One knight chugged a can of the soft fruit drink he was promoting; Gunn held the mic so close it was almost ASMR, King says, before the knight slammed the empty can against his helmet until it crumpled flat.

Why not just another highlight reel?

King's take leans away from the action and toward the community. He spoke with the woman who built the lances from foam and soft wood, and interviewed knights and bystanders in a traditional documentary approach. The jousting itself proved hardest to cover: when lances struck, photographers, videographers and influencers swarmed the downed knight, and camera operators ran past the cyclists. At points King gave up pushing through and shot the crowd from the edges.

He's candid about the film's shape. It doesn't end strongly, he admits, because there was no natural narrative arc to edit to. "I didn't want a highlight reel or a collection of disjointed moments, which is mostly what's out on social media and mainstream platforms right now," he says. The film is out now on YouTube and Vimeo.

The edit ran from about 6:30 PM into the early hours — five hours all told, dinner included. He graded the N-RAW and camcorder footage to match, added filmic glow and grain via presets and plugins, cited Lance Oppenheim's "Ren Faire" as a loose touchstone, cut with proxies in Premiere Pro and exported in 4K.

King skipped the first joust due to a prior commitment, and treated the second as a standalone document precisely because the phenomenon risks becoming "content saturated." He spotted serious camera rigs in the crowd and expects someone to deliver a fuller narrative film within months, keeping an eye on one creator, "TalesByTyler." His own takeaway: you don't need a perfect setup or a grand plan — show up, pay attention, and let the story tell the production what it needs to be.