Long Way Round

His best known work is as the cameraman who accompanied Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman on their Long Way Round motorcycle journey eastward from London to New York in 2004, Long Way Down from Scotland to South Africa in 2007, and Long Way Up from Ushuaia to Los Angeles in 2019.

Shortly before the 2004 trip von Planta 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 two weeks later, eventually flying out to join up with the team in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic.

Von Planta would often ride far ahead of the other two in order to film them going past, or trail behind getting the shots he wanted. He 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 McGregor and Boorman.

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 team's attempt at the Dakar Rally. 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 Boorman who was rapidly slowing down on a motorway in South Africa. In 2019, he joined Ewan, Charley, Russ, and David once again for Long Way Up, riding from the southern tip of South America, all the way through Central America, to Los Angeles.

Racing Green

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 kilometres (16,000 mi) down the Pan-American Highway starting from north Alaska in July 2010 to Argentina in an open-top electric sportscar, which was filmed by von Planta as eight 22 minute episodes for the BBC World News channel.^[1][2]