07 March 2005

Hello everyone, just a quick update from Europe:

"Chris Davenport and I just recently won the Red Bull Hike and Ride competition. It took place in the Interlaken/Murren/Grindlewald region of Switzerland.

This format of competition was the most interesting and creative form of competition I have ever done. The Hike and Ride is 7 teams of two competitors who have 48 hours to shoot and another 24 to edit a four minute long movie.

At the awards party all the movies are judged by the competitors. Each team was provided an editor for the editing day to help us do the stuff we don't know how to do. There were four snowboard teams, two skier teams and one mixed team. It must have a theme/story idea.

It's not your typical music playing over the sport's footage type of format that we all see every year in all the different freeride sports. This means you have to act out scenes as well as find quality lines to ski. We also had to create all our own music and sound effects from the program called Soundtrack.

Competitors had to shoot each other, no cameraman to shoot for us. We were given two Sony video
cameras and one helmet camera set up. Luckily we had put some thought into our project before we started and we had about 90% of our shot list organized. It was a very exhausting two days trying to tour all around the Alps to shoot fresh lines and then also shoot all our acting scenes with the props and fake blood and the maniquin etc...

The first day we went up the Grindlewald/First area and charged hard all day. We found ourselves skiing down the heinously long flat piste in the pitch dark carrying way too much after my sub 200ft, quite under hung, ski base jump carrying a 20 pound dummy (3 second canopy ride).

The second day we went up the Murren side to the Schilthorn area. We found some great snow since that tram had been broken for a month and that was the first day it was open. We then rallied hard down to Murren and raced the sunlight as we shot the rest of our acting and murder scenes next to someone's chalet.

We then had to race back to Zurich (Chris drove as I imported footage into the computer) to meet our 9pm deadline to turn in our rough edit. We edited till around 1am and then got some sleep and went at it again in the morning. Edit deadline was at 5pm that night and the awards show started at 7pm.

We ended up on top and it sure was one hell of a race/comp that I will never forget. There is no doubt that one must drink plenty of Red Bull even to finish this event!

In the age of the sports video and the Mac it seems that more and more athletes are editing their own segments in the various films that come out every year. More people are starting to use imovie and Final Cut to edit video. And many people are able to create decent music on their computers. It only seems fitting that there is now a competition which embraces this development.

I thought that the Hike and Ride was the most accurate way to make a competition out of any freeride sport. Since it is probably more important and gets the athlete and his sponsors more exposure these days to have a good segment in one of the top films in your sport than it is to win competitions I think it is
about time we started seeing more competitions which embrace the video side of our sports.

For more info and some pictures, check Red Bull Hike and Ride

Now we are in St. Moritz staying at a 5 star hotel hanging out with Franz Klammer and Marc Giradelli about to start skiing with some clients for the next week. Pretty crazy program over here! I would be a
lot more stoked about this jet setting we are doing if I wasn't sick in bed right now from burning the candle so hard at the Hike and Ride.

Hope everyone is well.

Shane

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