I had the recent pleasure of working with my friend Daniel Franz again under the umbrella of his new company Bright-minds. Instead of being in Cape Town though, this time we where in the ALPS! For those who are used to the Kalahari, Fynbos and hot December summers like me, this is a treat! I never actually thought that I would make my way,with some cameras , 3500m above sea level and get to chill (no pun intended) on a glacier! Hoeraa!
The mission was however not all play. On a shoe-string budget we went to shoot a video for the German Synchro Ski team who last year won the world championship. This year the group have assembled a girls only team (the old team is mixed) and are now going to compete in both mixed and girls only categories! Daniel, myself and third camera Hanno went up with the teams to catch their final practices before another big competition.
We where up at 6.30 every morning (despite the raucous evenings that carried on until the wee hours of the morning) and on the slopes by 8.30. Followed by an early lunch at about 11.30 and then finish the shooting by 3.30. The slopes close at 4pm anyway and by this time we where all pretty tired and ready to retreat to our B&B for some dinner and well, whatever happens in the Alps stays in the Alps.
The team commissioned Bright-Minds to shoot and edit a 15min promo video for them to show investors, sponsors, friends and family. It’s a show and tell for the team and the people that they interact with. Along side this we thought we would also cut a little 30sec trailer for online purposes and shoot stills for their site. Thanks to Hanno and his Nikon I was able to take about 700 pics in total of which 40 made the final grade.
In Austria the teams split up between boys and girls and stayed at different locations. For reasons unbeknown to me, the camera crew ended up staying with the girls and oh what a joy. Lovely breakfast in the morning, always a little sweet thing in the kitchen..hmmm. It was a real pleasure. In the evenings everyone would have dinner together and share some beers and stories. One night I made a Braai (known as a BBQ in most other parts of the world but where I’m form we call it a Braai) which was a treat for me since by that stage I had been traveling for a couple of months and was missing my South African culture!
After thrashing out some ideas with Daniel we finally decided that we would keep the story about the skiing and pepper it with “day-in-the-life” style stuff. So here and there we shot people doing other things besides skiing and I think for the final product these inserts will be valuable.
Bright-minds also has a Smith Sunglasses sponsor so we got some great goggles and sunglasses for our trip. All that we had to offer in return are some photos and a place in the promo. Done!
We have not cut anything yet but the raw footage looks great. As we get further along I’ll post the vids with some technical specs for you. In the mean time, here are some of the stills images, unfortunately I’ve had to down res quite a bit in order to save space on my limited server. Let me know what you think and drop a line if you have any nice references for ski films that you enjoyed.
