Trip to the 2012 Air & Style Beijing
\\ Introduction
So this is it. The first time more or less that I feature another editor if you want to say so. Someone new, I started working together with since barely 2 months. This is Austrian filmer Thomas Kesselbacher’s debut on ShredOn Mag. The idea was besides of working together by featuring each other’s content, also that Thomas could give a perpective of his work and trips he’d do, since he also is way more often on the road than my person, due to beeing the official Blue Tomato filmer and also being down with adidas Eyewear and consequently gets to see more of the events, the riders and all the circus around. I introduced him on an interview to you (read it here) a few weeks ago. Again, this is his debut on ShredOn Mag, giving you a different style in writing, a different perspective and foremost a different sort of content here. Thomas will kick things off, by giving you a look at his trip he did with Clemens Schattschneider and Mathias Weißenbacher to the 2012 Air & Style in Beijing, that went down in December. Thomas, take it away . . .
Cheers, Mike.
\\ Preparation and Training
At the beginning of December, adidas gave me the chance to accompany Mathias Weißenbacher to his first Air & Style to Beijing.
Two weeks before the contest I got the OK from adidas, so it was really close to get the visa and the same flight like Mathias.
adidas also wanted me to make an edit how Mathias is preparing for the A&S. It was really hard to make an edit of all these things in just two days. I was lucky that I joined Adrian and Mathias to Hintertux for some training in the park at the end of October. So I just had to film the training sections, some life style and the interview for the first part of the project.
In the first edit I try to show that snowboarders are also normal athletes and they also have to train a lot for example at the gym or on the trampoline.
Here you can see the final first part of our trip:
\\ Off to China
For me it was the first time that I was traveling outside of Europe. Our trip started in Vienna where our good friend Clemens Schattschneider joined us. Our next stop was Helsinki and after four hours of waiting we got our plane to Beijing. I was not able to sleep in the plane and when I visit a new city for the first time you will not go to bed at 8am. So at the first day I was awake for 36 hours.
We (Mathias, Clemens and me) visited a lot of famous places there, for example the Forbidden City and Summer Palace. We had just five days in Beijing so it was really stressful.
For the edit I had the idea to show the whole trip, the whole story of Mathias’s first Air & Style ever in just one short edit. Why should I just show the contest when I can show the feeling when he saw the giant ramp for the first time or ordered real Chinese food for the first time? This sounds interesting but it is also a lot of work, because you have no shot list or storyboard or anything else. You never know what’s happening. So my camera was hanging around my neck for almost 24 hours.
We had a lot of fun in Beijing and at the end Mathias got 4th on his first Air & Style. It was so amazing. He also got an invitation for the Air & Style in Innsbruck. Hopefully I can go there and make another clip.
\\ Back in Austria
I got back to my flat at 11pm and had to go back to work at 8am so I had a really nice jet lack =)…
I got a lot of footage and the first version of the clip was nearly eight minutes long. I send it over to adidas and got an e-mail back that we have to talk about the edit. I was thinking: “Nooo.. Shit.. Why they did not like it??” But when I got the call, they told me that they really like the edit but I have to cut it down to four minutes. One of their statements was “My heart is bleeding for every second you have to cut out, but we have to…” So I tried to find some shots, which are not “That”, important to bring it down.
At the end I got a five minutes short documentation about a friend, a city, a snowboard contest…
I would say I got an edit about an adventure:
Cheers, Thomas.
| Kesselbacher.net |
