Four episodes of a mini-documentrary I did for Nike of Gigi Rüf

I went down to Bregenz, Au and Innsbruck for a few days in November to shoot some stuff for an ongoing series I'm doing with Spatziba called Talking Headz.
The idea is to get to know the talent a little bit better without putting them in a chair and do a contrived standard interview.
To do that we left the tripod at home and chatted with Gigi about things that came to mind during a couple of days in his hometown of Bregenz and Au, the village he grew up in.

Most professional snowboarders make a living spontaneously travelling the globe to find good locations to film and photograph their tricks. These tricks end up in dvd's which sell (or used to sell before internet torrents took over) in snowboard / outdoorsy stores and core magazine and sponsors catalogs etc.
And in these videos (of which I made a handful somewhat successful ones this past decade) there is little or no room to portray the riders personality. I tried to incorporate that in past movies but it's a though sell and a lot of kids who board don't care much for it.
Now since we watch a lot of videos online me and the Spatziba crew thought it would be a good idea to make little short clips of the riders that were personality and lifestyle driven.
Gigi had just come out with a movie with Volcom in the fall of 2010 and Nike, who sponsor his feet, had a launch event for his boot planned and invited me to come document it and try and make something worth watching.
Those three days resulted in these four episodes, hope you like them and I hope to do more of these.
I wouldn't mind making a Tiger Woods series in this format. Or Jay-Z...


First Episode:


Second:


Third:


Fourth:



Here are two photos from my 360 degree camera.
Yes, you can always buy another camera.

Just watched Absinthe Films "Neverland".

I was so stoked on the first 5 min of the movie. Nicolas Müller´s powder riding is insane, nothing short of insane. You´ll have to see for yourself.

Gigi has some amazing powder shots too. But why use Ingemar Backman´s Dead Kennedy´s song from his legendary Meltdown Project part?
I´ve totally stolen songs and stuff from old skate videos, but from a snowboard part of that magnitude.. hmm I don´t know.
Gigi ended his section with a buttery corked fs 10 like a true skate video ender. But I enjoyed the in town / roof riding more than the aerial acrobatics.

Wolle´s noboarding was sick. I remember Danny Way mentioning to the ex DC snow team manager that he thought it would be cool to ride a snowboard with no binding down cliffs etc. Well now Danny you can.

They also used Air´s "Alpha Beta Gaga" in the credits. A song I used for the credits in Afterlame. But the nice guy I am I contacted Justin to see if they are using that song since I know he likes Air and they had just released an album that summer. Sure enough he said they were using it so me and Jess re-edited the credits to "Float Away" by David Garza.
But when I saw the Absinthe film that year there was no Alpha Beta Gaga in there... Not completely psyched at that moment.
Lesson learned: Use what the fuck you want instead of caring what others might use and growing an ulcer re-editing a section of the movie.
Well here if was, 5 years later.

Tommen, a legendary snowboard troll from Norway made it in the movie for a hot second.


Plus:
-Great powder riding.
-JP Solberg - bs 1080.

Minus:
- Cropped top frame. A lot of heads were missing. I´m assuming this happens because the telecine colourist doesn´t pay attention to the framing when they zoom in on the squre-ish 16mm negative when they framed it for the more rectangular-ish hd transfer.
I highly doubt Justin or Brusti would let that slide if they were there supervising the transfers.
- Uneven image quality. Which I think can be sort of cool if used for a purpose.


Neverland trailer here:

25 minutes with Terje Håkonsen

Self explanatory.