Keepin’ it real! – homie snowboard movie

If there’s any thing other than my work that occupies my free time, it’s been snowboarding. Since the age of four me and my homies spent countless hours building jumps, going on trips and waiting for winter.

Since I finally invested in a pocketsized HD-camera, we’ve been producing short round-ups of the previous season’s golden moments. For each year, the tricks got better, the movie got longer and the production value sky-rocketed.

The latest installment, for the 2011-2012 season, is a testament to that, with a proper production design, segment introductions and a total of 30 minutes of childish mocking-about in frozen water.

The intro was originally pitched as a promo for the World Snowboarding Championships 2012 at Tryvann, but got rejected. The idea was to have some of NRK’s grand old men watch a clip of some spectacular snowboard trick performed by a Norwegian rider, just to see them reject it as beeing a “film trick” – a special effect. Then it would cut to a gigantic green room, filled up with paper cut trees, polystyrene snow, backdrops of mountains, the snowboarder suspended from the roof in the middle of the trick just seen by the the old men, and an entire film crew consisting of famous snowboarders, with Terje Håkonsen as the director sitting in the folding chair. The message it would convey was that “yeah, we’re an entire generation who don’t care about your standard tv-broadcasted sports events, we’re different, we’re taking over and if you want to continue living in denial, please do so”.

Anyway, it got scrapped, but I found the idea of making something real look fake, and only have the people in the know dechiphering the fact it wasn’t fake after all, intriguing. The annual snowbro movie however, was an excellent way to make it a reality.

We’ve never been about having the latest or greatest equipment, nor are we elite snowboarders. What we do is have fun, and using the idea as an intro for our seasons proudest moment felt like a perfect match. The title “Keepin’ it real!” made it all add up.

I made several tounge-in-cheek chapter introductions, all featuring the green room and some “half real half fake” objects tailored to each chapter.

The movie got close to 1000 viewings on youtube, which I’m rather pleased with, considering the length and famousness of the boarders.

I don’t blame anyone for not having the patience to watch the flick in it’s entirety, so here’s the motiongraphics-only version:

If you got the appetite for more, here’s the entire thing, get the popcorn out;