At Afterbang*, Gavin recently asked whether making your own snowboarding clips is worthwhile. Since I try to get a few good video clips every winter, I thought I’d echo my opinions/answers to his questions:
I was sorting through a bunch of camcorder tapes, working out which ones were from last year. In doing so I watched quite a bit of the video we took. It was fun, but I didn’t see a lot of good stuff… If I’m shredding for two weeks of the winter and I score a couple of good powder days, do I want to be worrying about getting some footage? Or should I just be enjoying the moment?
I definitely think that you’ve got to enjoy the moment. I’ve taken camera/camcorder on trips the last few years but it’s usually the last thing I think about. I’ve made a few short clips, and you need many many minutes of video just to put together a short 3-4 minute clip.
I do think that making a video of your snowboarding matters. At least, it does to me. I love watching over my snowboarding experiences. It’s good for remembering the times. It’s good for analysis and similarly it’s good for progression. It gets me excited about going snowboarding. And most importantly it’s fun. I like making the video clip.
Indeed, it does matter to me, too. I want to have pictures and videos and things to remember my vacations. I keep a shoebox full of lift passes, beer labels, patches, stickers, airplane boarding passes, etc. One day I’ll make a scrapbook or something. But for now, I just like to keep them. And the videos are the same. I can watch them, post them on youtube or facebook, etc. And unless I get something super gnarly, I usually don’t edit clips until the off-season, so it let’s me re-live the season in a sense. And I like making the clips, too.
But I do worry that my goals are perhaps unrealistic. Unjustified. To get better footage than what I’ve been getting it’s more compramise on the actual riding. How about just leaving the camera at home?
IDK. If you try to be a photog, you will compromise your riding. Most of what you record is garbage, for a dozen reasons or more, none of which are your fault; you just don’t have the resources to film from six angles in 1080p HD and you don’t have the snowmobiles to make your laps easy. It’s a logistical nightmare, really.
And how many times have you seen a natural feature like a lip or a log-ride on the lift, but couldn’t find it on the way down-hill? Or maybe you found it, but the approach was sketchy? And someone has to get down there ahead of you to film, right? Or, you left the lens cover on. The angle is bad, the zoom is bad, the lighting is bad, you taped 45 seconds of approach and only 3 seconds of boardslide, etc., just to name a few.
It’s a logistical nightmare, really.
But, I don’t want to leave the camera at home, because I want that footage of the BS540. I want that footage of Zach eating shit on his first railside attempt (below), or Adam catching a random edge for no reason at all. I want pictures coming down the groomers.
But yeah, getting real quality footage, better than most of us will ever get (which is the stuff YouTube is made of!) is damn near impossible, it takes time that we don’t have and resources that we can’t afford.
But that won’t stop me from trying to capture a few gems each season — even if I can only put together a 3- or 4-minute clip. Get your ass out there and ride; film what you can, but that should be a distant second to shredding the gnar.
