Directed for Burton Snowboards (2023)
Directed a five part documentary series for Burton highlighting the stories from across their community and showing the power snowboarding has to help build that community up. Truly one of the most rewarding projects I have been a part of.
Director of Photography and edit for Universe (2023)
Was brought on to shoot and give creative guidance for Universe’s “Hello World” campaign. A fun location shoot in the desert with a fun crew.
Directed and edited for Burton Snowboards (2023)
As soon as we wrapped the My Turn doc project I jumped right into this one. Burton’s professional snowboarders and filmers collected footage all year for various other projects, but had no plan for anything to come from Burton. As there was no intention or brief for the project, I saw it as an opportunity to flex some creative freedom and try something new. Leaning into the idea of short attention spans and infinite scroll, I wanted to make an edit that kept the viewers attention with lots of hard fast cuts and mood changes.
Directed for Burton Snowboards (2021)
How do you go about visually defining a brand (in 90 seconds), and how do you give a statement like “WE RIDE TOGETHER” the emotional weight it deserves. Like for real, where do you even start?
I worked with the creative team at Burton to do just that - defining what WE RIDE TOGETHER means for the brand and the greater outdoor community. After talking through a lot of ideas, watching pretty much ever brand commercial any outdoor company ever created, and overthinking every aspect - we settled on a few things. We wanted to have a little bit of storyline that could act as a welcoming hook.we wanted to give space to the beautiful natural places we all love, we wanted to show the positive energy we get when experiencing those beautiful places, we wanted to show the whole community, and most of all we wanted to make sure you felt something when you watched it.
The brief for this asked for 90 seconds, and something high level that everyone could see themselves in. I feel it accomplishes that well and look forward to diving into deeper stories for this campaign as it develops.
Directed for Burton (2022)
Analog, back in the day, was always the coolest part of Burton to me. They had a great team, the product was super stylish, and it all felt very different from whatever Burton was doing.
Anyway, it kind of fizzled for a bunch of years, then disappeared. So when I heard it was coming back, and that I was going to be able to direct the video to relaunch the brand, I was pretty excited.
There was a large group of creatives who worked on the project, and the main guidance we got was that it was all about Performance and Zeitgeist. This new AG would capture that cool essence it used to have, but be rebuilt with the best performance materials available.
Shot for HBO Films and Red Bull Media House (2021)
It was an honor to get to work on this project, telling the story of one of snowboarding’s founders Jake Burton. I acted as the Director of Photography for the Vermont based family interviews for this project
Co-Directed for Burton Snowboards (2021).
Having grown up watching and re-watching snowboard videos, the medium has had an incredible impact on my life. Needless to say this was a dream project. We set out with a few goals, we wanted to put great snowboarding on a pedestal and also show the community and camaraderie that comes from it and the power of the beautiful places where it happens.
When Burton’s founder, Jake Burton Carpenter, passed away in the early stages of production, we knew we had to honor him in some way with the film. One World was a celebration of snowboarding and the good times that come along with it. Jake gave us snowboarding, so how better to honor the man than to showcase snowboarding in the best light we could.
One World and it’s episodic content has earned more than 2 million views between Amazon, iTunes, Tencent, and YouTube. During the covid pandemic were able to safely hold more than 10 premieres across 4 continents. The One World Film has been selected into numerous film festivals and won awards including Best Film and Best Cinematography and continues to appear in festivals across the world.
Directed for Microsoft and Burton Snowboards (2021)
Burton has had an adaptive program that customizes gear for athletes for whom normal off-the-shelf gear won’t work. It’s a great program and over the years I’ve worked on a number of projects telling adaptive stories.
This most recent one involved an Australian Snowboarder named Holly Palmer (watch the video for her story) and it was a cool project, not only because we’re going to make snowboarder easier for her, but because we were able to tell a story with natural brand inclusion for one of Burton’s business partners, Microsoft.
Due to the state of the world (COVID) no one was able to travel, so all communications had to happen over video calls, which was perfect for Microsoft Teams and Surface tablet inclusion. We built a storyline that would revolve around a few Teams calls between Holly and Burton, brought it to Microsoft (who loved the idea) and then just went from there. To fill in some Holly’s backstory we licensed existing footage from Telluride and hired a filmer in Australia to get some b-roll with Holly and her family.
All in all, we were able to use the challenge of COVID as a unique way to tell this great story. Looking forward to creating a follow up story once Holly is able to test her new gear on snow.
Directed and shot for Burton Snowboards (2021).
For this project I wanted to take a different look at how Burton traditionally markets powder boards and tell a little of the story of how and why they work, and the team of engineers and riders that are constantly tinkering with shapes and construction to make that perfect board. Ultimately, creating that perfect board for powder is a selfish pursuit as we all just want to go ride more powder.
Visually, my favorite part is the studio shots, we used the Ioawa probe lens, motor controlled dolly, and gelled lights to get that look.
This video led the aesthetic and story telling approach of a broader Family Tree campaign in 2021 and I worked with Burton’s design and copy teams to ensure a consistent look, feel, and tone throughout all placements.
Edited for X Games/ESPN (2021)
Ok, story about Real Snow. It’s unlikely, but in case you don’t know, Real Snow is an X Games video contest. This year Danny Davis had a part that he filmed with Tim Manning and they asked me to edit, which I was very excited to do.
It’s a timed contest (we had about two months to film and edit a part and deliver to X Games on January 31), and they’d be filming until the last day where ever the snow was good, and I would be in Vermont, so the immediate challenge was, how could I get the shots in time to make the edit?
Well, we started with a rough idea of what we wanted - a fast moving edit with a lot of real speed clips, that would show all the different stuff that Dan liked to ride, easy enough. We also, had a great track from Easy Giant very early on in the process (the hardest part of starting an edit is always finding a song).
We got Tim a bunch of hard drives and made a plan for him to send me a drive a week until we got close to the end, and then we’d just dropbox clips every day.
Pretty much all the jump shots came in the last few days, and each afternoon for that last week I’d get a text from Tim as soon as he got to service that would either say “no shots today” or “we got three shots!” and I’d plan my night accordingly (which means, I’d either be watching “grand designs” or combing through the edit trying to find spots for whatever the shots were).
They were having long days on hill, and then factor in Tim having to dump cards, pull shots, export, and upload. I’d wait for that, and then make a new version of the edit for them to check in the morning.
Definitely some late nights but compared to the hours Tim and Dan were putting it, it was fairly chill for me :)
Good example of this, on the day we had to submit the edit (Jan 31), Dan got three new shots that ended up in the part.
Anticipating this (to some degree) I built the framework for the edit pretty early on, and would just replace clips or remove multiple angles as we went. Not always the best way to work on an edit, but given the circumstances, I think it worked well.
Anyway, maybe not the most exciting story, but a story non-the-less. All the edits are sick, and I’m sure every team had their challenges to overcome to get em done. It’s insane the amount of work that goes into each of these parts.
Directed for Burton Snowboards (2020).
The idea from this one stemmed from a mountain bike edit I saw a year or so ago where they shot everything with a slower shutter, but were going the same speed as the biker so it made everything look faster. Basically, the slow shutter made the trees blurry, but the rider was still pretty sharp.
We were shooting this Rain Wear/Mountain Biking campaign at the time (when I saw the Mtn Bike video) and if you skip to like 30 seconds in this, you can see we did this shot on bikes. It was a lot easier cause we just found a trail with a road next to it and Gabe L’Heureux and I shot from the car. It was really cool and I wanted to try to do it on snow
The logistics of doing it on snow was a lot harder than just driving a car next to a trail though. We would need a really good camera operator who could ski fast though the tree’s (knew it would be Kirk all along), and a dual operator so the camera operator could just focus on skiing and not hitting tree’s (thanks for the tech help Motion State and the joy sticking Justin). Line of site would be important for that, as would easy access to power for charging, so we decided it would be best to do it at a resort - ideally a resort that got a lot of snow and wouldn’t get tracked out super quick. I visited Powder Mountain in December 2019 and knew it was the perfect spot.
Directed and shot for Burton Snowboards (2020).
Mtn Dew helped to fund One World and part of the deal with them was to make some product and some content - and this 2nd episode is the culmination of that. It was also one of the funnest shoots ever and one of the first shoots for the movie. Thanks for having us @baldface
So what do pow surfers have to do with Mountain Dew? Burton (and a lot of other bands) have done a bunch of soft goods product lines that are made from rPET recycled materials (rPET is what you get when you grind up recycled bottles - they are little pellets you can turn into a bunch of different things). We knew we would make some of that, but wanted to do something new and different too, but weren’t really sure what that was. We (@Zach and I) had heard that Burton had been experimenting with supplementing some core materials with foam and knew you could make the foam from rPET so thought it’d be cool to maybe make some boards with that material.
The idea of making a board was really cool as it could actually play a part in the film and the content we make, and using new sustainable materials is a bonus.
Turns out that the rPET foam, however, isn’t quite to the QC standards we need to make a snowboard flex properly yet. A pow surfer, however, has a much different flex pattern than a normal board and the HG crew said they could 100% do that.
Zach, Lance, and I had been talking about doing a pow surf shoot/episode already so this matched perfectly with that and the fun/not-to-serious vibe of pow surfing was perfect fit with Mtn Dew.
So we had Craig’s build some proto boards and headed to Baldface in January 2020 with Jaiyu, Danny, Red, Maria, and Terje.
Our first run there, was the first time Jaiyu or Maria had ever ridden pow surfers, and while boldface isn’t the steepest/gnarliest place - it’s a bit more serious than just riding down the hill in your backyard. They figured it out pretty quick, and the shoot was a super fun one.
Last note on it, just want to share this rig that I built for that first shot which Danny and I did this summer. I mounted a recycling bin on some really long rails, put a piece of glass at the bottom and ended up with this. The iowa probe lens shoots at f44 (basically meaning EVERYTHING will stay in focus) and i wanted that look for this shot, so it worked pretty well.
Again, thanks to Chip and Dylan for the great edit. Lance for the directional help on it, Mtn Dew for giving us the freedom to do cool shit like this. Justin and Rafe for the help shooting, Zach and Blatt (and Runke and Vanessa) for making all this happen.
Directed for Burton Snowboards (2020).
Episode 3 of 12 - highly recommend watching this one on a screen larger than your phone, with the sound way up.
938 frames per second is how fast (or slow) the camera we used for this shoots. This video is played back at 24 frames per second so for each second of real life - this will play back 39 seconds. That means this board slide from @Maria actually took a bit less than 3 seconds.
Video editing is really just manipulating time. You can speed things up, or slow them down, or re-arrange them to best suit what you’re trying to tell or show. It’s one of the most fun parts of editing when you can figure out the perfect combination of all that to make something feel right. It’s called “editing” because you’re actually editing what happened.
When a clip or shot just plays out with no edits, it can be really cool. “Long take shots” are always a crowd pleaser, and something most directors dream about putting together - like this clip from the Burton Presents intro I directed in 2013 - holy shit that was 7 years ago). The actual shot was almost 3 minutes long and involved a lot of choreography.
The inverse of that, can be really simple, like this shot from @hitschhaller 2018 movie Soft. This shot blew my mind. I saw Hitsch while we were filming a different Burton Presents in Switzerland, and he told me he had a 3 minute long shot of a method for a movie he was working on and I couldn’t wait to see. When I finally did it was just so mesmerizing. I had seen phantom shots, but rarely had I seen one play out in it’s super slow motion for the full duration of the shot. You need to have patience to appreciate it (it doesn’t fit into a 15 second story very well) but it’s just really cool to see something so simple, so slow, you pick up every flap of a jacket, and every piece of snow.
Anyway, it was really cool, and I wanted to see more of it. When planning these #OneWorld episodes I knew I really wanted to try to replicate a shot like this, but wanted to do it in the streets. Thanks for the inspiration Hitsch and sorry for copying you ;)
To do it in the streets was a little complicated - we didn’t have much money to pull this off and it’s pretty expensive to rent cameras that shoot so slow. When filming in the streets, it’s pretty common to get kicked out of spots and whole days can get wasted pretty easily. We only had enough money to rent the camera for a day (thanks @runke) so wanted to get the “ok” to shoot at a spot before renting.
Originally we were going to shoot in SLC here at the Vivent center, we lined up permission and had a few days ear marked to shoot and were ready to pull the trigger on a rental. We had a whole crew ready to go and make a big production of it. We were going to have a dog running in the background, birds in the run in to the rail, cars driving down the street in the landing, etc etc - we were inadvertently diverting from the beautiful simpleness of the Hitsch shot that we all loved. It was kinda stressful but overall felt good about it, and then it didn’t snow in SLC. Too many things needed to align for it to work out, so we scrapped the idea and started thinking of other cool things we could do instead (on top of obv. making a really sick street part for the film).
A few weeks later I joined Joe Carlino in Minnesota to shoot street stuff with Maria, Niels, Ethan, and Luke. I had kind of put off the idea of the slow motion thing, but then Joe and I started talking and he made me realize it could be WAY less complicated, and there are plenty of no bust spots in MN.
We talked to the crew about different spots and tricks and found a spot in Minneapolis that we could rent from. I only had a few days before I had to go to the US Open and unfortunately the weather didn’t cooperate with us and I had to leave before we actually shot it.
Joe and Kai (who flew in when I left) crushed the shot. They found a good (no bust) spot, the kinks in the feature meant we’d get some cool board flex or could gap to the down and was visually pretty interesting. To add some texture in the form of flying snow, we got Ethan a new snowblower (I think that’s him pushing it in the background). The whole crew hit the rail a few times and we’ve got some other sick shots (like Niels bail from the #OneWorld trailer) that we’ll probably release later, Maria’s shot was 🔥She is a fucking boss.
Shot and directed for Darn Tough (2020).
(1 of 3) Darn Tough reached out to me to create some fun non-traditional content for them. The sky was pretty much the limit in terms of what we did, they just wanted something that showed their socks in use in unexpected ways. With heavy COVID restrictions in place and a tight budget, I shot all these of myself (or my neighbor), in and around my house. They turned out pretty fun.
Shot and directed for Darn Tough (2020).
(2 of 3) Darn Tough reached out to me to create some fun non-traditional content for them. The sky was pretty much the limit in terms of what we did, they just wanted something that showed their socks in use in unexpected ways. With heavy COVID restrictions in place and a tight budget, I shot all these of myself (or my neighbor), in and around my house. They turned out pretty fun.
Shot and directed for Darn Tough (2020).
(3 of 3) Darn Tough reached out to me to create some fun non-traditional content for them. The sky was pretty much the limit in terms of what we did, they just wanted something that showed their socks in use in unexpected ways. With heavy COVID restrictions in place and a tight budget, I shot all these of myself (or my neighbor), in and around my house. They turned out pretty fun.
Shot and directed for Burton Snowboards (2019).
Part of a seven part profile series (called “Built on Boards”), really liked how this one came together. Anna is an incredible story with a pretty non-conventional path to snowboard stardom, so this was a cool one to tell.
Directed and Shot for Burton Snowboards (2019)
Part of a seven part profile series (called “Built on Boards”), this one featured board building legend JG. I’ve been lucky enough to travel the world to shoot snowboarding, and pretty much every where I go, when people find out I work at Burton they ask if I knew Jake and if I know JG. There are a lot of unique stories to tell in snowboarding, and it was an honor to get to tell part of this one.
Directed and Shot for Burton Snowboards (2019)
Another chapter in this seven part profile series. This one centered around a kid named Charlie who has learned to snowboard and cope with some of life’s challenges through the Chill Program. In snowboarding a lot of light is often shined at the winniest and best riders, so it’s cool to look around and tell less obvious story about how snowboarding has changed someones life. Charlie is a boss!