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If you build it, they will ride.
It's the cardinal rule for any action-sports enthusiast. Whether you've got a snowboard under your boots or a BMX attached to your feet, action-sports junkies are always trying to jump higher, go farther, and pull off the most elaborate scenes imaginable.
Making sure all that insane athleticism gets documented is an integral part of the culture, and the recent release of Life Cycles may have permanently altered how that happens.
“We started talking about it in 2004 and spent a couple of years talking to get in line with what we wanted to do,” Derek Frankowski told Wired.com. Along with co-director Ryan Gibb, Frankowski spent years pulling together this Odyssean project, with a result that's nothing short of remarkable.
Frankowski, a longtime still photographer for mountain-bike and snow-sports media, made the transition to video with the clear intent of pushing the genre, made harder because action sports movies typically trod a well-worn path. It’s a comfortable genre where viewers know pretty much what they’re going to get.
Life Cycles is a clear departure. (See more behind-the-scenes here.) If Bud Browne’s string of 1950s surf movies helped set the die for the action-film industry along with Warren Miller’s ski films, then Life Cycles is more akin to The Endless Summer, the 1964 release from Bruce Brown that attempted to impart some storytelling and broaden interest past the usual groms who’d attend area showings.
By raising action sports' filmmaking bar with a series of technically inventive and beautifully shot scenes done like never before, Life Cycles is a movie that anyone, even those who don’t ride, can appreciate on various levels.
“We threw out what we knew about bike films and built this movie from the ground up,” Frankowski told Wired.com in an exclusive interview. “Typically, shots in a bike movie are a rider-based or location-based segment. You go to Alaska with some riders, or you do a segment at a dirt jump track with a big name.
"We threw that out the window. Our approach was more cinematic.”
Life Cycles has two goals: Convey the flow of trail-riding in a way that’s never come through in film before, and tell the story of a trail, as shown from its construction through riding in four seasons.
Part of the reason the film took seven years to bring to fruition was the insistence on the seasonal storyline. “We had to shoot over several years to get light to match [from take to take],” Frankowski said. “Using a big crane camera, you might get one shot that day. Now, for the scene in the big old-growth forest we needed cloudy days. If we went up and it was sunny instead, we’d spend all day sitting in the forest. But we knew what we wanted and weren’t willing to sacrifice it for speediness, so that definitely made the time drag."
>'Typically, shots in a bike movie are a rider-based or location-based segment. We threw that out the window. Our approach was more cinematic.'
Frankowski and Gibb also had to wait for the right equipment. They extensively tested cameras before settling on the Red One – a sophisticated, high-speed HD, digital system created by Oakley founder Jim Jannard.
The camera was so-highly anticipated, they purchased another filmmaker’s “spot in line” for $5,000 to get started early. “We were one of the first filmmakers to get a Red, and the first in the genre to do a completely Red film,” said Frankowski, with just a hint of pride.
Slow-motion shots were typically done on a Redlake IDT system, and a night shot required a set of 10,000-watt stadium lights, hauled up in the Whistler bike park with generators. Frankowski and Gibb used a zip line, crane cams and dollies, but a substantial part of the movie was shot handheld or locked off on a tripod.
Almost all the scenes were shot close to Vancouver, in part because of budget. Only a few sponsors were willing to bankroll Gibb and Frankowski’s vision, so even though the film had a normal (for the bike movie world) budget of about $250,000, much of that was financed with credit cards and second mortgages.
“We spent the sponsor money on the camera,” Frankowski said, “so we were at zero (dollars) but at least we had gear. We could gas up the truck, get a sack lunch and go shoot.”
Without the distractions of exotic locations, they could concentrate solely on filmmaking.
For one segment, Frankowski and Gibb used a zip-line camera jig, threading the line through the woods next to the trail. Gibb, who has a film-school degree, operated the jig, which could move, zoom and pan with the riders, while Frankowski worked the monitor and figured out the perspectives he wanted to show.
The segment isn’t long, but it carries a sense of motion that you simply can’t get from a static shot or even a POV camera. The perspective picks up Mike Hopkins, leaned over in a corner at an impossible angle, and then accelerates to match speed alongside and then behind him.
For those who've ever wondered what it might be like to be a world-class free rider, the audience is practically perched on Hopkins’ shoulder as he flows down a trail like water, all smoothness and tightly calibrated aggression.
Artistic vision is paramount in Life Cycles, as illustrated by Frankowski’s favorite segment, the near-dreamlike dirt-jump sequence, shot in the wheat fields of his native Saskatchewan.
Seen from a slow tracking dolly positioned just above the waving grasses, Brandon Semenuk emerges from deep within the field, performing a 360-degree bar spin, tail whip and countless other tricks, before disappearing from view.
Its surreal nature begs the question of whether it's a composite shot created in some editing bay, but Frankowski assures that it wasn’t. How'd they do it? By using a backhoe to dig a dirt-jump track eight feet into the Canadian prairie.
“We built a 20-foot gap jump, and usually you want to view [a jump] from an angle to check the landing, but we didn’t want to walk around and crush the wheat,” Frankowski said. More centrally, Frankowski said they had no idea what the shot would look like until they tried it. “We knew what we wanted to see, but we had no idea of whether it would work.”
In what is arguably the film’s signature shot, a camera trains tightly on a section of trail gone tan with fall’s leaves on the ground. As the foliage gradually begins to green in a time-lapse feel of the coming of spring, a rider comes into the frame and lays into the bermed turn with a wicked carve.
“The guy goes from one season to another in the same frame,” Frankowski said. While it looks like sophisticated CG work, Frankowski said it’s really a simple (if time-consuming) crossfade to mesh the footage. But it wasn’t easy: The shot, taken every season from the exact same location, required the same rider on the same bike in the same spot. Even branches that fell from one season to the next had to be moved.
That’s an awful lot of work for a single shot, no matter how cool, but the intended effect is more than cosmetic. It shows the seasonal character of the trail. “It’s the exact, same trail but at different times of the season it’s completely different,” Frankowski said of the idea. “It’s super-tacky in the spring and then dusty in summer, and by fall you’re skidding on leaves.”
>The shot, taken every season from the exact same location, required the same rider on the same bike in the same spot. Even branches that fell from one season to the next had to be moved.
Response so far has been almost universally positive, according to Frankowski. Most encouraging is that it hasn’t all been from mountain bikers. “There are two audiences for this film,” he said. “There’s the bike-film audience ... and then there are people from a strictly non–action-sports background who are thoroughly enjoying it. These are people who are coming more from Hollywood or documentary-viewing experiences, so they’re open to what we’re trying to do.”
As much as Frankowski and Gibb set out to rewrite what an action-sports film looks like, they’re still unsure of its final impact. “Ryan was at a film festival in Colorado, and he said people told him that we’re changing film and doing things no one else has done before,” Frankowski said. “But what effect does that have? Until we start seeing other people pushing it and giving us credit for inspiring them, we won’t know.”
In the seven years between Gibb and Frankowski conceiving Life Cycles and its eventual release, video has changed dramatically.
Digital SLRs were just going mainstream in 2004, but shot still photos only. HD-capable DSLRs that allow amateurs to shoot high-quality video weren’t introduced until 2008.
Nor were there many places to show your work. YouTube didn’t debut until February of 2005, shortly after Vimeo’s fall 2004 launch.
Filmmaking is an inherently derivative genre. Frankowski and Gibb were inspired principally by documentary films ranging from the BBC’s Planet Earth series to 1992’s Baraka. And other filmmakers are turning out similarly inventive short subjects.
Their creations will, one hopes, push established action-film houses to incorporate more artistry and storytelling in their work. Maybe the next time a budding filmmaker comes along with a crazy idea, he – or she – will find a more open reception from sponsors.
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