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Tuesday, March 15, 2011

This Article Features Photo Zoom

It’s all about control on the ski slopes—control over your skis, tip position, poles and body posture, how you hit the bumps, when to flex and extend your knees. It’s about controlling the choice of where to go when you’re chasing perfect powder, too, so it makes perfect sense that professional skiers also would want control over the media about their adventures. That’s what brought four world-class skiers together: Eric Pollard, Chris Benchetler, Pep Fujas and Andy Mahre.

“Eric called me in the summer of 2007,” recalls Benchetler. “He had just made his first movie. I had been doing video projects as well, and we wanted to take creative control of how we were perceived in the media. We all had the same mission in skiing, had similar styles and liked the same terrain.”

As pro skiers, they all had been involved with the kind of promotional films you might see at a ski club meeting or on the sports channels. “I was working for multiple production companies, doing some editing,” explains Pollard. “I owned a 16mm camera and worked with my own shooter. I enjoyed the creative freedom of editing my sequence of a movie, but I wanted to control the entire production. I wanted to make a different style of skiing film.”

So Pollard made Idea, the first film he directed and edited, with Benchetler working with him on the project. “We just liked the whole format—the freedom, the creativity—and I liked being behind the camera,” he says. “So we decided to form Nimbus.”

Nimbus Independent takes doing what you love to another level. Comprised of five dedicated skiers and three full-time filmmakers, the group works hard to bring their own unique perspectives to skiing videos. They travel the world to bring viewers the total skiing experience, from the highs to the lows, presented in the full-length webisode series En Route and in a series of shorts called Point and Shoot.

Nimbus Independent has been going strong for three years. Recently, they added another rider, Blake Nyman, and two skiing videographers, Justin Wiegand and Ike Smith. Pollard’s wife, Erin, a pro snowboarder, is the Nimbus still photographer. The Nimbus team produces two web series. One is called Point and Shoot, in which a skier shoots and edits short, personal stories of travel adventures, both on the slopes and otherwise. There’s no fixed schedule, but several dozen Point and Shoot webisodes may go up on their website in a season. The En Route series is a longer-form video, more in the mode of a traditional ski film. Nimbus produces three webisodes in a season and times their release dates to the cycle of the ski season.

Currently, they’re working on a two-year plan to shoot specific locations throughout the world. “We know we want to hit a certain number of locations—Kashmir, Russia, Japan, Chile, Western Europe and so on,” explains Pollard, “and we have two years to accomplish this. We typically look for fresh snow and high pressure after the fresh snow.” That will give them the deep powder they like under clear, blue skies.

“We know Eastern Europe is usually good in late February, Asia is good in January,” adds Pollard. “We definitely put things on the calendar, but as the year evolves, we go from there.”
“So we tend to do everything last minute,” says Benchetler. “Sometimes we end up paying more for flights and sleep on couches because the lodging is full, but we always make it work.”

“In the past,” explains Pollard, “we all traveled together as much as possible—four riders, three camera operators and one still photographer. It’s evolving now to where we have two crews, each of two camera people and two skiers. The crew has a shot list of what we’re trying to document. Each day, we go through the list and check it off. Conditions dictate what we shoot on what day.” If the weather keeps them from getting good footage on the slopes, they head into town to document the local people, food and culture.

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