Dreams come true
Sunday July 11, 2010 - Email this article to a friend

A group of French students has won a competition to make an extreme video for The Nissan Outdoor Games. PlanetSKI met the team during the shoot high above Chamonix. If you want to see what goes into making the film then check out our video report.

It is a chance in a lifetime for the amateur film-makers.

The Nissan Outdoor Games is one the most prestigious events in the summer alpine sporting world;

It is now in its 6^th year and it selects 5 Teams of film-makers to produce a 5 minute high quality video with some of the best athletes in the world as they mountain bike, climb, paraglide, base jump and kayak.

The results are awe-inspiring and usually made by professionals; the best in the business.

This year though one team, sponsored by Julbo, decided to invite amateurs and after a strenuous selection process chose a team of students from Grenoble.

The youngest is just 17.

The director, 24-year old Maxime Moulin, seems remarkably unphased by the experience as PlanetSKI met the group filming the mountain bike sequences in Les Houches.

They had just finished hiking for over 3 hours to get to the top so they could film the bikes from a paraglider.

Maxime Moulin, director"I saw the advertisement on the internet so decided to have a go and put in a show reel, our ideas for the film with a scenario and a video of why we wanted to do it," he says. "From that we were chosen and now here we are in the middle of it. Fantastic!"

Apart from their lack of experience they also had a lack of equipment.

"We had to borrow some of the cameras and a few other bits of kit but we got there in the end and we pretty much have the same as the professionals," says one of the cameramen, 23-year old Luis Simac.

On the day we hooked up with them they had just dropped and lost a €700 camera lens.

"It just slipped out on my hand as I was on a steep cliff and I watched it rolling off down the mountain and bouncing out of sight. It was an expensive mistake," the photographer said ruefully.

So, what is their idea for the video and how will they be different?

"Well we can't give too much away as we don't want the other teams to know what we are up to, but we want to reflect the spirit of the each sport and show their differences but also the threads that unite them," says Moulin. "We have a few tricks up our sleeves too."

Luis Simac, camermanThere is fierce competition between the teams and rumours abound about who is doing what.

One of the teams is apparently intending to mountain bike off the Chamonix ski jump.

Another is doing a base jump from a paraglider high over the Chamonix Valley.

The cameraman will not only have to jump first but will also have to dive head first so he can film it.

For an interview with Maxime and Luis see the video below as we filmed with them for an afternoon.

They are pretty inspiring and it is fascinating to see how an extreme sporting video is made.

The pro bikers

The videos will be judged later this week, 15th July, and the results shown at a huge outdoor party in Chamonix.

Amoung the judges are the legendary skier, Glen Plake, and the Swiss extreme skier, Geraldine Fasnacht.

There is a prize of €32,000 up for grabs.

Regular readers of PlanetSKI will know that Geraldine is a good friend of ours and of course Glen Plake needs no introduction; see this video interview we made with him a couple of winters ago.

And this is what the amateur French team is up against; the video below was the winner last year. It was made by Golgoht, a Scandinavian team.

In the meantime here are some images of what the athletes get up to and beneath the images is another of the videos from last summer, made by the Austrian team of Argon.

Mountain biking