One World Monday is back and this time we’re going behind the scenes of snowboard mecca ‘Baldface Lodge‘ with NO BINDINGS! The Burton Snowboards team swapped their normal boards for ‘Pow Surfers’ and the day resembled – heaven on earth.
If you’re in Jindabyne this week, make sure to head to The Banjo Patterson Inn for stop number two of our ‘Welcome to Winter‘ party tour…it’s going to be wild. Come on in from 8:30pm!
We caught up with Alex Adrian, the One World film director to chat what went down on the Baldface shoot for the film…
Alex Adrian:
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 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.
