Sushi rolls, barrel rolls, jam rolls, powder rolls. We caught up with One World Film Director Alex Adrian to give us an insight of what went down behind the scenes of the latest Burton Snowboards ‘One World’ film’s Japan segment.
From Alex:
The name, 711 Rolls is kind of a play on a few things, in Japan you really rely on places like 7-11 (or lawsons or seikomart) for all your supplies. To an American it sounds weird, but it’s totally chill to eat raw fish that you get at 7-11. Probably should’ve called this 711 triangles. Anyway…
For the most part, the feedback I’ve heard on the One World film has been positive, but some of the criticism has centered around “how is it called one world when it’s mostly shot in North America.” That certainly wasn’t the original plan, but as everyone knows, 2020 was a tough year for travel.
The trip this episode comes from was shot in late January 2020, just as covid was starting to become a real thing. It happened at the same time as we were filming the “Tree’s” episode and also the Blue River section from the film. Japan was having a really bad snow year, and on top of that it got warm while the crew was there (Kelly, Brock, Zoi, and Red riding along with Zach, Kai, Russel, and Blotto). Pretty sure all the clips in this episode come from 2 days of riding/filming. Weird for Japan, but it happens.
So as one of the only international places we were able to film, how come more of this footage didn’t make it into the film you might be wondering.
Well, that’s the really hard part about making a snowboard movie (or really any project that you film a lot for), you have to leave out a lot of really great stuff to make sure the movie flows as best as it can. In the Jeremy Jones Bomb Hole podcast, he talks in depth about this. Pretty sure the filter that footage had to pass through to get into Mack Dawg movies was way gnarlier than what we had in mind but you get the idea.
There were some really good shots from this trip, but not really enough to make it feel like we could make a strong segment out of it. The way we built the One World film, it was location/session based, so really needed to have more for it to work out. The Japan parts that stick in your mind are the ones where it’s neck deep and blower, so a Japan part at low tide was just hard to fit in. It sucks, especially because this was some of the only time we had to shoot with Kelly and the only time to shoot with Zoi. Wasn’t an easy decision but…
There was an early version of #OneWorld where this was a part, and another version where it had more footage in the “montages” between segments but ultimately we decided it didn’t feel right in the film, but knew it would make a really great episode with a lot of unseen footage. So…that’s how we ended up with this 711 Rolls episode. Hope ya like it!
