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Brian Wimmer Takes Action at X-Dance
Established in 2001, Salt Lake City’s X-Dance Action Sports Film Festival has become one of the few viable outlets for extreme sports moviemaking. A relatively clandestine movement in the world of film over the years, the judges of X-Dance seek to reward the melding of sport and cinema by recognizing such qualities as creativity, self-expression and individuality. Without these three qualities, movies would bear a striking resemblance to the back of your eyelids. But to sports? It’s difficult to even think of anything more radioactive than individuality (let alone creativity and self-expression). We’re talking about extreme sports—an individual, physical outlet for creative impulses and thanks to this genre of film, the results are jaw-dropping.
Confident and brimming with pride, X-Dance founder Brian Wimmer took some time to speak with MovieMaker on his festival’s 10th anniversary.
Josh Elmets (MM): Extreme sports moviemaking is an intense—but often overlooked—moviemaking genre. What was the impetus for starting a fest dedicated to this risk-taking type of cinema?
Brian Wimmer (BW): Because traditionally the way they’ve shot these films has been, as we call it, “action porn"—just a lot of guys fucking themselves up with hardly any story and they put it to some music with a little bit of editing. I come from a filmmaking background and the background of an athlete who participates in some of these extreme sports. I just wasn’t satisfied from either end—from the perspective of the athlete or the perspective of a filmmaker. I was raised here at Sundance around the whole [Robert] Redford Sundance Film Festival and Institute and things like that. I’ve been in the film industry for 28 years. About 10 years ago I came up with the idea of doing the same thing for action sports films as Redford has done for independent films: Increasing the quality, pushing story lines and really helping these guys to learn how to make better films. And boy, I tell you, it’s been working.
MM: It seems many of the most mind-boggling feats in extreme sports happen at unexpected times when cameras are not readily available. Do you ever screen footage shot on cell phones or handheld digital cameras? Is that type of footage ever incorporated into films screened at X-Dance?
BW: Contrary to popular belief, these things are extremely calculated. These are extremely dangerous things that they are trying to attempt and they have to be extremely calculated. So it’s a lot of set-up, a lot of safety work and things like this. A lot of these filmmakers were also athletes in their day. They understand the safety factors, what it takes to do certain things. It’s not like a spontaneous, “Oh we just happened to capture that.” It is very, very planned out because a lot of what’s going on is just too dangerous. The way they set the shot up these days is becoming much more meticulous. They’re taking dollies and boom arms and things like that into the back and setting these things up at 13,00 feet in 50 feet of snow. They’re using cable cams through the forest so they can capture shots of guys coming down at high speeds through the forest, whether they’re snowboarding or mountain biking. They’ll set up a cable cam all day long just to get one or two shots.
So cell phones, those kinds of things… that’s not what we’re looking for. These guys are shooting with the Red One Camera, they’re shooting in 35mm, they’re shooting in 16mm, they’re shooting from helicopters. The film that won our event last year, a film called That’s It, That’s All, used military missile mounts—these high-tech mounts in helicopters to get super, super stable, super incredible shots of some action. They were shooting on the most high-tech new version of the Red camera that’s out, and shooting 35mm.
MM: On that same note, how has the mainstream integration of digital technology affected the way extreme sports moviemakers approach their subjects? Would this kind of festival even have been possible 10 to 15 years ago?
BW: It’s made it a lot easier to capture and it makes for much higher quality. It’s easier to take into the back country because it’s a much smaller camera if you’re shooting with a high-def camera. They’ve perfected these helmet cams, the POV cams and things like that. They’ve been mounting these tiny, little high-def cameras they’re able to mount on the athletes or the machinery or whatever they’re using. They’ve become absolutely, incredibly proficient in terms of getting the shots of these incredible POVs, because you want to see how crazy it is from the perspective of an athlete to really relate to how intense it is. The technology has made it a lot easier and leveled out the playing field in the action sports industry.
That’s the good news and the bad news. The bad news is that anybody can shoot, and so we’re seeing… some people are submitting films that are really sub-par because they’re not really filmmakers, they just happen to have a good camera. There are five criteria that we use to judge everything and they are: Editing, cinematography, music, action, story. Each one of them getting the same amount of value. And so films that are just action and music don’t score well because there’s no story.
MM: It’s been widely publicized that Warren Miller will be presented an award at this year’s festival. Can you talk a little bit about his accomplishments and what he’s done to broaden interest in extreme sports moviemaking?
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by Pelle on 1/15/10 at 6:03 am
Det är inte helt fel att välja weblån framför andra kredittyper i dessa tider.
- Comment by CV Writing Service on 1/25/10 at 7:27 pm
Salt Lake City’s X-Dance Action Sports Film Festival was a great event.
- Comment by Jackie on 1/28/10 at 1:05 pm
Checking why cant i comment
- Comment by TimD on 8/26/10 at 10:52 pm
Very interesting, I do agree on all three qualities.
- Comment by website design egypt on 10/27/10 at 4:18 am
تصميم المواقع كبيرة الحجم الديناميك لتكون قادر على تعديل وتغير المحتوى بنفسك
- Comment by Smslån on 3/18/11 at 6:50 am
Jämför mobillån när du vill låna pengar snabbt.
- Comment by Elizabeth on 6/17/11 at 12:14 am
These sports movies are awesome. I really love sports and watching it. I recently started enjoying a hockey pool my friends and I started. It is really important to pay attention to all the players and make sure you have the best team.
- Comment by مدونة العصابة on 10/04/11 at 9:37 pm
Thanks for writing this. It was very helpful. Keep writing.
- Comment by Absolute CV on 11/13/11 at 2:18 pm
This is great for a professional cv writer
- Comment by Create Click on 11/13/11 at 2:19 pm
This seemed like a great event
- Comment by como calcular o im on 12/18/11 at 9:14 am
wow Warren Miller is great
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