After my grassland shoot with Rick Hanchard I thought that I was in good enough shape to get back on my downhill bike, so that weekend I headed up to Sun Peaks to meet up with Café rippers Jackson Phillips and Keenan Kovacs amongst others for a day of fun. It was sooo good to be back on my DH bike after 3 weeks off the Glory and the boys were all shredding so I was well and truly happy. I felt good enough to try to get some more filming in so I called up the Silvia boys and set up 2 more days of shooting that week. Matty, Karl and I shot a solid day on Tuesday, filming one run of Barn Burner / Mach / Spicy Taco / Wagon Wheel and the Bikercross over 3.5 hours before I had to head to town for my last night of work.
On my bike I was fairly pinned but I felt a little off balance and lacking focus. As such I had a couple near-death moments, getting in over my head coming into sections fast and not thinking far enough ahead. On a wide-open section of mach I hit a fade away corner into a stump drop chicane on a completely new line, drifting to scrubbing the stump and landing hot on the inside of the next corner before slashing out… definitely a first, and possibly a last. I like to earn my speed by being smart and riding well, but on this day I seemed to have the throttle wide open regardless. Hopefully it resulted in some good shots but really I am happy I walked away in one piece.
That night was my last night of bartending at the Noble Pig before my trip to France, so from filming I was a little tired but I walked away from that night a free bird. We shot again on Wednesday, joined by my friend Royce Sihlis on stills, and put in a solid 5.5 hour day as I had my first completely free evening. For the first run we shot a warm up of sorts down Steam-shovel to the Bikercross before heading towards some more serious terrain on Kaboom to Honeydrop for the second run. Honeydrop is my favorite run and was amazing to ride but exhausting to film.
We shot it in 5 sections, shooting each section 5-6 times, so needless to say it involved a lot of hiking. The s-berms on the face we shot to death until we decided that it wasn’t possible to ride any faster. On my last run down the section I powered a berm, got hot in the next corner and then couldn’t make the following turn. Unfortunately Royce was entrenched right in the spill out zone so I hit the tree beside him and had to bear-hug it to avoid sailing into oblivion. On one of the lower sections Karl caught a moment where I slashed off the side of a rock face to get direction into a following corner and in the process sent a rock flying, illuminated directly by the sun... Definitely a shot I am looking forwards to seeing in the edit. By the bottom of Honeydrop I was so spent I could barely stay on my bike so we called it a day and headed down to the jump park so Matty could get some shots in the low light. My god that boy can lay it out, to the point that he has coined his own style… done right they are no longer Fairclough whips, they are Matty Miles whips. New appreciation for that style of whips for sure. Unfortunately Matty threw it so far sideways on his last jump that he took it to the ground on landing, and though he was ok, his day way done. I got to ride from there down with his full pack and I have new appreciation for the weight the boys cart around while riding from shot to shot during a day of filming.
Many thanks to Matt Miles and Karl Heldt of Silvia Productions (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Silvia/149128011826656) and Royce Sihlis of Royce Sihlis Photography (www.roycesihlis.ca) for their creative collaboration, hard work and mad skills behind the lense. Keep your eyes peeled for the Silvia edit, coming soon.
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