Who among us hasn’t sat through a roommate’s footage from a Mt. Hood ski trip, scored to something obnoxious and filmed dizzily with a GoPro helmet camera?
This spring term, University of Oregon assistant professor Rick Silva led the course ARTD 410: “Stoked 101” to look into the craft behind action sports filmmaking. Silva says he dreamt of the course since he was a film student at the University of Colorado, where his professors discouraged students from producing ski films and music videos.
“I understood that, and they wanted us to experiment with a variety of different approaches,” said Silva, an assistant professor in the UO Art & Technology Program (formerly known as the Digital Arts Program). “But I also thought they were dismissing a whole genre; there is an entire history of thoughtful and brilliant outdoor sports films.”
During “Stoked 101” — named for the sort of lingo you’d hear from the amped skiers and skaters — students produced a variety of short films, including documentaries, mockumentaries and experimental movies that blended motion graphics with drone footage.
This Friday, June 10, you can catch some of the student films from “Stoked 101” at 6 p.m. when they’re screened at the Outdoor Program Barn at the corner of 18^th and University.
In her documentary “Ebb & Fly,” UO junior Makensy Venneri followed Jasper Trout Marshall, a local 21-year-old fly fisherman. The seven-minute film was shot at the McKenzie River and the Crooked River near Bend, OR. Venneri says that she recorded more than 100 gigabytes of footage, which made this the largest project she’s ever directed.
Although Silva made a point of encouraging students “beyond the GoPro style” of a single point-of-view video, Venneri used the GoPro to capture underwater shots in her documentary.
“I can easily say this was my favorite production class ever,” said Venneri, a cinema studies major.
Another student project titled “Slip Up: The Real Story” is a comical mockumentary produced by Alex Kramer and Chris Morgan. “Slip Up” focused on Slip ‘N’ Sliding as an extreme sport, focused on the made-up character and self-proclaimed “slipper” A.J. Connors, who pursued the sport as a diversion after his father — a famed baseball player known for sliding to bases — left the family.
The film blends archival footage (as though it were filmed on a grainy VHS tape) of fabled “slipping” moments among beer-chugging athletes with earnest talking head interviews with other fictional slippers, and adrenalized recordings of friends gliding down a Slip ‘N’ Slide.
Silva invited guest filmmakers to speak during “Stoked 101,” including Trent Ludwig, who has created movies for Snowboarder Magazine and Ayleen Crotty, director of the Filmed by Bike Festival in Portland.
Venneri said, “I think Trent Ludwig put it really well when he said, ‘Action sport athletes are always about finding the hardest and baddest trick, and as action sport filmmakers, we have to elevate with them.’”