Chatel bike fest 2014 through my eyes

Last week I was in Chatel with 2 french freeriders Olivier cuvet and Antoine Dubourgnon to compete at the first edition of the Chatel bike festival.
We arrived on Sunday evening under the rain, not a surprise, even if we call this place "Les portes du soleil ".
Tracks in the bikepark were shredded and so muddy. The Little monday's photo sesh' with Olivier was for sure harder for me than for the rider, cause I had to go down the hill on foot under the rain, in the mud and between the slippy roots.



Benoit Chauvet, french rider from team 1 went with us to shoot some pictures and to have fun in the closed tracks.




After 3 rainy and muddy days. We saw the sun for the first time of the week on wednesday, so we just started filming the Air Voltage Track. The Hardest point of having a limited time to shoot a video is the organization : What would be the spirit of your video? which song ? which mood ? and of course what are you going to shoot?
Fortunately we fixed these points at the beginning of the week so we were ready to start filming and editing.



On Thursday we went to "The Face" to shoot some big jumps, but after some expectations, the weather was definitely too windy. So, still nothing on these jumps... A demo was organized from 2 PM to 4 PM down " The Face " with a huge sender of 15 meters long. Infortunately nobody sent it until Mr Antoine Bizet at 5.30 PM followed by Benoit Chauvet.


During this time, antoine, olivier and I were going down to shoot some more stuffs on the tracks.



Friday was the last day filming cause we had to return our video on Saturday morning. We decided to sleep on the morning and to shoot a little bit on a track on the afternoon.


Then the plan was to go to " The Face " on the evening, for a better light for sure, and we expected less wind.
At the end of the day, riders were really tired and to avoid injuries, we decided to stop the shooting quite early.
This allowed me to do some shots of the other riders with an incredible sunset.

Here is Nicola Pescetto sending a nice tabletop on the big right hip on The face. He was filming with the Lacondeguy Brothers. Infortunately, they didn't return their edit quickly enough.

The view from The Face was not so bad with a 200mm lens.

Vincent tupin killed it all the week with an incredible flow.

Thanks to Chatel, Nico vink and the bike patrols for this great week.
And here is the video if you haven't seen it :



Photo: Jb Liautard // Vidéo : Jb Liautard (helped by Cyril Cho )