Video – Tearing up the Surrey Hills with Upper Downs
2015 is here and it’s going to be an exciting year for us… The last 12 months has been incredible, we’ve hit the trails and worked with riders from all over the world to spec and design our upcoming Neoshell MTB jacket.
Back in the summer we were approached by the Apex Film Collective, a group of third year students from Staffordshire University who were looking to produce a film for a new brand focusing on outdoor and extreme sports. We immediately jumped at the chance to work with James Barnes and his team who understood what we are trying to achieve with Upper Downs and started working on an idea with some of our development riders to put together a short promotional film.
Our aim was to focus on the fun aspect of riding bikes, whilst also giving a view into what we’ve been working on at Upper Downs for the last 12 months and what we are trying to create.
We wanted to film our local spots and capture some footage of singletrack, jumps and woodland sections that feature in all our own rides when we’re out with mates. The Surrey Hills was the perfect location, we were planning to shoot the film in November and were unsure of how the weather would behave, and the trails ride better than most places in the South East as they drain pretty well.
After scouting out filming locations with Jack Chapman and Harry Molloy from Flowstyle MTB Coaching, we decided Winterfold Hill was going to be a great spot, with easy access which made sense as Apex were bringing a 6 strong film crew, three different camera set ups and a lot of equipment. The filming was something we had a clear idea about and we wanted to add something a bit different into our film so Apex brought a Sony FS700 camera with them that could shoot slo-mo footage in 240 FPS.
It came to shoot day and it had been a pretty dank, wet and cold couple of weeks. Thankfully for us the sun came out from the outset and it was t-shirt weather at points of the day as we worked with Apex via radios, to instruct the riders to hit the trails in turn.
All in all we were happy with the day, with less light available, it was always going to be hard to shoot enough footage for a long film, but with our aim to produce a 3 minute promotional film it looked like were had it covered.
We’d also arranged a second shoot date with Apex to show us at work. We got this covered in a couple of hours and then it was over to Apex to crack on with the long editing process.
After a number of cuts and reviews of the film, we’re pretty stoked with the final cut, and hope you all like it too.
Expect more videos from us this year…
Upper Downs
Thanks again to all of those involved in this fun project:
Apex Film collective
James Barnes
Development riders; Tim Kemp, Harry Molloy and Jack Chapman
Lucinda Rendall
Faulty Clicks for the soundtrack
upperdowns.com
Trailforks.com
Author Info:
Member since Aug 6, 2014
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We decided to shoot on this hill for our film as it has been used less and had planned to film at the viewpoint and the other two trails completely unaware that another trail existed close by.
We spoke to Hurtwood prior to filming to gain permission and a few hours into our shoot when our crew was filming on the trail with the drop, we noticed a group of riders hitting a jump on the trail just metres away.
Until this point we didn’t know the trail was there and when we’d finished filming the drop we decided to move our equipment over to the jump just metres away completely unaware at the time that there was an signage or restrictions for videos.
Any disrespect to the guys who built the trail is absolutely the last thing we intended. It's the first time we've made a video and we've clearly still got stuff to learn. We're very lucky that we have places like the Surrey Hills to ride and have huge respect for the hard work, time and effort the volunteers and trail builders put in, so we're obviously very sorry.
We've been working hard with local riders to develop genuinely decent apparel, so we're really disappointed and annoyed with ourselves for upsetting anyone.
As a means of apology we will be making a donation to the Friends of Hurtwood trust today.
"The builder put a sign on a tree, asking for that trail not to be shown on PB.
Don't build a trail in such close proximity to the other trails...!
Dreamers if you think no one will ride that trail / record it.
Fyi...this trail in question is already on vemo...and the trail is named ..
You f*ck.
If someone else robbed a bank would that make it rite for you to do so too?
ITS CALLED TRAIL ETIQUETTE .
plus selling a product on somebody's else;s hard work and disrespecting them is out of order.