reel-exchange

Ron “Snow” Shai

Preproduction was done in secret, because parkour is barely legal. The filmmakers were as elusive as the athletes — one step ahead of anybody in authority with a thing against people plummeting to the pavement from a rooftop-to-rooftop jump. Grab the shot, vanish on the Vespa. Pass the baton to the next videographer in a six-shooter chain across the whole of Tel Aviv, Israel, as the Israel Parkour Team ran, coiled, and leapt like panthers across the urban landscape at the dawn of a sweet, sunny, perfect day. Six shooters and a chopper team, two hours, 130 points of shooting — talk about hitting your mark. (See the Red Bull-sponsored documentary on Sony's AXN channel, axn.com).

The combination of extreme sports and music is a specialty for Ron “Snow” Shai and his co-conspirators at Snowdrum. Snowdrum is a collective — not the last time you'll read that word in this story. Like other modern videographers (he's also a composer), Snow is rethinking everything: production, distribution, business plans, partnerships. Don't look for a consistent average profit margin or a “best practice” for every project. Some are decent budgets, some less so; some are for-hire, some entrepreneurial (or both) in the content marketplace where a filmmaker may or may not find an audience.

Ron “Snow” Shai and his team at Snowdrum prefer to use Panasonic AG-DVX200 P2 cameras—always at 25p and with 35mm lenses.

It was not always so. Snow came up through a postproduction system that used to be ubiquitous, training his eye and hand on a million-dollar Quantel Henry in the traditional commercial industry. His Snowdrum co-founder/director Ram Matza came from the same world. But these days, a videographer's fancy turns to thoughts of independence. Driven by affordable HD, laptop post, and the widening — let's say — “web” of digital distribution, the career path for content producers is less defined than ever. In this new world, 1,000ft. of HDV tape or a quartet of P2 cards can be shot on spec. If you take that for granted, you likely just got your drivers' license, but it's fast becoming the norm for a large segment of the content creation marketplace. The potential is there, if not the security, to invent marketing and entertainment content in new ways or tangent off into a new form.

For Snowdrum, that form will be extreme sports- and music-driven — not necessarily music videos in the traditional sense, but more like visual concept albums. In 2005, for example, Snow and Matza took cameras and snowboards to The Battle in Falun, Sweden, capturing the best riders in the world, shooting alongside their higher-budget brethren from Matinee Film and Television, who were there for Extreme TV. With Volvo sponsorship, backstage access, and a generous rough cut from Matinee, Snowdrum acquired the assets that would become both a short promotional video for Volvo and now the abstract film The Battle, set to music from the vibrant Israeli club scene.

Read the rest on digitalcontentproducer.com.