RJW has been learning the fundamentals of “getting rad” this season on his snowboard. After two days at Copper Mountain (CO) he was feeling confident, or at least *more* confident in his abilities than in the weeks prior. After several miscarriages on a small jump, he decided to move up to the bigger jump because it looked easier.
And then he nailed it on his first attempt. Which only made him greedy:
He just bit through his lip and was bleeding a little bit. That was the end of the night, but he confirms that he’s ready to rage again next week.
Unfortunately, this video is pretty much my entire catalog of snowboarding clips from previous years. I would like to put together a handful of videos, each about twice this long, after Jackson Hole.
I knew I had some old footage on my laptop, somewhere. Unfortunately, as these videos were captured on my old digital camera, and not a camcorder, they are of questionable quality. Also, MS Windows Movie Maker is not compatible with the .mov output from my old camera. So they were lost in the archives, until recently.
When I told Adam M, aka “The Highlander” that I would be posting these embarrassing clips from Whistler (2006) on YouTube, if I could convert the .mov to .wmv, he begged me not to. I am not a kind and loving god:
In all fairness, Adam is one of the better skiers that I know, and he can hold his own on a snowboard. We’ll see whether he’s willing to tackle any cliffs, bowls or chutes, at Jackson Hole next week, though.
I’ve been snowboarding more-or-less for a long time.One trick that always eluded me was the 360, which I consider to be a staple in anyone’s bag-o-tricks. And I could never do it. I could do 180s, but every time I tried a three, I’d get, like, stuck in midair. Then I’d yardsale. It didn’t make sense to me, because when I used to rollerblade, I could do 540s and even 720s with little effort. Clearly, the geometry of snowboarding is different, but the physics are (I presume) more or less the same. I struggled with it as a beginner. After a 4-year hiatus in college, when I started again in my early 20′s, it wasn’t starting over, but it was pretty close, especially because in high-school, I only really went a few times a year. I came up with all sorts of excuses for why I couldn’t land a three. My board is too big to do park tricks. I’m out of shape. I don’t even want to ride park. And so on.
In a way, neglecting the park has made me a better rider than I would otherwise be. I had to find natural gnar. I am confident in my ability to ride just about anything: glades, moguls, steeps, pow, and the occasional park session. Although I’m not quite as comfortable doing it, I can ride switch. I practice that a lot, especially when I’m riding with friends who are less experienced. If I had spent the last 3 or 4 years sessioning in the park all day, I wouldn’t be able to charge the double-diamonds, or slalom the pines. But last year, I decided I absolutely had to learn the three. I started working on my park tricks again. I got very comfortable with 180s, frontside and backside. I learned backside, because I heard that backside-threes are easier. All this did was confuse me. When I would think about a three, I couldn’t commit to one direction over the other. Not good. In case you’re wondering, I didn’t land any threes last year.
Last night, with the camera rolling, I landed a frontside-360, on my first attempt. It is not pretty, but it’s a 360.
Yep. The very first 360 I’ve ever landed. The second one was prettier, but the landing wasn’t quite as smooth. By the third attempt, I was thinking to myself, “I can probably lay down a 540.” This was enough to break my concentration, and I didn’t stick the three. Unfortunately, now I have to aim higher: in addition to perfecting the 360s, I’m going to shoot for the 540.
++++
I am getting much more comfortable with Microsoft MovieMaker, although I suspect there are probably freeware programs that do a better job. It’s basic enough, and idiot-proof, which is nice. My complaints are with the manipulability of the video effects and transitions, e.g., you can’t change the length or speed of a “fade out, to black.” Or, if you could, it wasn’t intuitive. Also, you can’t apply effects to segments of a clip, and it seemed like when I applied “slow down, half speed” to one clip, there was a mysterious spillover of that effect on the audio (but not the video) component of the next consecutive clip. I don’t think I can resolve this issue without splicing a gap between segments. Maybe I’ll give that a try. Adding titles, subtitles, credits, etc., was fairly straightforward, but I was disappointed with the available formatting options. In any event, the inclusion of titles, transitions, and credits makes for a more professional looking video.
I’m also learning that it takes a tremendous amount of footage to put together even something like the one-minute short that I’ve got here. It turned out well enough, but obviously even within that one minute, there is very little actual content. Most of the video is of me, approaching the jump. I anticipate a lot (and I mean, a lot) of footage in Jackson Hole. I’d like to be able to throw together a few short highlight reels (like this) and a 5- or 6-minute video of each of us.
