Schnee Running
Making Of
A film by Sebastian Linda
How I met Leo & Jo
Jo on the left, Leo on the right
So about 2 weeks ago, we had great sunny weather in Dresden and went out for skating at our new skatepark. We had a great session, when suddenly I saw kids jumping on the trampoline, trying all kinds of crazy flips and creative moves. After that they backflipped out of the swings on the playground at the maximum height into the sand. We all stopped skating and thought these kids were crazy.
Since I worked with professional Free Runners like Jason Paul from Team Farang or the Team Ashigaru I know about the progression in Free Running. So I was used to crazy tricks and stuff like that, but what I liked about those kids were their creative motivation and fun they had while exploring the playground.
So I went into talking to them, because I never have seen Free Runners before in Dresden. We connected via Facebook and planned to meet and shoot some scenes together. Of course at first they had to ask their parents, so I met up with them before. We concluded that the best would be if Leo´s mother would join the shoot. Because shooting with underage kids can be very dangerous if it comes to accidents.
Thinking: “I forgot the assistant… again.”
The Shoot
On the weekend we wanted to shoot it was between minus 12 and 14 degrees celsius. On Saturday it was so cold that you could not stay outside for longer than 10 minutes. I thought about aborting the whole shoot. But on the next day the sun was supposed to be out for the whole day. So we did it meet at 11 o´clock with 3 pullovers, undershirts and what not.
The kids were like machines. You just had to put them into an environment and they would get creative within seconds. What I loved was the cooperation between them and their ideas to share the framing with creative moves and ideas.
Of course most shots were shot from extreme low angles with backlight of the sun. So you might think that the kids should be too dark and appear as silhouettes then. Right, but the snow works like a big reflector from the ground up into their faces.