What It's Really Like Shooting an Event like Red Bull Rampage: The Experience
When I said yes to shooting for Chelsea Kimball at Red Bull Rampage I felt two things: absolute elation at such a huge opportunity… and absolute dread with my brain thinking what the f*ck am I going to do?
Let me set the scene:
It’s Southern Utah in the fall which sounds like it should be lovely: cooler temps, maybe some scattered clouds, beautiful desert light that creates that rare blue as it bounces off the orange rock at the end of the day. Turns out that year only the last one of those things was true. It was 105 degrees, you’re taking the most insane sh*ts in the porta potty poop sauna, you’re running on Red Bull and meat sticks, and everyone around you is operating at level 12 intensity as they quite literally risk their lives.
What no one warns you about—or at least I didn’t really appreciate until I stood at the bottom of the mountain—was how fucking intense that hike and that incline is. There are moments where you have to quite literally free solo about 8-10 feet of stone to get to the top. Having watched the event before I probably should have anticipated that but in all honesty, the event coverage will never do it justice.
Now, I’ll be the first to tell you that I was by far the least athletic person on the mountain. You’ve got the top 8 most elite female freeride mountain bikers facing off on terrain that quite honestly should not be ridden by a bicycle. You’ve got the dig teams—who are all pretty much pro athletes themselves—moving literal mountains for 12 hours straight. And you’ve got filmers with 10+ years of experience, $40K camera set ups, and enough d-bag energy to weigh them down another 100lbs. And me! Who unceremoniously told renowned action sports anchor Selema Masekela to “get out of my shot” without knowing who he was.
I don’t say all of that to undersell myself or make me seem like an under dog.
I say all of that to justify to myself the number of times I cried during those two weeks 😂 I’m pretty sure my parents and my boyfriend had a separate group chat where they just said “your turn” as they alternated talking me off a ledge. To this day I’m still unsure if I lost 15lbs because of stress or exercise, most likely both.
Then there's the creative environment itself…
which is unlike anything I've worked in before or since. Essentially, everyone around you is at the top of their craft. From the riders to the filmers, the event staff to the athlete liasons, everyone who is there was invited for a reason. It’s also a Red Bull event, so there’s just an added layer of intensity threaded throughout the environment. This came from both the dangerous levels of taurine and caffeine, and the death defying insanity of how hard these athletes push the bounds of what’s possible on a literal bicycle.
These athletes are not casually sending it. They are standing at the top of features that give normal people vertigo, doing math in their heads about whether the speed they're carrying will clear the knuckle or send them into the dirt face-first giving them a broken nose, a concussion and 3 holes in their tongue—a sight I witnessed firsthand. They are testing the features they built themselves after 6 straight days of 12 hours of manual labor moving 40lb bags of sand and massive stones.
The energy on the hill is this strange mix of total focus and controlled chaos. You learn very quickly to read the room, stay out of the way, and never under any circumstances walk onto a line when an athlete is dropping.
Some of these things, however, are in direct conflict with an attempt to create a documentary film. You’re constantly trying to find the balance between getting into the messy, nitty gritty, intensity of the competition (crashes, tears, frustration, fear), and respecting the privacy and integrity of your athlete. A balance I didn’t always nail.
But after two of the most intense weeks of my life
I only managed to not know who two important people were. I told one of the male athletes he should bring his daughter back some dirt for her birthday to which he replied “I was thinking more like a trophy… ya know, like winning.”
But most importantly, I walked away with a couple terabytes of footage that would eventually become my biggest and most successful project to date. My film “Leaving a Legacy” went through 11 film festivals and won two awards: the Women in Film Award, and Best Student Film—oh yeah, did I mention I was still in college while I did this?
All in all, I look back on this period of growth and am proud of myself. Do I still usually only see the things I hate about my film? Yes. Do I also look at that poster with all my laurels and have a brief moment of pride? Also, yes.
The real question is, would I put myself through this absolute suffer fest again? … Never say never…
