If a mountain biker executes a 360 tailwhip before landing a 30-foot drop-off into a desert canyon, but no one is around to witness it, did it even happen? Rather than ponder the metaphysics of their extreme sports, adrenaline junkies have been filming their stunts, leaving audiences jaw-dropped and totally stoked.
But for every shaky, hand-held fisheye-lense clip, there's a thousand more clips that are just as amateurish. If you prefer your extreme sports movies to have a little more cinematic depth to them, then the epically narrated and beautifully filmed Life Cycles mountain biking movie just might be what your gnarly little heart craves.
Derek Frankowski and co-director Ryan Gibb spent years filming meticulous and gorgeous scenes of mountain bikers carving-up trails back-dropped by breath-taking landscapes.
“We started talking about it in 2004 and spent a couple of years talking to get in line with what we wanted to do,” Derek Frankowski told Wired.com.
A longtime still photographer for mountain-bike and snow-sports media, Frankowski transitioned to video with the clear intent of adding more nuance and depth to a genre that is often quite predictable.
“We threw out what we knew about bike films and built this movie from the ground up,” Frankowski told Wired.com. “Typically, shots in a bike movie are a rider-based or location-based segment. You go to Alaska with some riders, or you do a segment at a dirt jump track with a big name.
“We threw that out the window. Our approach was more cinematic.”
Credit: Youtube screengrab
