Inspiration: I’m no skateboarder, but I found this 3-minute short film to be so beautifully shot, simply capturing a group of skaters doing what they love best…
As a little Friday morning inspiration, I thought I’d share “LOCAL” by Sean Slobodan, the founder at Local.Studio. I’m no skateboarder, but I found this 3-minute short film to be so beautifully shot, simply capturing a group of skaters doing what they love best. Slobodan says the idea for the project was born from wanting to collaborate more with a good friend and seasoned skate photographer, Weston Colton. Slobodan continues saying that he was long overdue a project with real personal meaning, and so when the opportunity came up he decided that this was going to be it.
Background on the Moon Shot
“We filmed in Western Utah. I used the Sony F55 and a Canon 800mm lens with a 2x converter, so effectively it turned it into a 1600mm lens. With the 2x converter the widest you can go is a F/11 so light became a bit of an issue. I found the hill we shot our moon skater Daniel on through Google Earth. Luckily it was only about an hour drive from my house so it allowed us to scout the location multiple times over the course of about a month. I had seen a similar shot here vimeo.com/56298775 and kinda took the info I could find on it to piece together what we wanted. I was shooting from a little over a mile away in a massive field.
Because this was on the top of a dirt hill, we had to build a 100-foot track made out of plywood for Daniel to skate on. The main difficulties at that point were lining up the moon, the skater, and the camera, and then just finding the moon in the sky, which, when you’re focused on such a small area and there’s nothing to visually reference, because it’s pitch black, can be very difficult. We had guys up on the hill with flashlights trying to marl edge of the frame, which helped. We ultimately ended up shooting three nights in a row. This was from the third night. The first night we got it pretty well, but it was dusky and not totally dark. The second night was a total bust. We ended up being wrong in our camera positioning by about 300 feet each night. So when the moon first started to peak we had to grab everything and run until it was lined up, set down the camera, find the moon again, refocus, etc. Slightly stressful 🙂 From the time the moon first touches the horizon line to when it’s already fully above it is a little under 2 minutes. Ultimately there were probably 20 people who helped make this shot possible.”
If you’d like to keep up with more from Sean, be sure to subscribe to his channel on Vimeo, follow him on Instagram or visit his website.
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