Last year Sweetgrass Productions produced an incredible ski short, “Afterglow”, and last month they continued their project with Darklight, its mountain bike equivalent. Immediately, one of the film’s main intentions is to make an explosion of color in your eyes. On the entire slopes of the mountains, the colorful neon tones shine on cyclists wandering through lemon-green forests and deeper orange-magenta trails, all in the middle of the night.
As an advertisement for Philips Ambilight television technology, the film does a remarkable job of combining the idea of creating an aura of color. Whether it’s a difficult video or not for some to watch is another story. However, it is equally important to remember that it is companies like Philips that provide budgets to film crews like Sweetgrass Productions and extreme sports stars like Graham Agassiz, Matt Hunter and Matty Miles for fun, this gives us our own entertainment and admiration, like Darklight.
- Dragging huge IHM and thousands of meters of darts.
- Batteries.
- Cables.
- Etc.
- Is not easy.
- And then there’s the camera team: RED Dragon in a drone for aerial shots over the mountain.
- A cable camera system for fluid and fast scenes through the dense forest.
- And TomTom POV action cameras for occasional shots.
- View of the bike.
- To say that all this is impressive would be to fall short.
You may not remember Afterglow from the video produced before Darklight. This is a hypnotic ski video that surprised the Internet last year. In case you needed an encore, this video featured several world-renowned skiers, each in a suit full of LEDs, and made their way through the colorful illuminated mountains in the middle of the night. To say that the film was exceptionally beautiful or sublime does not do it justice. In fact, if you haven’t seen her yet, stop what you’re doing. and go see him now. You’ll be happy after you’ve done that.
Thus, the producer behind Afterglow, Sweetgrass Productions, recently adopted this same concept applied to the sport of mountain bike descent, but this time sweetgrass’s team had even more toys, including an EPIC Dragon, a movi, a cable-Cam and two-handle trucks filled to the edge with generators, powerful lights and colorful gels. The result is a new film called Darklight, which is as beautiful in sight as its predecessor.
Check out Darklight in its entirety here
And here’s the behind-the-scenes video, which details Darklight’s grueling three-week production, and which was described this way on the company’s Vimeo page:
In the first months of 2015, Sweetgrass assembled a team of 27 people and more than 7,000 pounds of lighting equipment from four states in the western United States to produce Darklight. During their time on set, the team had to overcome difficulties with rattlesnake bites. 3 weeks of nightlife and almost literally mountains of logistics to run 178 games all night.
Although both films have been sponsored by Philips (these are essentially commercials of Ambilight TV, which has LEDs on the back of the TV that dynamically change color with what is shown), they provide an excellent case study of what can be achieved when brands equip talented artists to produce something in the best interest of both parties. Of course, it would be great if filmmakers could afford to produce projects of this magnitude independently, but that’s not particularly realistic.
Either way, the Sweetgrass team deserves serious praise for their work at Darklight. It’s an incredible feat, both technically and artistically, and I don’t think I’m alone when I say I can’t wait to see what they produce next.