"Skrunning" - A New Winter Sport Is Born! (2.7K 60FPS)

Our short film is an interesting look at the birth of a new winter snow sport we've named "Skrunning" - combining our love of running, with being out on the ski slopes! Our first few attempts turned out to be wildly fun (even more fun than we've had carving down the mountain in years!), so as passionate outdoor content creators, we naturally had to film and share it with others. Watch Ironman triathlete Julia Prouse go barreling down the slopes of Mont Tremblant next to skiers & snowboarders, putting her balance and agility as a runner to the test, as she dodges moguls, running all-out, across slippery snow and ice!

Professional filmmaker Chris Prouse also took the camerawork to a whole new level to create smooth drone shots from impossibly close new angles, just inches away from Julia, while also managing to go up the hill... and yet no drones or motorized vehicles were used in the filming of this project. Months of testing, training, and revisions went into perfecting a new filming technique with a specialized, counterweighted 3-axis gimbal on the end of a long boom, which took a tremendous amount of practice and effort to hold smoothly at the balance point... while also awkwardly running with the entire rig in one hand going up the snowy mountain. This was done in order to isolate the camera movement from camera operator's own running, in a way that handheld 3-axis gimbals simply can't match without otherwise being fixed to a drone. The two then worked perilously close to one another on the way down with Chris holding the apparatus while on skis to continue the look next to Julia.

Afterwards, the shots were warp-stabilized in After Effects, where 10,000+ individual frames of video at 60fps were painstakingly rotoscoped by hand, one by one, during months of post production work to manually remove all the tracking points on Julia and all other foreground elements in order to get the absolute smoothest track possible on the background, to achieve the impossibly close drone-like look, in places where you'd never expect to see them. Yeah, kinda crazy! The shots were then round-tripped back into the editing timeline where a great deal of incredibly precise rotational keyframing was applied to either hold the horizon level, or smooth the roll axis even more, and make the drone-look all the more compelling. Julia and Chris were not only determined to show audiences a new sport, but to also show them new, never before seen camera angles, in places were drones and motorized vehicles aren't allowed... and to hopefully inspire others to get out there, and try skrunning for themselves!

*Please note, if you happen to view the linked copy online, Apple's Safari browser does not currently support the higher resolution 1440p60 (2.7K 60) playback, and will automatically default to a lower resolution 1080p60 stream. The 1440p60 version is viewable through Google's Chrome browser, however, playback over the web on computers older than 1 or 2 years may have trouble decoding YouTube's higher 1440p60 bit-rate, and stuttering / dropped frames may occur. In the event the higher resolution playback isn't smooth, please default to the 1080p60 version for the best viewing experience. A buttery smooth ProRes master with considerably more detail than YouTube or FilmFreeway's web compressed codecs can also be provided upon request. Thanks for watching! :)