Snow during the summer? MT Hood? Nope, its the Southern Hemisphere where the winter season goes from sometimes as early as May to mid-October. JDubs
On Jun 9, 2006, at 8:19 AM, Michael Irving wrote:
I guess I was curious how you could afford to go to Chile for that long. Are you sponsored?
I'm working my ass off right now to try and save enough to take a couple of months off in the heart of the season.
-Michael
On Jun 9, 2006, at 1:07 PM, Jeremy Dubs wrote:
"Well I worked delivering pizzas and stopped going to the bars for a while. I sponsored myself with what I had saved for a year. For the most part I paid for my lift tickets with a discounted price of 11 mil at El Colorado, which is equal to about $20. El Colorado was the most convienient resort to ride cause its right there in Farellones. La Parva is up the mountain and Valle Nevado is across the way driving 30 minutes. Nate Lind was getting us hook-ups for lift tickets at Valle Nevado on occasion cause he's sponsored by Oakley and they love those goggles down in Chile. I think the most important thing is getting that $1000 plane ticket which is difficult. Then once you are there it can be as cheap or as expensive as you want. When I first got there we had connections to some Chileans (
Nico Saric & Marcello Flores) that had come to Washington state before. We didn't know them but they were friends of friends. I mostly stayed in Farellones, Chile cause thats where all the action is, its the closest resort town to Santiago, and thats where the friends I met lived. They helped us rent an apartment slopeside for $500 per week which we crammed 6-10 people in on a daily basis. Needless to say I was sleeping on a mattress in the kitchen most nights for that period. Then after being there for a while and talking with people we realized we were being overcharged. So we rented a van from Rasta Bill,(an Oregonian who runs the hostel in Farellones), for cheap and headed south of the Santiago region where everything gets much cheaper the further south you travel. Then we were paying $10-15 per night to stay in a nice cabana in Chillan, a nice house in Pucon, and a dirty old home in Loquimay that was about $8 per night. When I returned to Farellones (the town where El Colorado, Valle Nevado, & La Parva are) I hooked up with some skier friends I'd met who invited me to stay in an extra bed they had for free because someone had moved back to Argentina for the Season. All my friends were staying in various homes and some returned to the USA, leaving me, Nathan Lind, and Devin Carroll in Chile. We then met Connie, a friendly Chilena who took us in for the rest of our stay. She has a place slopeside right next to the T-bar so we rode out the back door to ride literally every morning. And I worked washing dishes in the hostel for dinners after the paying customers would eat. So the trip wasn't all glamour and we never stayed in any 4 star hotels or anything. Its similar prices to daily life in the states. Actually right now I am returning this season to shred again. Overall traveling is most expensive when you are moving around i.e. planes, cars, gas money, etc. Cost of living is similar to the US, if you want to eat sushi every night you'll be paying more than if you go to the store and purchase food and cook it yourself." -
JDubs
Picture riding out your door and arriving at the top of this every day.
End of the Trip hanging with Connie, Trini, Devin, Nate, and Dubs.
Devin at Valle Nevado with some Chilean chicas.
I love Chile! JDubs posing in front of some lines.
Chile Snowboard Trip 2: Blog
August-Oct 06 (Snowboarding in Summer) Some people just can´t get enough of winter. They truck in the white stuff from ice arenas to urban street rails, ledges, and gaps, hike miles up backcountry glaciers for a ride on some corn snow, play snowboarding video games, edit video footage, blog on websites/Myspace about the latest happenings, and pray continously for a miracle pow dump in early October. Others take the plunge southword for an adventure riding in the southern hemisphere. In countries such as Argentina, and Chile there is a winter opposite from the one most of us are used to. From May to October there exists another winter where the dreams of yearlong pow turns can become a reality.This isn´t a trip for the weak at heart. It takes some severe motivation to ditch the summer days at the beach, girls in bikinis, summer concerts, 40 hour work weeks stacking loot, &100 degree days for a shot at the dream. The task isn´t easy; there´s language and cultural barriers, financial insecurity, & patchy periods of snowfall waiting for you. You never know whats around the next corner, maps and directions are virtually non-existent and the streets are gnarly in places.
I had already been to Chile the previous year (see Funner Filete) and knew that a trip such as this requires planning ahead. So I began the task of editing and promoting Smokebomb in early May. Besides this there was the ongoing post-season riding sessions in Mt. Baker´s backcountry, which has snow nearly year-round and a job delivering pizzas part-time to pay some bills.
Phase 1: Smokebomb
Editing videos can be a strenuous and mind juggling task. It involves a lot of hard work and determination to pursist with the project despite the obstacles thrown constantly in your path. First off you have music rights issues, deciding the music itself, fitting it in with the broader concept of the video and importing the tracks. Every video wants to make it big, so there is the struggle between using music you have the rights to vs. your favorite song. Getting permission is easiest when its local music or made by your friends, simply meet up face to face and talk it over. Usually the artist will understand that it is bringing more exposure to them and be stoked, cause really who hasn´t found a new band by hearing it first in a snowboard video? It even brings back some old bands from obscurity and leads to more fans and cd/ticket sales. You also have a second type of music, good independent tracks you love, but don´t know where or how to contact the band. Check myspace and google for references to the band names and hopefully you can scavenge a email address for someone who may or may not even answer that email. Then you convince them through a series of emails to let you use the tracks for free, cause you´re broke from making the video all year with no budget but more love than the next guy. Don´t forget to fax all the forms and read all the legal jargon, you thought that making videos was fun and easy, what up with the hassles, I mean its only snowboarding, right? Then you have the big bad #1 Top 40 Triple Platinum sellers that have a song you desperately want to use. You can say F* it and just use it, which is the solution most videos use today. You can attempt to contact them about it, but most likely they´ll ignore you or ask for a $ fee you can´t afford since you´re broke. So use a couple songs, but keep it low key and give credit where credit is do, the bands will see benefits no matter what. I decided to keep it low key and got sick new artists on the come-up such as Cancer Rising, EXP, Terminal 7, Modular, Itation Sound, Blockhead, Dungeon Project, & Full Frontal Assault to deliver for the soundtrack to Smokebomb. Music is valuable for editing, it can give a new meaning to the footage and provide structure for putting together the shots.
As the snowboard season began winding down there was finally time to start importing the piles of mini-dv tapes accumulated during the cold winter months of riding eating sleeping- riding eating sleeping- riding eating sleeping, with no time for much else. For those who don´t know, to import footy you watch through the tape and select various clips/sections and save them to your computer. Every hour of tape might take an hour and a half to 2 hours to view and import. So this can be a long process, especially if you have a huge pile of tapes. Then no matter how close you are to finishing the movie, someone else always shows up with a few long lost tapes containing their best five shots ever, and they don´t know where exactly to find them. These days I have to set a cut-off point for footage, unless it’s the sickest shot ever, you have to draw the line somewhere or the movie never gets finished.
The next point is my favorite because this is where the fun begins. All of a sudden you will get inspired and start putting together a section, you have the best song ever, and it’s a constant stoke to turn all those sick shots you compiled all year into a significant, meaningful part that the riders and viewers will be extra pumped about. It’s all about constant innovation all day long and its hard to drag your droopy eyes from the computer for something as simple as using the bathroom or getting a meal. Frozen pizza can come in handy, considering it’s the simplest dinner to make, and if you use the box for a plate, you only have one item to wash, the pizza cutter. So sit back and watch the film evolve into something better than you thought possible, and slowly the pieces begin falling into place. I use Apple´s Final Cut Pro editing program, and dabble in some Photoshop and Illustrator. Together with my 5 year old G4 that’s beefed up it’s a deadly combination for piles of digital video files.
At the same time as editing your video, you need to be out there marketing the idea, concept, movie name, or whatever to the masses. They need something free to entice them, like movie teasers, that get everyone talking. Emailing potential sponsors and magazine editors to get some peeps behind you is essential. I made a custom 10 minute video for Future Snowboard Mag to get included in their mag. Its like a single that gets released with a B-Side that you can´t get anywhere else, even on the album. I also selected choice clips to spread around to friends´videos like Sakadat Funk´s Museum of Savages, Bald Eagle´s Keeping it Classy, and Skunklchuck Productions´Testing Grounds. Its all about spreading the love around the community and to keep the ideas fresh, not stale repeats of the year before or something. And you gotta help your friends out, cause that’s why we snowboard anyways, not to compete against each other, what´s funner about that? Snowboarding doesn´t need any more haters! Support each other´s projects and we´ll all be better for it.
So your footy is imported, your sections are put together, your marketing is getting out there, and now its time to finish the movie. My goal for this year was to complete by July 10
th , so I could have copies produced by the time I left for Chile On August 10th. The hardest part is deciding the structure of the sections, which at this point could be as short as 10 seconds long to 6 minute double parts that fit together. You need to get the credits in there, and remember the correct spelling of everyone´s name. Download the album artwork of your musical guests, and get to work splicing these credits into the final project. By now you´ve seen the movie 15 times a day for a few months and have examined every last second of footy for even the slightest imperfection that needs to be fixed. When I finished this process completely, it was time to burn copies for examination on different TVs and to check for color imbalances or something you never noticed on the computer. So the movie was finally finished! Now I needed to create the DVD menu on a totally different program like DVD studio pro, and work through a whole different process of checking the remote controls to make sure they work correctly, Don´t forget that each dvd burn can take around 40 minutes, so if some slight thing is wrong, it can take a while to fix. Thankfully, I had a good friend Craig help me out with this process of DVD production and everything went fairly smooth. I finally finished the movie and DVD and cover art, and shipped it to get produced into full professional quality DVD s, wrapped in plastic. Unfortunately I was slightly off deadline for the production, and the dvds didn´t arrive until the day after I shipped off to Chile. Luckily Nate Lind wasn´t leaving to meet me until that day and he was able to cram a few copies into his luggage for the trek down south. TO BE CONTINUED........
Revista Demolicion Fiesta August 30th Santiago, Chile On Aug 30th, 06 we went with our friends to Club Miel(Honey) a three story club downtown. The occasion was a party for Revista Demolicion, a Chilean surf/skate/wake/snow mag. Our boy Audisio hooked us up w/some VIP passes which let us kick it in the top story chill bar. Downstairs was a madhouse complete with a packed dancefloor, DJ, dual video screens playing videos and strobe effects. Lots of good friends from the mountain were in attendance, which shows how tightnit the Chilean scene is down here.
Valle Nevado Hotel Jump. aug 29th, 2006
Valle Nevado is a pretty chill place to hang out & eat some excellent wood fire pizza. Lucas DeBari like to build Jumps after he gets his pizza. Lucas DeBari likes to build big jumps with scary gaps over roofs.
Chile 2007
-8/11/07 Down in Chile, the crew is Tarek Husevold, Lucas Debari, Jeremy Dubs, and Conne Mellafe. We've been here a week now and already rode some of the sickest lines of a lifetime. Its snowed 2 times so far and the last snowfall left a dumping of 1.5 feet of dry pow pow. We've been chilling so far at El Colorado and Valle Nevado and we're apparently in the best place in the world to ride right now.
