How to make a Paper Tiger
In lieu of this video premiere season we wanted to highlight what really goes into making a top notch snowboard video, and to do that, we delved into the nitty gritty with Skylar Brent, a Derry, NH local and one of the most talented creators in snowboarding today. He’s had a major part in filming and editing videos like Stronger, 2032, T32m, Eckle Sparkle, Landline, PRISM, Your Grilling me Smalls, the most recent Capita x Mt. Hood video on top of multiple seasons of the High Cascade Recaps during their heyday and much much more. To say he’s had an influential role in snowboarding videos would be an understatement.
Paper Tiger is his and Mike Rav’s newest brain child, bringing together an amazing crew of riders to create a seamless stream of audio visual art, metaphysical story and snowboarding. Personally, one of our favorite videos of last season, we thought it would be a treat to dive into the logistics, technicals and ideas that cade this film with the creator himself.
Buckle up it’s a long one.
First things first. If you haven’t seen Paper Tiger, go watch it now.
So with the narrative, it seemed strong, having each door being a door into each of the riders minds.
Yeah kind of kind of. You can interpret it however you want, but not necessarily each rider. The whole thing was supposed to be like an abstract look at the mind I guess. The guy in the hall with the mask on, He can almost be like a blank sleight like the viewer. I had this notebook where I wrote a bunch of stuff down. Rav and I did a storyboard for everything so everything is exactly like this in the movie. We did this all back in June. So we had it all pretty dialed in.
That’s so sick!
It was really fun just trying to come up with a concept and trying to pull through. I don’t think I have ever ended up with a final product that was that close to what I had envisioned. It’s really hard filming snowboarding because you never know. Stuff changes all the time and I guess with the narrative stuff you have a lot more control over it I guess. Even so, Rav was able to come out over the summer and work in it with me.
How long do you think that took you to edit it all?
It’s hard to say. I guess I really started when the season ended in april. I had all my footage on hard drives; I hadn’t really organized it or even looked at it yet, so I spent most of may just looking at it when I was home at least because I was gone a lot at this point. I was looking at footage and slowly putting things together. I didn’t want to get too heavily into it until we filmed all of the narrative parts, which we ended up filming in the beginning of July. I had an idea of how I wanted it to all look and sometimes it’s really hard to get in the mix until you have all the pieces. So yeah most of September and October I was sitting right here just editing away.
Was the final Draft going down the night before or were you sitting on it for a while?
Noo, I was finishing up a lot of graphics within the last week before it came out. It wasn’t super last minute crunch time. I’ve done that before and that’s the worst. I’ve learned to stop procrastinating things because that’s never fun.
You could definitely feel the cohesiveness this year, where it felt like so many crews attacked videos with a plan rather than just shoot a ton of clips and see what happens
Yeah but that’s what I’ve done so many times too. It was fun, I always wanted to do something like this and luckily we had the right people involved who backed it and trusted us to try something like that. Also when we first started filming I pitched this idea to Mark Dangler at C3 and it was a little of what you see now, but mostly different and then a month or two in end of January and February is when I really started formulating this idea that you see now.
How did you guys decide on that Crew because out of all of Capita it was a smaller specific crew of sick riders.
Yeah we got so lucky that he could come film. Initially it was just Mike and Johnny because they didn’t have a project. I didn't have a project and we came together and were like let's make something happen. So we talked, I made a proposal, we talked about a bunch of ideas and then the first trip came and it was to New York and we stayed at Johnny's house. His family owns this inn/bar that’s close to Windham Mountain. In the town Windham, NY where Johnny is from. It snowed a shit ton while we were there and we were only planning on riding the resort there for the most part, but instead we ended up building this backyard park at Johnny’s. We built some rails, his friend helped us weld some together for it. We went to Windham Mountain and they let us take a snowblower to Johnny's house. So we tried to get that hooked up but the night we tried it miraculously snowed a foot and a half and we joked that the snowblower blew a foot and a half all over the back yard. It just kept snowing and after New Years we went out to Iowa and Austin Met us there, I think it was Mark’s Idea to send him to us and from then on he stuck with us through the rest of the year. He just kept getting clips and never left. He’s so great to have around. He's super cool, super motivated and naturally talented and I don’t think he’s ever really filmed a full street part before.
I was so stoked he finally had a full street part with Capita after the videos he filmed with Jake (@Eastbummfucc) and that was rag tag and fun but he finally got the production value his boarding could stand up to.
For Sure!
I was excited about the whole crew. I mean there were a lot of challenge rails going down this year, a lot of people trying to do the hardest things you’ve ever seen and the polar opposite with people trying to do the smaller creative stuff. But this was great! There were crazy tricks, small tricks, long tricks and tricks that were the best because that person’s style and you filmed it to compliment their styles and tricks.
Yeah I think the music went really well with everyone too ya know.
Yeah it was a good score. I saw that Harry Hagan helped with the audio of it too?
Yeah he, Mike Rav and Brandon Cocard did a bunch of the audio for the narrative stuff.
Was it the voice audio or the background music?
It was the music that you hear. It was more the ambient music in the scenes and I did all the sound effects.
I need to dive into the opening sequence; I was juiced on it. There weren’t a lot of beginnings to movies this year that tapped into the kind of energy this did.
Yeah I wanted to have an intro like in a lot of older videos where it had segments that didn’t even relate to the snowboarding. Mike and I were watching a bunch of those videos in the beginning of the season so that was the inspiration for adding this whole weird narrative and to have that montage in the beginning was the same type of thing. That’s what always got me so hyped back in the day.
Yeah you have to get the people hyped up for the journey they’re about to take. I realized there wasn’t a lot of that in other videos this year. This one was just good visually and with audio where it mixed up and transitioned into the heavy guitar riff. It really took me.
That’s one of those songs I’ve wanted to find a place for for like years and years and years.
Watch the intro here
Were there any kind of obstacles you had to find a creative approach in order to get the visual you wanted?
At Johnny’s hotel there are no actual peepholes on the door. I only realized that after we got there to film it.
So you built little peepholes?
No it’s actually shot with this fisheye lens. It’s just a little adapter that you screw onto the front of a 50mm so that it has a vignette. I was just standing in the doorway with the lens pretending it was there. And Mike wore the mask in the hallway sequence.
Then there’s that scene where you guys push the TV down the hall what was the strategy for that.
Have you ever heard of the account @shittyrigs? It was like that but it worked pretty well
I don’t want to call it a skit, but I feel like there's been a reemergence of skits or little stories and stuff in recent videos like this
Yeah it’s pretty sick
It kind of fell away for a little bit but then people remembered they could put more into it than just tricks and music. Like the Dustbox has one they used in Dreamcastle or the Liquid Death tall can ad.
Yeah I was way hyped on that!
On a more technical note I wanted to ask what cameras did you film with?
I have the Black Magic Ursa Mini Pro and the Black Magic Pocket 6k pro
I am going to google those to see the prices on those (typing into google noises)
Yeah they’re popping up more and more. They’re so good and I think people just didn’t know about them or something.They’re relatively low price and what you can get out of them is pretty awesome.
I don’t know what word to use specifically, but I feel like there was a visual motion or energy in all the shots that really made everything feel quick and punchy. Was it the frame rate you were using? Were you at 60 fps or 24 fps to get that feeling?
Yeah so I exported the whole video in 24fps, but I shoot a lot at 60fps or 24fps or anywhere in between honestly, depending on the shot. I always shoot action shots at 60fps and mostly everything else I’ll shoot at 24fps.
Is it something you’ve consciously practiced or pursued for the look you like?
I think at a point it just becomes intuition and what your goal for the project is and then it’s just knowing where the button is so you can change it on the fly. Another thing that is important is that you’re never really switching your shutter speed ever, you always want to use the same shutter speed. So you always shoot with a shutter speed that is twice the value of your frame rate. So if you’re shooting at 24 fps your shutter is at 1/48 of a second and if you’re shooting in 60fps then you want your shutter speed to be 1/120 of a second. If you’re seeing something shot at 24 fps that looks too jittery they probably have their shutter speed set too high.
There’s just so much on top of that that goes into making a good shot or video. Eventually after doing it for so long you build an intuition to what you need to get, what conditions you want and what kind of shots you want to bring into editing and getting the result you were envisioning. You eventually create your own personal workflow. Just trying to see the finished product, make sure you get what know you need for it ahead of time and feel what you’re missing along the way. It’s always good to overshoot.
Example: frame capture from moments captured at 24 frames per second
Did you use a different lens or a cinema lens? (Cine-lens:High quality constructed lens for digital cameras which contain precision glass, motors for precision autofocus and zoom and cost $$$$$$) The focal points and depth on that shot compared to others had me feeling very immersed.
Yeah I actually bought this anamorphic lens which basically means you’re getting a wider aspect ratio that’s why you have the space at the top that is black. (Insert screenshot) That’s just so you can squish more into the frame. I just wanted to get it so I could mess around with that. I wasn’t really planning on filming with it but I brought it along with me and filmed a bunch of stuff not being sure how I was going to incorporate it thinking it was going to look funny. For some reason though when I watch the video back; I haven’t gotten any comments on this either but I didn’t even really notice the change in aspect ratio from shot to shot and it just flowed.
Yeah it flowed so well. I mean I noticed a little bit because I was maybe looking for it more but I didn’t think anything of it just like it was supposed to be there.
Yeah you’re a filmer you’re gonna pay attention to that, that makes total sense. I also feel like I’ve seen a lot of commercials or ads where hey switch up aspect ratios a lot ya know.
At first when I saw it at first I thought, “Wait you’re not allowed to do that!” But you’re totally allowed to do that because you just did and it worked.
There are no rules. But yeah, no ones said anything about it to me pointing out that any shots are different from the last.
One minute you’re in an A grade hollywood movie then the next your back to snowboarding.
It would be cool to shoot a video with just one of these but the problem is that this one is a jerry rigged lens, where the real ones they film movies with are one lens and worth $30,000, but this is actually a piece from a projector, so they would use this to project anamorphic films and it works the other way too. So basically, there’s the projector lens and this focus ring screwed onto it because otherwise you can’t adjust your focus and then you attach it to your standard lens.
Wow so did you get it with all those pieces?
Well I actually collect a lot of vintage camera lenses, so I took pieces from them to make this work. But I have had my focus ring for a long time because I use it for other shit. It’s just fun experimenting with some different stuff.
I keep thinking about this shot in Austin’s part where it’s a static shot of a bail with the street in the foreground and a bridge in the background. I don’t know what lens you used, but I was juiced on it. It was just a bail clip, but it was so well shot you could sell it as an NFT.
You liked the shot, yeah thank you! Haha
The next aspect I wanted to ask you about are the colors. You’ve had really good color in other videos like “Stronger” and then you moved to “T32M”, which had a little more of a set color palette to it that made all the orange pop, but still stayed opaque and the colors in Paper Tiger were really vibrant and more green.
Skylar and his Anamorphic lens
To be honest I am not really an expert on color grading. I kinda got into that a lot more this year which is why you might notice that. But also it’s hard doing everything on your own you know? Like for “Stronger”, I was a filmer, I was an editor but I didn’t have anything to do with color grading. They have other people doing that stuff you know. But with this Project it was me doing everything; Filming, editing , all the color, sound, titling, graphics and all the art direction. So I go back and I watch it and all I can see are these little things that are not right that probably no one else will see, but that’s all I see.
Like what? What’s a major minor issue you’ve noticed that still really gets to you when you watch it?
I don’t know. Maybe the sound mostly, I’ll notice the sound is a little off or not timed up exactly how I want it or a cut isn’t exactly one the beat I thought I put it on and some little things with the graphics too. Just stuff no one will ever notice.
(This is your queue to watch Paper Tiger and find every little possible editing error you can find. Most errors wins a hand written letter, personally signed by Skylar saying “Fuck You”
But that’s the thing you know, just learn from your mistakes. And that’s the thing sometimes, I have a hard time watching back my work because all I can pay attention to is the problems.
I have the biggest issue with music because when you pick a song you basically have to commit to hating it for the rest of your life after editing with it.
Yeah totally, After this year I feel better about this video than I have ever felt before. I think also, like I said before, it’s really close to what we envisioned. I used to be a lot more, I don’t know, experimental or I would try to be more abstract way back in the day, but then I just got really into trying to get a higher production value or just trying to perfect things. Whether it be just the framing or editing, I just got into this more simplified kind of look. This year I was just like fuck it I am going to take it back to how I used to do things and just get weird with it. But that’s kind of the cycle of interest too.
It sounds like you gained such a good foundation after focusing on all the basics that you could build ideas off of that, experiment and feel more confident in what you were trying.
Yeah exactly
So I wanted to ask, did you make presets of LUTs or color, or an adjustment layer over the top or did you just freely color every shot?
I just kinda went shot by shot more or less. I use this plug-in for Adobe Called Film Convert, so it kinda is like using a base LUT, but you aren’t getting your final look from it. Then you just use Lumetri in Premier. It’s a confusing world honestly.
I also really like the HSL Secondary color grading where you can pick a certain shade and control it’s color.
Skylar: Yeah l Have had to use that before to change the color of Johnny O’Connor’s beanie cause sometimes people will change what they’re wearing mid session.
Example: Frame grabs that have clear and uniform color grading. This helps create a visual and artistic standard throughout the video.
So I need to ask. After Effects. How important is After Effects in making your videos? Would you say filmer/editors should learn how to use it? Is it a huge portion of the process?
Yeah, yeah for sure. Especially with this video because there’s so much I used it in. Like all the motion graphics, titling and all that stuff is done in after effects. But also I think almost everyone uses that to ramp clips too. (Speed Ramping: to make a parabolic or gradual slowing down to a point and speeding up of a clip). I also use it to stabilize, if I need to warp stabilize clips I do it in After Effects instead of Premier. Mainly because when I do it in premier things start to glitch out after a certain point for some reason. Stabilizer to like if you if you ever want to like put like something in the shop and have it look like it’s in the shot yeah like I did this thing with mike a couple years ago Eklesparkle at Mt.Hood where we put all those like alien looking guys in the shot. I used warp stabilizer to stabilize the clip to make it look still, then put one of those guys shot and an add warp stabilizer again and then kind of reverse stabilize all of it to make the guy move with the shakes and bounces of the camera. There’s a whole ton of reasons to use warp stabilizer than to just stabilize a clip as well.After effects is just so crazy, it’s limitless the amount of tricks you can use to make things work in ways you would have never thought.
That warp stabilizing trick you just listed would make it super easy and natural looking to add something into a shot like that compared to keyframing and trying to manually track an alien into a shot frame by frame.
Yeah, depends on the shot. I had to do a lot of that for that same video as well. Also for Paper Tiger I used After Effects for all the TV stuff. All that stuff had to be done in after effects, because we originally shot it with footage on the TV but then afterwards we decided that we didn’t want that specific footage on the tv anymore so that really stressed me out like “Fuck I really wanted it to look like it was on the TV”. I had to go back and use After Effects to Rotoscope in some new footage. (Rotoscoping: Replacing a section of video by tracing a certain section to be replaced in every frame then using those traced points to put new images in its place.) Then the whole segment where he goes into the TV where he’s falling through the blank space is all After Effects as well.
You just threw him on a green screen?
Actually *reaches for notebook* I just made this big piece of wood with a hole in it where Mike’s on the other side while a piece of glass has footage being projected onto it in front of him. I’m filming from the other side while he pushes through the piece of glass and climbs though. But I had to find a way to actually make it look like he was in a TV so I build a cube with the inside to look like it’s the inside of a tv which I made in an app called Blender which is like a 3D modeling software that’s FREE (note to all creators) and really confusing but really cool. So I made that and put it into After Effects and went through all the steps to integrate it.
That’s what I'm scared of is that there's definitely a ton of steps to make anything like that including learning a new program or maybe 3 new programs.
But sometimes it’s a lot easier than you think.
What was one of the first bigger uses of After Effects in your videos?
Probably all of the high cascade camp edits back in the 20teens. We made all of the graphics and titles for those with it.
Lastly I wanted to bring up the ever important aspect of B-roll. Not only did you have a well established background visual going with the adventures of the masked person, but you had great B-roll throughout, of the lifestyle and locations. I find myself not focusing enough of getting enough B-roll to build the story or atmosphere I want and just getting stressed out once I hit the editing bay and realizing all I have is a constant stream of action.
I’ve definitely been in that spot so many times where I’m like Fuck I dont have enough B-roll and then it’s hard to set a vibe without that stuff, so I say just film everything. That’s something I really tried to focus on myself this past year. So going into Paper Tiger I made sure I was going to get a lot more of that stuff.