Last month ESPN the Mag. photo editor Jennifer Aborn tapped me to shoot the east coast half (big ups to team Williams & Hirakawa for the left coast work) of a summer time portfolio of the rising teenage stars of X Games 16 for ESPN Action, formerly titled EXPN (you can find a copy inside each July 26 issue of ESPN). Saying yes was a no brainer not least of which because the first leg of the feature was of motoX stud Ashley Fiolek who I shot the year before also for ESPN.
It’s been quite a while since I really dug into the nitty gritty of the shoot so I think we’ll make this shoot recap a warts ‘n’ all affair. And bonus, there’s even a short behind the scenes video… Enjoy!
The name of the game for shooting Ashley was ice cream (I get that now after seeing the sweet typographical treatment on the opening spread above). But while scouting down in FL the whole idea was killing me, especially since we decided to shoot right on the beach (without a permit), and on a summer afternoon when it was a shade under 5000 degrees in St. Augustine Beach. The magazine wanted the ice cream as colorful as possible so I opted for sherbet hoping it might melt slower (it doesn’t) and we had 2 coolers packed with ice to keep things cold (very much a losing battle). The other prop buy was easy and always fun to expense: plastic beach toys.
The great thing about shooting people like Ashley or Chaz is that from the moment they meet you they are a part of the team and are game for just about anything. Before I even got to say hi to Ashley on set she was running back and forth between the ocean helping to build the castle along with her little brother Kicker and my all-star assistant team Eric & Scott. I can’t stress how rock star these guys were enough because it was a brutally hot, sticky day and they made it possible and awesome.
As I admitted before, we didn’t have a permit for the shoot (you can’t pull permits if the city never answers any the phone), so I wanted to keep things as low key as possible until we were absolutely ready to shoot. But getting multiple lights on stands w/ booms, etc. in place and then moving a motocross bike into position is pretty conspicuous, especially on a crowded beach. So before I had shot a single frame of Ashley we had a member of St. Augustine’s finest joining the party.
With a smile plastered on my face and a single thought in my mind (“I’m fucked”), I went over to casually chat with the officer as if there was absolutely no reason in the world that what we were doing could be wrong. By the grace of god he wasn’t annoyed, just really bored, and he wanted to know if we were going to do tricks off of the (environmentally protected) sand dunes. “No no, we would never…” I started. He stopped me by saying “oh that’s too bad, it’d be sweet!” Even though our slot with the subject was short I took plenty of time to be friendly to the cop and offer him water, etc. Ultimately he stuck around to watch us shoot for a while and then left. That maybe happens once in 100 times. And thank god we were shooting in smaller town FL coast because it would have never worked out so sweetly anywhere near Miami.
From there the shoot with Ashley was smooth sailing. We managed to spill a whole lot of ice cream all over her and her beautiful new practice bike. And then we finished off just as I had entirely drained the 7B packs on our last set-up, which was what the magazine ultimately used. We managed to crank up the video camera at the same time that we finally let Ashley start up the bike to try and destroy her kid brother’s sand castle while he protested behind. We had all been out in the blazing sun for a few hours and I felt like my brain had melted along with the sherbet but the shoot was a lot of fun. Building sand castles for pay doesn’t suck.
With the first portrait in the bag we went through a few scheduling mishaps before I was able to grab a flight to Chicago and hook up with skateboarder Chaz Ortiz in the suburbs. This shoot also had fun accessories, namely kiddie pools (I, well ESPN, bought 2 and gave the one we didn’t use to Chaz’s little sister). At some point in the last 25 years kiddie pools got a whole lot bigger because we ended up with 8 feet+ of pool (and friends) to leap over. Chaz didn’t even blink for a second and just like Ashley was immediately on board.
Physics aside, our big problem in Chicago was rain as the grey skies that had been threatening all day long were now starting to open up as we (including my super helpful local assistants Peter and Daniel) got things set up. It’s always hard to figure out exactly how much you can really get prepped (stands, lights, props, etc.) when it’s pissing rain. On the one hand you want to be ready to jump in as soon as it stops, but on the other hand you can’t exactly sacrifice a head to mother nature. As we finished getting set up Peter used his iPhone to learn that the Chicago area would be under severe thunderstorm watch for the rest of the day.
Despite the rain I was able to convince Chaz and his friends to get things rolling. After only 20 very slow frames (one for each jumping attempt) it started to rain really hard and we had to stop and wait. And wait. And wait. (Thanks to Chaz’s mom who made everyone hot dogs.) Since I had a flight out of Chicago a few hours away it was time to make a decision on whether or not it was worth sticking around to get more (Chaz very kindly offered to get up early the next morning, but both of my assistants were booked for other gigs and I had work back in NYC) or did we already have what we wanted. I was able to edit and tone a select and then sent it to my editor’s phone. She loved it but was worried because now the layout was running vertically (of course that changed later).
Waiting is boring, sure, but it can also be disastrous to the momentum and energy of your shoot. I had to decide if it was worth missing the flight for whatever potential was left in the situation. If I didn’t really believe that there was a much better picture waiting to be made it would be stupid to waste a bunch of money and stick around. However 90 minutes later we got lucky and suddenly the sun came out (from absolutely nowhere) even though it continued to rain. A few minutes later the rain slowed to a drizzle we jumped back into place (many thanks to Chaz’s friends who got back into the very cold water in the pool), ripped the improvised rain covers off of the lights and tarps off the ramp, and then broomed off Chaz’s landing area (I was pretty worried he might hurt himself).
We got “sun” for about 8 minutes and the natural light looked beautiful. Chaz jumped directly at me to get a more vertical composition and didn’t crash despite my ring light blasting away right at him. The major benefit of all of that waiting around was that we found Chaz’s little sister’s pink Escalade big wheel which had to be included. After 10 jumps I told Chaz this was the last and he decided he wanted to go right into the drink. We broke down super fast, hauled ass to my hotel to switch cars but it was pretty obvious that with traffic I was never going to make my flight so I decided to return the rental gear myself. But with all of the bad weather my flight had become severely delayed and very, very late that night I found myself back in a taxi speeding home through the nearly empty NYC streets with the picture in the bag and a smile on my face.
The production aspect to these shoots was fun but what actually makes the images is the energy. In both cases the location and weather made my lighting decisions pretty obvious (I was asked to somewhat match what the west coast team had already done) so it came down to old fashioned cheering and shouting. If you find yourself trying hard to psych up your subjects to give you something big then you are already most of the way there to bringing your own energy to the table and that stuff is infectious. Despite the difficulties this project was personally really rewarding. Many thanks again to both sets of assistants for their hard work and to Jen Aborn at ESPN for another fun gig.
