HelliVentures Captures the Emotion of Sports Through Film Craft by Anthony Vagnoni 29 May, 2012

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1 HelliVentures Captures the Emotion of Sports Through Film Craft by Anthony Vagnoni 29 May, 2012 Europe s leading action, sports and outdoor production company is fueled by depicting its drama and passion for both clients and audiences. In the Janis Joplin s hit Mercedes-Benz, she sings about how her friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends. Joachim Hellinger probably feels the same way. He grew up in Stuttgart, home of both Daimler Benz and Porsche, and many of his schoolmates studied to be engineers and work in the automotive business. Even Helli s father everyone calls Hellinger Helli, by the way wanted him to pursue the profession, but to no avail. Instead, he got swept away by a pair of skis and a Super 8 movie camera. Since then, he s built one of Europe s best-known action sports production companies, shooting countless TV commercials, adventure films and documentaries while running one of the largest film festivals on the continent dedicated to outdoor, action and sports entertainment. Seems like he s made amends plenty. The cheerful German director presides over the Munich-based production company known as HelliVentures, which was started back in Helli got his start in the action and sports genre back in the days when there was relatively little of this content out there, aside from early ski and surf films. I was organizing ski trips for my high school, and I d make a little Super 8 movie of each trip, Helli recalls. He d edit these down, add a music track and show them to his friends. They were really the very first action sports films I did. This was back in the 1980s. That s when the young Helli met the French filmmaker Thierry Donard, and subsequently began showing his Nuit de la Glisse, a two-hour film that combined footage of skiing, surfing and skating. He was surprised to find that the screenings were a big hit. We had huge audiences, and we were filming sports that were relatively new, things like snowboarding and paragliding, that had never really been seen close-up. Before long Helli s screenings of sports films grew into a full-time occupation; he began distributing sports films and started to build a network of people involved in the growing action and sports genre. A skier himself, he was attuned to the unique tastes of this audience, and set out to make films himself that would not only resonate with this crowd but would appeal to a wider, crossover audience as well. Our goal from the very beginning was to use the craft of filmmaking to convey the feeling and emotions of the athletes to the audience, he says. We use film language not so much for traditional storytelling, but more about employing camera angles, lenses and editing to show what these sports are like with a new visual quality.

2 Once he realized where his career was headed, Helli enrolled in the University of Film and Television (HFF) in Munich and later spent a semester at UCLA s film school in California before doing post graduate work at La Femis in France. He also conceived a short snowboarding film that he produced and directed on his own; shot in Alaska and the French Alps, it was titled Secret Island and was released theatrically in Europe. It wasn t long before people other than outdoor and adventure enthusiasts took an interest in Helli s work; he began to field calls from a mix of production houses, advertisers and ad agencies. They liked what I was doing, and they wanted me to produce work for them, but he had a different idea. I just decided to do this on my own. His first big break came on an international campaign for Swatch, one he pitched to a Swatch marketing executive by jumping into a taxicab with him and explaining the campaign while they drove. Based on this he was invited to pitch it to Swatch s CEO in Switzerland, who took a look at it and told Helli, Let s do it. The resulting spots ran in Europe and the US and established HelliVentures as a legitimate player in TVC production. Since then, HelliVentures has gone on to shoot just about everywhere Alaska, the Amazon, Papua New Guinea, Tibet, you name it, warm weather or cold. It s showreel today includes not just commercials but tons of web content as well as documentaries, corporate image films and shorts. They ve worked on sports and outdoor-oriented spots for major brands like MasterCard, Kellogg s, Karstadt, Milka, ING-DiBa, Nivea, Royal Caribbean, Samsung, Unilever, Swatch, Nestle, Gillette and Colgate/Palmolive, working for McCann-Erickson, Saatchi & Saatchi, Euro RSCG, BBDO and many others. They ve also produced long-format web content for brands within the sports world such as Gore-Tex, Red Bull, Mammut and others. Helli notes that only about sixty percent of the company s current work is TVC projects, and not all of those are action and sports spots. We shoot a lot of traditional commercials as well, he says. The director is totally engaged in the outdoor and action sports film and video world. Indeed, his extracurricular ventures, in addition to running HelliVentures, only further cement his status as one of the leaders in outdoor and adventure programming. For example, his other company, Moving Adventures Media, runs the annual European Outdoor Film Tour (check it out here), a series of film festivals dedicated to action, sports and outdoor adventure. He also runs a German-language web TV channel dedicated to outdoor and adventure content called 4 Seasons TV. There you ll find reviews of outdoor gear and equipment and lots of videos dedicated to ardent sportsmen and women. Helli says that HelliVentures is on the cutting edge when it comes to production techniques, new talent and trends in action and sports content. They were among the first European companies to shoot snowboarding on film, he says, back at a time when the sport was not held in high regard by the downhill elites. They wouldn t allow us on the mountains at first, he says. We had to try and fool them. Many of the techniques Helli pioneered in shooting action and sports content have become mainstream. Now you can put a GoPro camera on your helmet and have a friend shoot you with a D5 and if you know someone who can use editing software, you can make a great movie, he explains.

3 He points out that HelliVentures approach to shooting is marked by its high level of production value. Their innovation was to apply classic film production techniques to a field - outdoor and adventure content - where it had not been widely used before. We always worked on 35 mm, very often with full lighting and grip packages, Helli explains. Our idea was to use the skills we d developed working in remote terrain or on water, and still approach it like a traditional filmmaker in terms of how we worked. We were bridging the gap between the two worlds; since I knew the athletes, the sports and the locations, we decided to use nature as our studio instead of a sound stage. They still work this way when the project calls for it, but his studio has enthusiastically embraced the new, more mobile tools. Helli notes that they just produced a major web viral campaign for Sony Ericsson and McCann in Berlin, part of which was actually shot on the smartphones featured in the ads. The rest of the content was captured on a variety of systems, all the way up to REDs shooting HD. The campaign is themed Challenges, and in each video a challenge is delivered to the Sony Ericsson Xperia smartphone things like can you drive a car or skateboard using the phone s screen as your means of watching the road, or is the screen bright enough to grow plants? The production crew created these elaborate devices to pull off the challenges building enclosed helmets for the skateboarders with smartphones mounted in the front, restricting their view to just the phones screens (see Challenge the Fast Lane ). They did the same thing with an old, beat up car, knocking out the windows and replacing them with sheet metal and Xperia portals (see Challenge the Driver ). In Challenge the Greenhouse, they built an enclosed dark room with plants inside and mounted a rig so that the smartphone s glow would be the only light shining on a row of flowers. Using time-lapse photography, we watch as they bloom. The videos, five in all, were shot in three weeks on the island of Tenerife, off the coast of Africa. Erich Reuter, Executive Creative Director of McCann in Berlin, had never worked with HelliVentures before but says this was a great opportunity to collaborate with them, based on the scripts. Helli suggested the directing team of Kronck and was on location for most of the shoot. This was a very different way of working for us, Reuter recalls. We were sort of creating content as we went. It took a lot of trust on the part of the client; this was a challenge for them as well. He says the agency chose HelliVentures for the project based on their extensive documentary work and how they approached shooting action sequences. We felt if anyone in the business could cope with the challenges this campaign presented, it was most probably Helli and his team, he adds. And they did; it really worked out well. Rob Sherlock, the former Chief Creative Officer of Draft FCB in Chicago, is a Kiwi who held a senior creative spot with the agency in Asia before heading to the US. He worked with HelliVentures on a TVC for Samsung that was created by the agency s Hong Kong office. In the spot, a dashing, good-looking guy flies to the top of a mountain in a helicopter and jumps out, zooming his way to the bottom. In the background, we hear his outgoing voic message explain to co-workers that he s a little up in the air right now, and will get back to you when he gets his feet back on the ground.

4 What Sherlock likes about Helli s action and sports work is that it has a very international feel to it. I think it comes from his European sensibility, he notes, adding that Helli is extremely laid-back, probably the most un-german German I know. He s a get out there and get it done kind of guy, and he builds great teams around him. In terms of its directorial roster, HelliVentures relies on more than just Helli to, as Sherlock says, get things done. The studio works with a wide range of directors, many of them experts in outdoor and adventure filmmaking. Helli says they often look for something on a directors reel that that they can connect with, such as the skateboard work seen on the Kronck reel. That s how Helli came up with them for the Sony Ericsson campaign. And then there are the film tours Helli does in his other work at Moving Adventures Media. These events give him a front row seat for the newest and most breakthrough work on the part of young filmmakers working in a range of outdoor genres. Helli has met a lot of exciting new talents this way, people like Mickey Smith, the bodyboarder whose film, The Dark Side of the Lens, impressed him greatly. Another notable project he showcased in his film tour was Life Cycles, directed by Derek Frankoski and Ryan Gibb, which he describes as an epic mountain biking film with a very artistic approach. At times we pull in talent from this world and introduce them to the commercials business, he notes. Back when he was in film school in Munich, Helli recalls, he was the only student who was focused on working in the action and sports genre. These days, he lectures at the school and says each semester there are easily several young talents who work in the field. I ve seen a lot of stuff out there that s truly amazing, he says about the kind of content filmmakers like these are creating with the new production tools. They learn quickly, and in many respects the ease of use of this gear makes you more free with your thinking. What we re seeing now are new possibilities and new horizons in the world of action and sports. When teamed with a company like his one with a deep knowledge of the industry, relationships with top athletes around the world and connections with global agencies and brands Helli feels the potential for fresh, new work is very good. For the past 13 years in Cannes, HelliVentures has been holding an event they call Catch the Early Bird. It s an early morning water skiing and wakeboarding party, held on the Majestic Beach. They sip coffee (among other things), have fun and hand out a grand prize - a bright green cuckoo clock - to the first guest to show up on the pier before 8 AM. Rob Sherlock has won it two years in a row. Helli s really one of the most likeable, genuine guys in the business, says Sherlock. He exudes a sense of warmth and openness, and that s what he s like all the time, even when working on a tough job. And he and his people have a great talent not just for the logistics, technical aspects and risk management of the kind of work they do, but for the creative vision as well. The total full-time employment at Helli s various companies numbers close to 30 something of an extension of the growing Hellinger family, as Helli has five kids. Between their work on the outdoor film tour and the web TV channel and the documentaries and commercials not to mention Helli s constant travel to film festivals around the world (he s just back from the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, where he screened a film he made with the rock climbing star Lynn Hill) they re totally immersed in the world of action, sports and outdoor content.

5 In some respects, the growth of the European Outdoor Film Tour takes Helli back to his beginnings in the industry. The tour has been all over China, England (starting this fall), France and five other European countries and plays to audiences in the thousands. It s how I got started, he says, recalling his days as a teenager screening ski tour films for friends and classmates. You re in there, you ve got a couple of hundred people, at times close to a thousand, watching the films, you ve got this big screen, sometimes twenty meters across, with a great sound system. It s like a light show, everyone s cheering, applauding we bring the stars of the sports up on stage. It s all good, he says about where things are going for his company right now. We re doing a lot of interesting work, and I m really happy with that. Take that, Janis Joplin.