Tearing up the Surrey Hills with Upper Downs

Harry Molloy, Jack Chapman and Tim Kemp – Upper Downs Development Riders, have put together this promo vid in the Surrey Hills.

2015 is here and it’s going to be an exciting year for us… The last 12 months has been incredible, we’ve hit the trails and worked with riders from all over the world to spec and design our upcoming Neoshell MTB jacket.

Back in the summer we were approached by the Apex Film Collective, a group of third year students from Staffordshire University who were looking to produce a film for a new brand focusing on outdoor and extreme sports. We immediately jumped at the chance to work with James Barnes and his team who understood what we are trying to achieve with Upper Downs and started working on an idea with some of our development riders to put together a short promotional film.

Our aim was to focus on the fun aspect of riding bikes, whilst also giving a view into what we’ve been working on at Upper Downs for the last 12 months and what we are trying to create.

We wanted to film our local spots and capture some footage of singletrack, jumps and woodland sections that feature in all our own rides when we’re out with mates. The Surrey Hills was the perfect location, we were planning to shoot the film in November and were unsure of how the weather would behave, and the trails ride better than most places in the South East as they drain pretty well.

After scouting out filming locations with Jack Chapman and Harry Molloy from Flowstyle MTB Coaching, we decided Winterfold Hill was going to be a great spot, with easy access which made sense as Apex were bringing a 6 strong film crew, three different camera set ups and a lot of equipment. The filming was something we had a clear idea about and we wanted to add something a bit different into our film so Apex brought a Sony FS700 camera with them that could shoot slo-mo footage in 240 FPS.

It came to shoot day and it had been a pretty dank, wet and cold couple of weeks. Thankfully for us the sun came out from the outset and it was t-shirt weather at points of the day as we worked with Apex via radios, to instruct the riders to hit the trails in turn.

All in all we were happy with the day, with less light available, it was always going to be hard to shoot enough footage for a long film, but with our aim to produce a 3 minute promotional film it looked like were had it covered.

We’d also arranged a second shoot date with Apex to show us at work. We got this covered in a couple of hours and then it was over to Apex to crack on with the long editing process.

After a number of cuts and reviews of the film, we’re pretty stoked with the final cut, and hope you all like it too.

Expect more videos from us this year…

Thanks again to all of those involved in this fun project:

Apex Film collective
James Barnes
Development riders; Tim Kemp, Harry Molloy and Jack Chapman
Lucinda Rendall
Faulty Clicks for the soundtrack