AnyForty ‘Stick Em Up’ Session from Rob Antill on Vimeo.

Myself & Alex Fowkes hooked up with London based streetwear brand AnyForty  to bring you this short edit.

Shredding the new AnyForty deck ‘Stick Em Up’ at Flo skatepark, Nottingham.

First time experimenting with CineStyle for the 7D and ProTune for the GoPro. Colour correction using film convert pro. Thanks to the guys at Dimention2 for introducing me to this.

Deck available here | Rider Alex Fowkes | Location Flo Skatepark | Music Ten Tigers – Bonobo

Interviewed by Dan for his final year project at Nottingham Trent Uni. Thought I’d post up my response, as the questions were good and summarize my first season snowboarding.

It’s nice to see my images used also. They seem to work pretty well.

Click below to read the interview..

WHAT RESORT DID YOU CHOOSE FOR YOUR SEASON ?
A: Whitewater, Near Nelson, British Columbia, Canada

WHAT WERE YOUR REASONS FOR CHOOSING THAT RESORT?
A: Quiet location, small town, cheaper than the bigger resorts, good terrain and snowfall.

WHAT DID YOU / ARE YOU LOOKING TO GET OUT OF THE SEASON SPENT IN WHITEWATER?
A: To level up my snowboarding skills and live a life in the mountains.

DID YOU GO IT ALONE OR GO AS A GROUP?
A: I went out with one other person and I met one of his friends while out there. We spent half the season as a three, and slowly broke off to do our own thing.

MEET ANY COOL PEOPLE AND HOW DID THEY INFLUENCE YOU?
A: I met some of the coolest people. Being in a small town where
everyone has similar interests is really inspiring. I was pushed to try tricks and features I would have never done on my own. I have those people to thank for helping me progress.

FAVOURITE ASPECT OF THE RESORT YOU SEASONED?
A: Its a very small resort with only three lifts. There is a great deal of terrain covered by these lifts, which was awesome. I loved how empty the runs were, I would often get from the top to the bottom of runs with out seeing another person! Another great feature is that the resort has no cell phone reception or wifi, this means people actually talk to each other and are not constantly on their phones.

DID YOU FOCUS ON ONE PARTICULAR AREA OF SNOWBOARDING? IF SO WHICH AND WHY
A: It was fairly varied. There was a little terrain park with some decent kickers and rails, but the resort has so many natural features that we spent most the time just free-riding those.

COULD YOU SEE YOURSELF DOING ANOTHER SEASON? IF YES WHICH RESORT WOULD YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?
A: I would love the opportunity to do another season. If I was to do one again I think it would be at the same resort. But I would like to check out the other local resorts also.

BEST THINGS ABOUT YOUR SEASON ?
A: Meeting and working with the Sweetgrass Production team. Got to photograph and ride the first skate-style snowbowl in North America with them. We also did some night shoots up the mountain which included building big kickers and firing lots of fireworks… that was pretty sick.

ANY WORDS OF WISDOM FOR ANYONE THINKING OF DOING A SEASON?
A: Try your hardest to save money before you go. If its your first season your better off trying to go the 5 months with out working and just be a ski bum. That way you get to fully enjoy the experience.

BEING A RECOGNISED VIDEOGRAPHER AND PHOTOGRAPHER, DID THAT HELP YOU ON YOUR SEASON?
A: Yes massively. I see the time and effort I put in to my work as a form of currency. By which I mean, it allows me to get into situations where it would other wise cost a lot of money. For example I was invited to go backcountry sledding with a pro rider. I wasn’t paid, but that didn’t
matter because I was gaining invaluable experience. It all seems to
accelerate also, the more I did the more opportunities came up.

THE QUADCOPTER, DID THAT GET A LOT OF ATTENTION IN RESORT?
A: Yes a lot. I was told by multiple people that it was the talk of the town! haha

HOW DID YOU COME ABOUT YOUR ACCOMADATION? IT LOOKS SUPER COOL.
A: It was super cool.. it was one of the fate things I guess. We were
looking for a place to stay for about a week, it was proving really hard to find anywhere decent. One evening we checked the notice board
outside the library and there was a message saying this group
of people were looking for three housemates for the winter. There was three of us so it seemed perfect. Went to meet them the next day and got along great.
The place was amazing, a nine bedroom retreat center in the summer. The only down side to it was the location. We were up a 2.5km logging track in the middle of nowhere, which meant driving to the ski hill took about 35mins.

WE HADNT HEARD OF NELSON BEFORE, HOW DID YOU COME ABOUT IT AS MOST PEOPLE THINK OF WHISTLER WHEN THEY THINK OF CANADA.
A: I’ve done plenty of ski resort towns in Europe, I knew Whistler would be the same thing… lots of partying and very busy. I was on the hunt for something completely different. I wanted to experience the real Canada and Nelson somehow ended up being the spot for just that.

PROUDEST MOMENT OF THE TRIP?
A: Attempting and landing my first backflip on a snowboard. I was
bricking it before hand, but was so stoked when I landed it.

WHATS NEXT FOR YOU NOW YOU HAVE RETURNED?
A: Keep working on a freelance basis until I can work out the way to my next adventure.

ANY ADVICE FOR THE BUDDING PHOTOGRAPHER / VIDEOGRAPHER ?
A: Yes, work really hard, keep going even when things seem pointless and worthless. Set your self a goal and keep working towards that no matter what it takes. And most importantly, enjoy what you are doing.

Nice one Dan.

This season I tracked everyday (with the exception of a couple of errors) snowboarding at the ski resort Whitewater, BC, Canada. Overlaying all the data in Google Earth creates this super interesting effect.

Click below to read more about this project…

Update: I’ve created this interactive map using GPS Visualizer and Google maps. Download the KMZ file here to play with it in Google Earth.

Tracking outdoor activities is something I enjoy doing. It’s nice to be able to see where you went and look at things like max speed etc.

After a couple of days at Whitewater I had the idea of trying to track every day I was at the hill for the entire season. I wanted to see where I had been and where I had left to explore. As time when on, the mountain slowly turned blue and patterns started to emerge. I was able to see where I hadn’t been and areas that I travelled a lot. Remembering to set it off tracking every day was a mission. I was surprised that I was able to get a full day of data on one battery.

Some Info:

• Tracked with the iPhone 5
• MotionX-GPS used to record the data
• Total distance approximately 2200km / 1370mi
• Average distance per day 35km / 21mi
• Total descent/ ascent 260,000m / 853 000ft
• Average time 5 hours per day
• 66 tracked runs
• Max speed 118km/h / 73mph
• Date range 10 Dec 12 – 14 Apr 13

Aerial view from Google Earth of Whitewater Ski Resort with all the tracking data overlaid.

As mentioned in the stats above I clocked a new personal best top speed. The conditions that day were perfect. The resort was empty, the snow was hard but not icy and my board had been recently waxed. I decided to straight line it from the top of one of the runs and get as low as I could. I knew I was going fast because the air resistance was intense. It felt like I was ready to take off.

When I got to the bottom and looked at the phone I was stoked to see I finally beat my previous top speed of 101kmph by 17kmph! The road speed limit here in the UK is 70mph, at this point I was going 73mph. It’s kind of scary to think I was traveling this fast on a board…

There were a couple of days where I forgot to turn off the tracking data as we got in the car and left the resort. I ended up tracking some of the way back into the closest town, Nelson. This would have skewed the results a little, but not enough to have a major impact. You can see the road leaving the resort at the bottom right of the image below.

View of the ‘Short Side’ of the resort. There are no groomed runs in this area, but there is some great lines to be had through the trees. The only issue with dropping in here, was the traverse at the bottom back to the lift. This is why this section of the mountain is less covered than the others.

The thicker straight blue lines are the lifts.

Below you can see where we went for hikes.

View of the resort looking west from Ymir peak.

Close up view of the runs.

So there it is, 5 months of snowboarding tracked. I’m very much looking forward to my next visit to this amazing resort. I can use this data to work out what spots still need to be filled in on the next map :)

Nuptial Flight from Rob Antill on Vimeo.

Been working on this edit for the past 3.5 months. It’s been an ever upgrading/ tweaking project, but now I finally feel its at a stage where its complete. I’m stoked on the outcome.

Why the name Nuptial Flight? Well that is the term given to the phase in which most ant species will take to the skies to mate and form new colonies. I call the  Quad-copter used to film this, the flying ant… so, yeah.

Enjoy.

Download the high res wallpaper here

My friend Darcy was given something quite special the other day, the board for the #passitonproject from Lib Tech.

Here’s some info from Travis Rice pulled from the xgames website:

“The #passitonproject is an idea we came up with more or less spontaneously. My new Speedodeeps snowboard — a powder-specific board I’ve been designing with Lib Technologies for several years now to replace the Banana Hammock; I really think it rides like nothing else out there — showed up at the Asymbol studio a few weeks ago, and we just started kicking around this idea:

What if we sent it out into the world for people to ride and pass along, from snowboarder to snowboarder?”

We went out shooting one day to see what we could create. I had the idea of making my first sequenced stereographic projection. It was quite a challenge to think of how this image would come together, but it did come together and the results are mind warping…

Click More to see the process and other shots from this day..

Here’s the video introducing the project and the board.

The first shot of Darcy pulling a pretty clean backflip on the board. Now that I had the standard shot nailed it was time to try something else…

First I tried setting up the quad copter to capture some aerial shots. Below is a still from the footage of a Backside Rodeo. It’s interesting to have this levelled perspective as he flys through the air.

Next was the challenge of capturing the stereographic projection with a sequence shot. I had left my fisheye lens back at home, which meant a 1.5 hour round trip. I knew I had to get the shot so I made the journey. Once back at the hill I set up the camera and panoramic head in a suitable position and fired away. Because I had gone for so long my main concern was the weather might change. It did start to cloud over, however it meant a Sun Halo had appeared. I love these, and they always makes for a good panoramic image. It took three tries to get the sequence of shots we were happy with.

Then on to the editing. First I stitched the back plate image the same way I create every other panodrop image, by creating control points between the images so the program can work out how they join together.

Next I roughly masked off all the unwanted parts of the images, for example the tripod. I also masked out areas that I wanted from each image, in the example below its the green area on the tree.

This image shows how each shot is now linked together to create a full 360 ° picture.

Here’s the final stitched backplate now ready to host the sequence of images on top.

Below is the 15 shots I captured (from the same position as the above image) of Darcy backflipping.

In Photoshop I roughly cut out each frame with a point of reference, for example a section of mountain, so I could line up the images to the back plate. I then carefully cut out each frame and blended it with the background.

This sequence shows the process of adding the frames.

And here’s the final equirectangular sequence shot.

Now that I have the full panoramic image I could then map it out in a number stereographic perspectives..

For more info on the process and to see other images of this kind head to www.panodrop.com/info.

And to finish, here’s a shot of me about to drop in on the board at Whitewater.

Note: The panodrop sticker ;)

New images up on 500px. Really happy with how this panodrop turned out.

Minute Fourteen – Chipped from Rob Antill on Vimeo.

Here’s a quick process video showing how I put together this image. A friend work’s at a electronics factory here in Nelson, BC, Canada. They had collected a bag of parts that the machines miss-place. Usually these will just get chucked out or recycled. I tipped them out on the table and was fascinated by all the tiny bits (some the size of a grane of sand). It was new to see these separate components before they are soldered to a board.

Music: Flotsam – Tasty Morsels - (free track download)

Click more to see more stuff on this..

Camera set-up for the time-lapse shots over looking the laptop.

The final shot. I thought the little chips could represent the ants building the logo from the pile (anthill). I wasn’t entirely satisfied with how this looked though. I think its a bit too literal. Also the little ‘ants’ have what appears to be 8 legs (real ants have 6 legs). I thought the two front legs could get away with being the ants feelers.

Some close-up shots..

Here’s another shot of the final image. I prefer this simplified version.

So yeah, this was a fun little project to spend a couple of days on. I think theres some potential to take this idea further. If you really had the patience you could create an entire image with the parts, using different coloured bits as shading and high lights. It would also be better to have a flat dedicated screen for the job. Having the laptop perched up like this was highly unsettling for hours on end. I had to be so careful not to knock it over and ruin the piece. It would also be cool to create an animation in Aftereffects that corresponded to what was laid on the screen. Maybe something I can experiment with.. if I get the spare time.

I recently re-created my logo out of very small electronic components. Really pleased with how it turned out. Video of the process here.

Download the full resolution image to use as a desktop image if you so wish:

Desktop [1920x1280] | Tablet [1536x2048]| Mobile [640x1136]