The idea of shooting a short trail running in the Swiss Alps had been tossed around between us before, and so in Sept. 2012 we decided to just do it. Our little team included Matthew Anderson, a photographer based in Winterthur who has a passion for adventure sport filming to do camera work, with music provided by FNDMNTL (music.fndmntl.com/). Being the sometimes impulsive person that I am, I picked up a quadrocopter, and with Christian running as well we had a team to do the shoot. The basic idea was to create a short film discussing why we like to run. I like to run for the sense of freedom it affords, and with the backdrop of Appenzell, Mt. Santis, the Churfirsten of St. Gallen…the grand vistas falling away into the horizon is a wonderful place to contemplate these thoughts of life and we wanted to communicated that to others.
Swiss Trail Running: Mt. Santis from Mark Melnykowycz on Vimeo.
We filmed mainly with the Nikon D800, the Cinevate Atlas FLT slider, and a little bit with the GoPro 2 on a Bumblebee quadrocopter for the areal shots (I have a deep desire for a hexacopter now). We had beautiful weather, and concentrated on telling our little running story with interviews of Christian and I near the Rotsteinpass Hutte. Christian ran on his On CloudSurfers while I was on the Asics Fuji Trabuco and Fuji Attack (thank you RunningShoeGuru) shoes. We stayed there the night and then continued up the ridge with the Alpstein around us. We focused on trying to capture the technical attributes of running along mountain trails and the beauty of the environment. I forget where I live sometimes. It’s great working on startup ideas in Zurich, building up mobile apps and UX ideation workshops, but it’s too easy to feel big in a city, and the calm mountain environment brings your ego back to simplicity and in balance with the world.
Often the satisfaction of a run is a kinder factor than the hurry of these days. Just a primary satisfaction of being outside on my own with that feeling of going through timber and plants and over mountains in some way quick, slowly, simple or not so simple.