A password will be e-mailed to you.

Screen Shot 2015-05-22 at 3.11.17 PMScreen Shot 2015-05-22 at 3.10.14 PM
Screen Shot 2015-05-22 at 3.12.18 PM
By Brendan Richards
This story first appeared in The Kiteboarder Magazine’s Spring 2014 Issue, available online. 

It seemed oddly cliché that I would be waiting around for a director named Adam Boozer to roll himself out of bed for our meeting under the palapa of a southern Baja resort. I can’t blame Adam nor Davey Blair for their late arrival or for that matter, their groggy disheveled appearance. After all, the boys had flown into Cabo the prior evening just hours before they premiered their feature length documentary, With a Kite. If I had to stand in front of a crowd as it judged three years of blood, sweat, debt and personal sacrifice, I’d dull the risk of a total bomb with a couple of Mexican cervezas as well. As the huevos rancheros arrived at our poolside bar the morning after, Adam and Davey were tired but relieved. In fact, their 119 minute documentary about the history of the US’s biggest and most prestigious kiteboarding contest, the Triple-S, was a total hit with the Los Barriles crowd and would go on to sell out multiple theatres in North America in the following months.

Adam Boozer and Davey Blair are all smiles at the Boston premier of their movie. Photo: Brett Phillips

Adam Boozer and Davey Blair are all smiles at the Boston premier of their movie. Photo: Brett Phillips

For Davey Blair, the film is very personal. Davey serves as the narrative glue pulling the cast of Triple-S characters together, and has been at the forefront of the east coast wakestyle scene as well as a fixture of the Hatteras event since day one. Adam Boozer on the other hand doesn’t kite. By day, Adam hops around the advertising world directing commercials for corporate America and in his spare time wakeboards, skates and snowboards. The two became fast friends after a chance meeting at a wakeboard contest and their partnership emerged when Davey convinced Adam to produce a short Naish TV segment called Welcome to Chucktown for internet release. The nature of Adam’s day job is telling visual stories about products that appeal to broad audiences. He and co-director Tim Tewell had been looking for a side project but it wasn’t until Adam’s first visit to the 2011 Triple-S that he found the engaging characters and a storyline that he and Tim had been seeking.

To Adam, the discovery of the slider park in Hatteras felt like he had stumbled onto an underground scene, but to those in the kiteboarding world the Triple-S is no secret. The event’s three pronged approach to kiteboarding; surf, slick and slider heats, has received ample coverage in web videos and magazine articles since its humble beginning in 2006. From Adam’s outsider yet broader boardsports perspective, he felt the true colors of the wakestyle progression hadn’t been adequately explored. “We wanted to make something with more substance and depth. We wanted to tell a more robust story about these incredible characters that are drawn to the Triple-S every year,” said Adam. The boys dreamed of making a full length documentary that told the story of legendary kiters like Jason Slezak, Billy Parker, and Eric Rienstra, in the context of the evolution of the Triple-S. They knew they had a viable concept, they had the access, the passion and the documentary skills, but the missing ingredient was money.

Jason Slezak on the Liquid Force slider in the REAL slick Photo: Toby Bromwitch

Jason Slezak on the Liquid Force slider in the REAL slick Photo: Toby Bromwitch

The money challenge had much to do with the way in which the general kite population accesses their kite entertainment, which has changed drastically in the last 10 years. Not too long ago kiteboarders received their kite entertainment from feature length DVDs from major players like the Tronolone brothers or Elliot Leboe’s ACL Productions, but the DVD is on the verge of going archaic. Nielsen’s Law of Internet Bandwidth growth as well as social media’s widespread popularity has created an entirely new distribution pipeline for video content. Shorter videos are cheaply distributed to Facebook’s hungry eyeballs for free and athletes have learned how to use relatively inexpensive DSLR and GoPro video cameras to create an endless supply of short form video content. The prominence of the feature length kite video has been cannibalized into a hundred 3-minute team rider videos. The kiting public for the most part no longer buys DVDs because video updates of our favorite riders and brands are streaming straight from the internet to just about any device, everywhere.

Both Davey and Adam felt even though there was so much short form video content surrounding kiting, it could never touch the richness and the long term progression of the sport from within the confines of a few minutes. In this void there was an opportunity to do something new. Adam and Tim had the skills to tell the broader story and so the boys conceived their audience in terms of three concentric circles. The inner circle is core kiters, the second is boardsports enthusiasts and the third is the average member of the public. The goal was to meet the needs of all three: Mind-blowing action shots for the core, kiting painted broader for the tempted wakeboarder, and finally a story hook that could keep non-kiters glued to a compelling human narrative from beginning to end. Before Adam could worry about the intricate balance job, he needed the underlying shots that would satisfy the three circles. He wanted seven cameras (including a game camera) , one for each athlete as well as full coverage of the event. He knew his storytelling skills and professional grade cameras were the key to setting his project apart from the 3-minute kite videos. The problem was Adam didn’t own these cameras, and if he wanted to rent them, the going price was $2,500 a day. Throw in travel and unexpected expenses and it was clear With a Kite done right would require a sizable budget and sponsors.

Maybe it was an issue of poor salesmanship, the absence of a proven track record, or simply just the notion that funding a big broad kite documentary was like swimming upstream against the economic and social dominance of the 3-minute kite video. Regardless, early on it was clear the boys would not secure money from within the kite industry. The farther Adam and Davey pushed the project uphill, the greater their passion and their belief in its potential grew.

The breakout moment for the film was when the boys turned to crowdfunding. New websites like Kickstarter.com allow little guys like Adam and Davey to pitch their ideas to the internet at large and let the concept, on its own merits, solicit donations from a broader base. Adam and co-director Tim reached out to all the athletes and created an engaging Kickstarter teaser to help sell the project. It almost worked. They came within 90% of funding all the cameras, travel and aerial photography they needed, but there was a catch. They chose an all or nothing crowdfunding platform and failure to reach their financial goal by a specified date meant that they had to hand all of it back.

The psychological mind f#$% of watching your funding incrementally climb toward your goal only to have it disappear into thin air is probably worth more than one loudly spoken expletive and for most, would mean it’s time to throw in the towel. Even in those dark moments, the strength of the documentary’s siren song coerced Adam, Tim and Davey to move forward with the caveat that funding for their movie would be coming directly out of their pockets. All three were willing to continue even if it required an unprecedented amount of bootstrapping.

Seven cameras became one and travel became organized around sky-mile blackout dates. Narrower and fewer filming windows required the boys to rely on lady luck to corral athletes, wind and favorable lighting, all into the same time and place. The money draining from Adam’s pockets forced him to get crafty. The single camera was piggybacked on corporate jobs, two days here, two days there. Adam leveraged his relationships with his camera rental company for free days and paid where he had to. The production values missing from most 3-minute kite videos are high-resolution cinema cameras, pre-drone aerial photography, and the silver bullet high frame rate slow motion. Slow motion cameras shoot at over 1000 frames per second yielding moving pictures so slow you can see every bead of water and every nuance of the riding that makes kiteboarding so dynamic. Adam shot commercials all day long with the Red Epic, a $30,000 digital cinema camera with a high resolution sensor, but slow motion required a more expensive camera called the Phantom Miro. Even just one day with the Phantom was well beyond their bootstrap budget so Adam struck a deal with a wakeboard production company, bartering a week of his time on one of their movies in exchange for a week in Hatteras with their slow motion machine.

It took three years from Adam’s first Triple-S to gather enough footage to safely land in post production. They had filmed three Triple-S events, interviewed over 25 athletes and followed Billy Parker to his humble small hometown where they made his mother cry on camera out of pride. Adam chased Jason Slezak as he moved his life from Hatteras to Hood River and bit by gigabyte, the boys were getting what they needed to tell the deeper stories of Triple-S, but not without hiccups. For one shoot, Adam and Davey flew to Travis Pastrana’s Nitro City resort in Punta Chame, Panama, to document the backstory of Eric Rienstra. As bad luck would have it, neither the wind nor Eric’s sponsorship obligations chose to cooperate. After a day and half of filming, Eric had to get on a plane leaving the boys in Panama scratching their heads. A good bootstrap operation requires flexibility and since Triple-S competitor Craig Cunningham happened to be staying at Nitro City at that time, he stepped up and into the movie.

Photo: Bret Phillips

Photo: Bret Phillips

The morning after the Baja premier, we sat poolside laughing as Adam and Davey walked me through their filming adventures. It was important to them that the retelling of their uphill battles not sound like sour grapes. They’re proud of what they have accomplished and each challenge they faced is a testament to their passion for the sport, its athletes and the film’s commitment to telling a broader story. Adam is the first to acknowledge they didn’t do it without help. Trip Foreman and Matt Nuzzo at Real Watersports had donated all the historic kite footage. Hookups like a helicopter for filming aerial shots at Hood River’s KB4Cancer event came from friends like Matt Elsasser, who believed in the cause. Davey was able to use his connections to enlist Sir Richard Branson to lend a commanding voice to the film’s introduction. Multiple artists hand-watercolored prints for the initial narration which recounts the story of a 6th century Chinese Emperor who experimented with kites and early manned flight by pushing prisoners out of a tower with makeshift wings. Adam and his team felt the intro was of monumental importance. “We needed to immediately set the tone of the film, and let the viewers know they were sitting down for more than just kite porn.” Perhaps conjecture, but Sir Richard Branson might have shared that exact concern. After all, he generously contributed his voice with the only requirement that he see the final version prior to release.

Adam approached the project as a test case for the future of documentary action sports cinema. “We never once kidded ourselves that this film would generate much money for us, although we thought if it broke even that would be great.” It’s rare for such an immense project to have such low financial goals, but maybe that’s what has allowed Adam to experiment with new distribution methods. A quick survey of kite shops indicated that lukewarm demand for DVDs wouldn’t be worth the effort. Instead, Adam turned to Tugg.com, a crowd-promotion tool that allows any shop or kite club to organize a premier. Tickets are sold in advance and the logistics of theatre size and location are arranged by Tugg.com. Additional premiers have been organized in Hood River, San Francisco, Boston and St. Petersburg. The screening in Florida has outgrown the designated theatre size three times to date. It’s great all around because local communities get an event to pull its members together and the boys get some of their money back. For those that want to watch the film in the privacy of their own home, the film has been released through Vimeo on Demand, a pay per view internet streaming service. As far as internet distribution goes, Vimeo’s 90/10 revenue split is generous compared to other platforms and the film can be viewed throughout the world without restrictive territorial requirements. Despite the early disappointment in crowdfunding, the boys are ultimately relying entirely on internet-driven technology to distribute the film.

It’s clear that as the With a Kite project continues to work its way out of the red, the real goal for Adam and his crew was to set a precedent. “If we could produce a feature length documentary on kiting it would open the door for future projects of this caliber,” says Adam. Skeptics of wakestyle riding may focus on the irony of making a broader audience documentary on what some may perceive as a niche aspect of the sport, but in all honesty, Adam seems to pull it off. With a Kite isn’t just the Triple-S crew patting themselves on the back. It’s a film that reaches for the outsider. The surfers of our world as well as old school big air kiters are invited to follow the development of the Triple-S from a casual jam session to a world-renowned professional event. Its characters, rather than glorified, are pulled to our level to explain their part in the building of a competitive institution and the progression of wakestyle to an audience that may never strap on boot bindings, unhook or hit a kicker.

WAK-MOVIETHEATER-Brett-Phillips-02

Alex Fox and Davey Blair give away some serious Slingshot product at a premier. Photo: Brett Phillips

When Adam and Davey recounted how each showing had been different, some audiences rowdy and others more reserved, it was the similarities that told them they had achieved their larger artistic goal. At each premier the crowd had laughed in all the right spots and had grown silent with awe as their characters grinded through dramatic moments. Standing behind the Baja audience as the credits rolled, to Adam and Davey these were signs that they had hit their mark and it was time for one more celebratory beer. 

This story first appeared in Volume 11, No 1. of The Kiteboarder Magazine available here, for free. Want more? Subscribe now.