Image property of Dvortygirl – CC BY-SA 3.0
Nicolas Vuignier is a 25 year old professional skier from Switzerland. Although he is best-known for his skills as an athlete in the freestyle skiing world, he is also known for combining his life’s passion with creative visual projects that involve photography and video. His latest achievement “Centriphone” was shot entirely with an iPhone 6 and replicates a look-alike bullet time effect. Unsurprisingly, it recently went viral.
Nicolas often collaborates with Director of Photography and Filmmaker Jules Guarneri. Their latest project together is Torched, a video shot entirely at night starring Nicolas and other professional skiers coming down a mountain with rescue flares attached to their ski. As you can imagine the visual impact is quite stunning: you see sparkles of red light and black shadows coming down the mountain with some beautiful effects. As Nicolas states in his Youtube video:
The riders appear as sparks to reveal an ephemeral world of shadows.
The video was shot mainly with a Panasonic GH4 mounted on a Mövi M5. A Sony A7s was also used for some shots.
The idea came to them in September 2014 and the shoot began in January 2015 and ended in March. First Nicolas and his team had to figure out how to attach the flares. They first attempted holding them in their hands but it wasn’t a very comfortable solution. Then they attached them to the ski booth but the flares were too close to their legs and ended up burning their ski pants. So the final solution was to attach them to the tail of the ski with some tape.
As you can imagine, skiing in the dark is not easy. They had to carefully plan the path and perform some tests during the day.
You can watch the final video below, as well as the making of it after. If you are interested in videos like this, you can also check out our curated article about the best videos shot in moonlight with the Sony A7s.
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