Spend enough time browsing the internet for flicks and edits to get excited about winter and you’ll start to notice a thing or two. A cynic will tell you they’re formulaic. Every park scene or treeline looks the same from edit to edit. “Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.” And yes, there’s some truth to the notion that a handful of shots seem to make their way into every edit, just interchange the location and whoever’s riding. But even if you believe there’s an oversaturation, you can’t help but recognize a unique POV angle when one pops up, or an aerial shot that’s used in just the right way.
Xavier de le Rue knows a thing or two about freeriding videos himself and he’ll argue that POV angles and aerials are just two of his four essential tools for properly telling a story. He just has his own perspective on how to keep all those standards fresh.
“One important rule with the POV is to try to vary the angles and vary the shots as much as possible,” he says. “The POV is a great tool to tell a story. So what I do quite often in a line is that I’ll be ready and I will take off my helmet and quickly tell the story.”
And making tools like drones available to the Average Joe has opened up the fun and creativity of it all, according to Xavier, who loves the aerial angle and its ability to help show the full landscape of a line. If you don’t have a drone, he says you can swap it out for the Barbie angle, a stationary wide shot set up directly across from your line. He goes into more detail, above.
