In case you didn’t know already, Sämi Ortlieb is a Swiss skier, filmmaker, animator, and member of a hardcore rock band. During the summer months he’s a Saas-Fee regular, when it provides some of the best park for skiers who don’t want to take the summer off. This year Sämi spent his summer months a little differently, experimenting with stop-motion animation, the same technique used in popular films such as Wallace and Gromit, but Sämi uses snow and natural elements instead of clay.
“The original idea was to create something I would describe as ‘landscape animation,'” Sämi said in an interview with Vimeo. “The idea is to bring an environment to life with stop motion animation, using the material provided by the environment.” Fully animated and in its final form, the footage looks effortless as the snow magically forms itself into jumps and tree branches lean out of the way as the skiers race by. But of course, it’s never as easy as it looks.
“The biggest challenge was probably the light,” says Sämi. “Stop motion animation is traditionally done in a studio setting, where you are working with light sources that you can control and are constant. Working in the mountains… if you want the light to be somewhat constant you have a timeframe of around 30 minutes on a clear and sunny day. It’s definitely the most physically intense type of animation I’ve ever done. We would shovel, then run out of frame or run to the camera to take a picture, just to run back to the jump to shovel again for the next animation frame.”
Check out the video above, and click here for the full interview on Vimeo.
