Spintertainment is born:

After my struggles finding motivational entertainment for my off season & indoor mountain bike training purposes I started looking into what it would take to make my own.  As an amateur photo/video enthusiast I had made some promotional videos for my current technology company & enjoyed doing it.  At first I thought I would just go take onboard helmet camera footage of some of my favorite trails to use on my own.  I tried it but the footage was just too monotonous & shaky for even me to watch for an hour or more. Then I began having thoughts of setting a camera on a tripod & just riding by for an entire trail.  Geeze what a process, that would not work.  As I realized how hard it would be & what all resources it would require to do even a decent job with I got overwhelmed.  I had to think bigger.  

If I actually wanted to do it right I would need real cinematographers to acquire the video footage & edit it together.  If I went that far maybe someone else could use it & help me fund the project.  I approached my favorite local gym & asked if they would consider paying to help me film some local trails to use in their spin studio.  They did not feel comfortable doing that but they were very interested in the concept.  They invited me to lead some of their classes & said I could test the videos with real people, which turned out to be tremendously helpful.  

When I came up with the name Spintertainment that was even more encouragement to try making some mountain bike spin videos.  I pulled up my big boy pants & decided to go after making & funding the project on my own.  I started looking around for a cinematographer to hire to make a prototype video.  I knew of a few people in the industry & just kept my eye out.  Via social media I saw that a friend of mine Quinn Maxwell who is a passionate, talented & well trained cinematographer was looking for work.  I told him of my idea & that there was not much money to work with but it would be a job & of course I was optimistic about its potential.  

We went to work planning out a first prototype video.  Since we live in the Fruita/Grand Junction area of Colorado  we had many world class trails to consider.  We decided on the infamous & world renowned Mary's Loop trail featuring the Horse Thief Bench side trail.  We scheduled 2 days to go out & film.  Our plan was to shoot cinematic quality shots of all the interesting trail sections with on board helmet camera as filler in the less interesting  parts.  It turned out we were not even close to having enough time.  Shooting every feature on the trail was so time consuming.   We scheduled 3 more days & were getting close.  

Now comes the editing process.  Most young people involved in video production are used to making short highlight edits just a couple minutes long.  We of course were bringing together an hour long edit composed of short couple second each clips.  The process of organizing & editing into a seamless trail ride was extremely difficult.  It literally took weeks of almost full time editing.  

Finally we had a completed video!   No fancy anything, no music or soundtrack just a one hour edit.  Time to try it out in a spin class.