Red Bull Takes Plunge in Animated Cliff Dive

This September, the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series stopped off on the Pembrokeshire coastline to see ten athletes fling themselves off a 27 metre height.

 
In order to chart the day, Holler and Red Bull teamed up with Instagramers @danrubin, @jeera and @chaiwalla with support from @Finn to create beautiful – and terribly social- stop motion film. LBB’s Laura Swinton spoke to Holler Art Director Barry Markham and Instagrammer @chaiwalla (a.k.a r Allan Hinton) to find out more. 

 

LBB> What was the brief for this project? 

BM> The brief was to raise awareness of Red Bull's Cliff Diving World series event held in Wales, and to capture the beauty of the Pembrokeshire coast, the dives and all the excitement from the day. Our aim was to use some of the best creative talent in the UK to document their unique perspectives of the day, creating a stop motion video pieced up entirely of their photographs.

 

LBB> How did you select the Instagramers who shot the short? What did they bring to the project?

BM> We contacted well known Instagramers @danrubin, @jeera and @chaiwalla who all have a great reputation for their photography and their use of instagram. On the day, each Instagramer captured their unique view of an area, taking an individual approach to photograph the details. It was important they had creative freedom on the day – we wanted to give them free reign and utlise their expertise as much as possible. 

 

LBB> What did the Instagramers use to capture the film - just bog standard smartphones or something a bit different?

BM> The Instagramers chose to use their own SLR cameras, giving them the flexibility to crop the shots and armed them with a faster shutter speed. Jiri used a Nikon D600 with a 24-70mm 2.8 lens. Allan brought along his Canon 7D and Dan felt comfortable using his Canon 5D Mk11 with 24-70L 11 lens. In total, around 21,000 pictures were taken on the day.

 

LBB> In terms of production, were there any challenges with capturing the stop motion footage? 

BM> The Red Bull Cliff Diving event in Wales saw over 5,000 people descending on the Blue Lagoon over the weekend. With it being a live event with regimented timing's for the dives, it did come with some tricky challenges. The main difficulties came from the ever-changing lighting and weather conditions, the positioning of crowds and the coordination needed with so many moving parts of such a large event during a limited three-hour slot. Walking along the rocky coastline whilst shooting continuously kept our Instagramers on their toes! We planned for the event as much as possible in advance, but as with most live events, we had to remain spontaneous and flexible. 

 

LBB> The location is stunning - looks more like a Greek island than Wales! What are your memories of the event itself?

AH> On the morning of the event we got up at sunrise and headed to the cove – seeing it so still before the crowds came in was magical.  

One of my main memories from the event was the crowd atmosphere. The crowd noise dropped completely silent just before the dives, which created an incredible atmosphere and tension before the big splash. 

Each time a diver entered the water the crowd cheered loudly as they were impressed by the moves, technique and sheer guts of the divers. I haven’t ever seen anything quite like it; I think these divers are super human.   

It was great fun being behind a camera, whizzing in and out of the crowd at the top of the cliff.  People were very happy to be snapped and often tried to do something funny to impress me.  I really enjoyed having “access all areas” so that I could capture the dives at all sorts of angles and perspectives.

 

LBB> What were the biggest challenges with this project? 

BM> Planning as much as possible was essential because of the three-hour time frame we had to work with. But one of the biggest challenges was taking the Instagramers out of their comfort zone with the use of stop frame photography. It's a method of they had dabbled with previously, but nothing to this scale. On the day they were more than confident and used it as an opportunity to really test themselves creatively. 

LBB> It seems that while some brands are really trying to be creative with micro video platforms like Vine and Instagram video others are still struggling to get their heads round it. Why do you think that is, and how do you see the relationship between brands and these emerging platforms evolving?

 

BM> For us as an agency, we're always pushing ourselves to create engaging and entertaining content that either has real relevance or is useful for the right consumers. It's about encouraging brands to step up, take a leap and use platforms in a fresh and innovative way - but it's also about making sure the content is right for the audience. Not all brands need to create clever Vines, Instagram feeds or Snapchat profiles, but if the platform supports the idea or message, then brilliant.