Gavin Rudy first picked up his dads camera when he was around 10 years old.
With that camera, he and his friends put together stop motion clips, and made action movies.
They used AfterEffects for the muzzle flashes, and airsoft guns as props.
Not a whole lot got finished.
I just didnt have a vision, Gavin told me, with a laugh.
The basics learned in these formative years led to an intermingling with another of Gavins interests, skiing.
Gavins resume quickly stacked up with notable video projects.
These videos caught the attention of Newschoolers, who brought Gavin to Windells in 2014.
During that time he and Andrew Mildenberger, another filmmaker, linked up to create the film crew Strictly.
Whats the video part that youve had the most fun creating?
This year was really fun.
So this year was really fun.
I love the years prior to that because we progressed so much.
I think one of the best was probably Recordings of The Sun which was 2016.
And then I was at Hood for West Coast Sessions.
So there was some stuff like that in there.
I was just like, yeah, I’m just gonna take off school and make a video…
It definitely felt pretty carefree.
And I like to do goofy shit too.
https://www.newschoolers.com/videos/watch/1025202/Recordings-of-the-Sun
Could you tell me a little bit about what West Coast Sessions was like?
There were the most people there and the most hungry dudes, so it was cool to experience that.
Steve Stepp is the only person who went to every single one of them.
I remember Windells being packed with people who arent campers.
There was sketchyish weather, like we never really had a great window for the big jump.
They built that enormous jump for us.
Being part of the big jump session felt like being a little kid in a candy store or something.
I definitely didn’t realize that at the time.
Things started changing a lot around then, even earlier in the 2010s, or something.
So I’m stoked that I got to be a little bit of part of that.
There are some things definitely worth missing about those types of shoots.
But I miss all that old shit.
Whats the process from idea to finished video look like to you?
And sometimes that happens naturally.
It’s just really proper and it lets you focus just on the skiing.
Ideas develop as you’re out there and as you’re filming.
There are times that havent worked out.
Maybe that’s why it didn’t end up coming to fruition.
But then there are other times too where we have a vision that does play out.
It’s creatively putting this shit together and trying to do new things.
And then I can find visual analogues to those ideas and sort of experiment with these concepts.
What is your camera of choice and why?
And that could be several different cameras based on whatever situation you might be in as well.
I like the GH fives because it also has an anamorphic mode.
https://www.newschoolers.com/videos/watch/1025203/SAYING
Freeskiing video content seems heavily indebted to snowboarding and skating right now.
And that’s something that’s important to me that I want to bring to my videos.
Whats this upcoming season going to look like for you?
I don’t even know what’s gonna go on with me this year.
And we did that.
Strictly is going to make another full movie again.
Like Bermuda, Welcome, and Strictly Business.
Like there’ll be a movie that has powder and street and hopefully park stuff, too.
So I know Im gonna be involved with that in some capacity.
I kind of just want to relax a little bit and I want to ski more this year.
I’ll probably wind up doing something.
I will end up doing something.
And I want to ski a bunch, so we’re still figuring it out.
