“I felt like I had a better vision for what I wanted to do than the other kids,” says Sturges, who left after a semester.
The revelation wasn’t surprising considering that by the time he entered The Art Institute of Vancouver in the fall of 2003 Sturges already had one well-received feature film, “The Next Generation,” to his credit. He made that pean to whitewater paddling with a couple of high school buddies under their Young Gun Productions label.
That was six films ago. His latest effort, “Frontier,” released last year through his River Roots studio, is part of the Radical Reels Tour, a collection of 11 action sports films from the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival, which comes to Chapel Hill, Winston-Salem, Charlotte and Asheville in September.
Sturges’ genre of whitewater kayaking films isn’t surprising since he grew up on California’s Salmon River, where his parents owned the Otter Bar Lodge. From the start, he took both to paddling and picture making.
“I started doing video boating in high school,” says Sturges, who still bases his life in California. “There’d be a class or a group, and I’d kinda make a video of them going down the river.”
He started with a basic Canon handi-cam not much different than the ones millions of parents used to record their toddler’s first steps. He used the money he made from selling the videos to tourists to invest in better equipment, which enabled him to shoot more sophisticated and interesting films.
At the same time, his kayaking career was taking off. For the last year and a half of high school he attended World Class Kayak Academy, which let him train daily and took him to different parts of the globe. In his junior year he won the Junior World Championships of freestyle kayaking in Graz, Austria.
It was around the same time that he and fellow World Class Kayak Academy buds Brooks Baldwin and Marlow Long started Young Gun Productions.
“We wanted to do a different style of kayak movie,” Sturges explains. “Up to that point, whitewater movies had a bit of a … granola feel about them. They hadn’t evolved into the cool sense of surfing, snowboarding and skateboarding films. The board industry was blowing up.”
What whitewater needed, they concluded, was equally provocative shots of paddling — kayak porn.
Kayak porn — shot upon shot of stunning footage from the world’s toughest rivers — served Young Gun well for the next several years. Then it was time to move on and Young Gun dissolved.
“It’s comparable to when a band breaks up,” says Sturges. “We all had our own talents. We all wanted to get out and do our own thing.”
For Sturges, that led to River Roots.
“I think [Young Gun] was what the industry needed at the time,” Sturges says of the role they played in making whitewater kayaking — the freestyle element in particular — more cool.
With River Roots he wanted to do more.
“In recent years,” he says, “I’ve wanted to push the story side more.”
“Frontier,” for instance, explores what motivates the world’s top kayakers to try new and challenging waters — though not at the expense of the kayak porn that draws viewers in the first place. The paddlers share their thoughts over breathtaking footage.
“I want a story,” says Sturges, “but I still have to appeal to my base.”
The biggest challenge for the kayaker/filmmaker comes when he’s on the river.
“We’re on big water in a remote location and I have to worry about the shot as well [as scouting the run],” says Sturges. “I like to push the whitewater.
“It’s probably my least favorite part of the job,” he adds. “Kayaking is still the priority.” (As such, Sturges came in third at the 2011 Whitewater Grand Prix — also the subject of a Radical Reels film.)
While he continues to upgrade his equipment — he shot a good deal of “Frontier” with a Canon 7D digital SLR — much of the footage shot on the water comes from a GoPro HD Hero cam.
The same HeroCam goobers like the rest of us glue to our boats?
“The same $200 camera,” says Sturges. “We use them a lot.”
Like so many modern adventure sport filmmakers — and the majority who contribute to the Radical Reels Tour — Sturges’s River Roots operates on a shoestring budget. His films operate on a fraction of the $200,000 to $500,000 budgets for some of the higher-end ski movies and nowhere near the $2 million to $3 million commanded by top-tier productions such as “Art of Flight,” which is also part of Radical Reels.
That could be about to change with his next River Roots project.
“We’re working with Red Bull Media House on a year-and-a-half-long project tentatively called ‘Waterfall’,” says Sturges. Teaming with deep-pocketed Red Bull will enable Sturges such luxuries as a helicopter to shoot from and use of a Cineflex camera, which works with a gyroscope to produce especially stable footage. That project is just getting underway and should keep him traveling to the world’s steepest drops for the next year and a half. (Sturges is no stranger to waterfalls: in 2010 he ran an 80-foot drop in Argentina — and broke his back in the process.)
Typically, Sturges works both behind and in front of the camera, playing a key on-screen role in the films he directs, a la Woody Allen. For the past year, though, he’s taken a break from producing to play one of four kayakers featured in “Congo: The Grand Inga Project,” produced by Steve Fisher for Red Bull. It’s a film that has helped Sturges further explore the storytelling side of whitewater filmmaking.
“These are the biggest rapids in the world in a politically unstable part of the world,” says Sturges.
A good story no doubt. Though not, judging from the teaser, devoid of the genre’s bread-and-butter kayak porn.
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Radical Reels Tour
For more on the Radical Reels Tour and its showings in Chapel Hill on Sept. 6 and Winston-Salem on Sept. 7, go here.
In addition to Chapel Hill and Winston-Salem, Radical Reels also will play in Charlotte on Sept. 8 and in Asheville on Sept. 10. Go here for information on those showings.
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