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Overview
White Tail Bicycles — A locally owned and operated bike shop in Milton GA, north of Atlanta, with a unique spin. Crowning itself as a Cyclery Cafe, Whitetail serves Stumptown Coffee and provides a really cool environment for their customers or anyone that stops by for that matter. They provide service on all mountain and road bike brands but specialize in custom built bikes. They are a retailer for bikes from Cannondale, Felt, Parlee and Seven Cycles. A truly a unique shop in the south for bikers.
Southend Films collaborated with Whitetail to produce a mountain-biking commercial highlighting both the sport of mountain biking and the art of maintenance and mechanical care. The collaboration was a crucial element of the production as Whitetail provided a talented rider from their mountain biking team, a bike mechanic and the filming location and the products showcased in the film.
Project
Brand Film
“Prepare For the Mountain”
Client
Whitetail Bicycles & Coffee Shop
Camera
Sony FS7
Sony A7Sii
Sigma Art Cine Lenses
Stand out. Elevate your brand.
Our film was well received with
five times the average engagement
and potentially 1,000’s of new customers.
For this project, the client was very hands off. They connected us with the right resources — locations and talent — and we worked to create a kick-ass product highlighting their work and how that ultimately connected with the rider.
In concepting and pre-production, we took the opportunity to get our own feel for the sport before crafting a vision for the film.
We literally put ourselves in the shoes of our client — and their clients — hitting the mountain and experiencing for ourselves what we needed to translate to an audience on screen.
After concepting and educating ourselves, we landed on a storyline that intertwined the craftsman and the bike with the rider and the mountain. The production of this idea presented a lot of challenges because it involved multiple locations, real life subjects instead of actors, fast action filming, and external factors like weather.
Production was a really amazing process as it involved cinematically representing authentic people and places. Whitetail is located in this old building with lots of character and a mechanics shop onsite. The mechanic we worked with simply had to come in and do what he does every day – work on bikes. Our job was to capture the essence of what he was doing and how that is so deeply connected to the sport itself.
We then went on location at Camp Highland in North Georgia with miles of trails and beautiful mountain scenes. Shooting on rough terrain, with a real rider going down trails at 20 miles per hour required resources beyond a typical static set — we had several vehicles for fast motion filming and had to film certain rides and maneuvers over and over to get the right footage.
Armed with our original story concept and the footage we were able to capture in the shop and on the mountain, we were able to start post-production. We spent hours searching for the right music and piecing together the footage to really bring the emotion of the craft and sport to life.
Our end product is one that not only allows the viewer to see inside the mechanics shop — experiencing the time and attention to detail involved in maintaining a bicycle — but also allows the viewer to feel the experience of the rider, even if they have never ridden themselves.
