Speedflying with Matt Gerdes and Mike Steen
by AIRSTRIPPED.COM Production Blog on Jul.26, 2009, under MAKING OF - Articles
July 6th – 15th, 2009
Monday afternoon we met the american boys in Innsbruck near the railway station. Both of them
just arrived from their quite long journeys, but still full thirst for action. Matt and Mike are our
Xtreme Aviators from the United States. Please see airstripped.com for their detailed profiles.
We have planned some flights in the area of Zugspitze for the first days but the weather
conditions were rather useless. So we decided to move to Mayrhofen and then to Hallstatt,
were the guys showed some action flying down from the Ahornspitze and Krippenstein. It
was pretty hard to get some good scenes from that spot, as the area was mostly to flat for our
speedflying-pro’s.
We had to find a mountain that really rock’s, as time was passing by and the weather forecast
predicted rain and strong winds for the whole week.
The next day we left Hallstatt and travelled to the Grimming, wich is a mostly unknown
mountain for speedflyers.
We had good conditions, and so our helicopter brought Matt and Mike to the top,
were they showed some really good action for our cameras when maneuvering down.
After that day we traveled to Villach, as the Dobratsch mountain was another spot
for flying we had in our mind.
On top of the Dobratsch at 2165 meters there is a little church, were the guys started
from. You can see it on the image above on the left side of the antenna. This spot was
really awesome to fly, but it also had some bad secrets for us: No cablecar and no road to the top.
So we had to walk up and bring up all our stuff in backpacks. Including the 9-meter
camera-crane from abc products…
The good news: It was was worth climbing up there. We got really awesome footage from the flights,
and we also found some nice locations for the interviews.
Finally we’d like to thank Matt and Mike for their great job and staying 9 days with us.
It was a pleasure for us to work with them. Both are speedflying professionals and travelling around
the world with the Ozone Team. Just give ‘em some mountains, a wing and a cam and they do the Rock ‘n’ Roll :)
We also like to thank the crew members Lisa and Sandra for beeing part of the speedflying production,
our Helicopter Pilot “Mike” from Heliservice Salzburg, the cablecar company of Tiroler Zugpsitze,
the Mayrhofner Bergbahnen AG, and the Villacher Alpenstrasse for supporting airstripped.com .
Want more? Check back soon for further production news!