My cousin and I are passionate mountain bikers. I have been mountain biking for about seven years. When my cousin became interested in it as well, we started to ride on a weekly basis to improve our skills. My cousin and I like to ride on the North Shore (Mt. Fromme, Mt. Seymour, and Burke Mountain). Earlier this year 2019, my cousin and I did a mountain bike trip around British Columbia with my dad. We rode in places such as the Rockies and the Kootenays. Our most favourite place to go is Whistler Bike Park because it has the best downhill jump trails and technical trails. It is always a fun and a great experience. Whistler is known worldwide as one of the best downhill mountain biking parks. Another great part of Whistler is the lift takes riders and their bikes up to the top, making it more fun because riding up takes a long time.
Over the past two years, I have become so passionate about this sport. This led my cousin and me to enter a film contest. The contest was made from a YouTube mountain biking channel in the lower mainland named IFHT. When we began this filming project, we underestimated how long it would take to create. In the end, the process took more than three months to plan out. Our crew consisted of my cousin, a friend, and myself. The criteria for the film was to go to Nanaimo, BC, film a mountain biking video of ourselves on Nanaimo bike trails, challenge our abilities, take risks to get good footage, then create a “sick edit”. To film the video, we took a ferry to Nanaimo at 7:00 am and filmed on the trails for about eight hours. We arrived home at 1:00 am the next day with only having some minor injuries from falling off our bikes during the filming. The actual filming day was very short. We only had a few hours to film. We started to film at 3:30 pm because our friend with the camera equipment was late. We had to catch a ferry at 6:00 pm. By the time we finished filming it was 5:30, we still needed to pack up and drive to the ferry terminal. We spent the most time on editing the actual video. This took about two weeks, and it was very finicky. Some of our footage was lost for our drone got corrupted, but luckily, the footage was on a phone. In the end, our final product was successful. We came in first place and won some great prizes.
The prizes were: a GoPro, a water bottle, some gloves, a $100 gift card to the IFHT merch store, a shirt, and some stickers of the YouTube channel logo. We also got to go riding for a day with IFHT Nanaimo. In July 2019, my cousin broke his leg. This was a problem because since we won the contest for the film, we were supposed to go riding with the YouTubers in Nanaimo for a day, all expenses paid. The plans to go riding were postponed to the spring of 2020, and my cousin had almost recovered in November of 2019.
So, whenever you wonder, “Should I enter this contest? Will I win out of all the entries? – Go for it!”
