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Todd Jones' story of homegrown 3D helicopter filmmaking at Teton Gravity Research- From Our Sponsor

2014-04-24
I'm Todd Jones my brother and I founded and run Teton Gravity Research and we're media company we do action sports entertainment we had a fairly wild upbringing you know with the three brothers and it was always like just adventure and trying to you know create cool wild different stuff and always stayed really close with my brothers and you know fortunate enough to work with them all today so this is a photo of my younger brother Jeremy Jones and myself in still Vermont in the early days basically my dad had gotten us these boards and we really liked it it would ski all day and the mountain would close and then we would put on the headlamps and hike up behind our house you know just any little hill we could find and build kickers and stuff that's how in 1986 and 87 that's how they do it you know we were fortunate our friend Doug Coombs had opened the first like commercial heli ski guiding and in Alaska and we were fortunate for him to take us under our under his wing and give us jobs at the time we couldn't really afford to pay for a bunch of helicopter time we were just ski bums and dishwashers and Jackson Hall and we'd spend all of our money just doing our own personal runs and exploring the Chugach range and then we'd be out of money and we've been we'd hitchhike to the nearest fishing port and hop on a boat and try to make some money and you know keep keep the whole dream rolling you know at that point we were kind of low-level pro skiers ourselves and no one was really capturing that Alaska movement that was really a big part of our whole DNA me and my brother and another guy I'll pull the in commercial fishing money about our first our flex 16 millimeter camera and said screw it let's make those early days of hanging out the side of Hailey's I think really taught me a lot in aerial cinematography for one you have to see the vision of what you want to do is just move in space and then you have to communicate that to your pilot the continuum is really cool because it's our first film so it was like you know super indicative of the time for us it was 18 years ago and we didn't need a ton and we had this vision to make movies and make films and I was still skiing from the camera and me and my brother and our other partner were trading the camera back and forth we just had this idea and vision and really wanted to set out and chase it down and go after it it was a really special special phone for us you know playing with technology and and and watching the world evolve and change and kind of you know seeing what's relevant and how that can help us do what we do is really cool I would say 18 years ago when we started TGR we started rolling the cameras and really haven't put them down we you know through this thing out there not really knowing what it would do the last eight years would be like the most dynamic constantly changing evolving times ever you
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