gummilove is an anti aids campaign founded by daniel “gummi” rietmann, and to officially launch his message and products he organised an art exhibition in the vip tent at freestyle.ch, where the artwork will be sold to raise money for the swiss aids organisation… if you haven’t noticed the man on the left is snowboarder iouri podlatchikov, who was chosen as one of gummilove’s ambassadors along with people like markus keller, nicolas müller and anne-flore marxer. props to gummi for all the hard work he put into this, go visit www.gummilove.com for more infos.

check out my interview on the world of freestyle website, for all those who don’t understand german: sorry ! http://mag.freestyle.ch/articles/view/1268 – enjoy!

check out my latest work! got a new job for 09′ and thats designing the whole print media for the freestyle night at the jumpin training facilities in mettmenstetten. freestyle night is basically a big party surrounding a bunch of huge kickers  where bmx riders,  skiers and snowboarders huck themselves into a huge pool. check out the website www.freestyle-night.ch for further infos and pics from last years event. and if you want to join in on the fun, its an open event for everyone with enough guts

Later this Spring Leandro from Eleven called me up and told me that they wanted to give me another advert (two seasons after my first ad) for winter 2010, and enlightened me about the whole concept. Yes, it sounded like a lot of work, especially because most of the snow was already gone by that time of the year and that meant a long drive from Zürich to Lauchernalp, a Resort somewhere in Wallis, to start shooting at dusk and then drive back home as soon as we’re done. The plan looked like this: doing a fs wallride with a drop of easily 5 meters from the highest point to the ground, several times, with seven different outfits until I get the best shot with each outfit. Honestly, I thought that I would do 2-3 takes for each one…but that was pure foolishness.
Ok, so we arrived at the Spot, we knew it was going to work because it has been tested already, so we got into things without delay. The thing was, we had to make a big enough landing pile because I

didn’t want to totally destroy my knees when hitting this obstacle about 30 plus times. After the landing there was a tricky counter tranny where we also had to dig heaps to smoothen the whole thing out. The kicker was there in a jiffy… and I must add, salt was our friend on this day.
All in all it took us a couple of hours to set up and the evening was kicking in right on time. I was the first of four guys to shoot for the 2010 ads so it was up to me to make it a good start. So first we got the main shots, which had me trying and trying, first I was to close to the camera and I had to go lower, then the style was wack or the clothes didn’t look right. On the picture with the yellow jacket, after four tries, I rode away and almost hit a window on the building, and ending up in a pile of dirt. With that happening the yellow jacket was over! After three and a half hours of hardcore shooting I think we were done at midnight, and my legs were wobbling all over the place. I guess I hit the wall about 40 times or more… but in the end everybody was stoked and we drove home partly sleeping and stopping at numerous places to sleep or get some stretching haha well, I was at home sometime in the morning totally wrecked.

This spring sometime in may, when the lifts in hoch ybrig were already closed alex schiller and his gang of shredniks joined us for a week of shooting in our home territory. Howzee and I showed them around and we started shaping our arms off on several spots. There was a brand-new spot we claimed that seemed like a perfect fit and two other projects that were more of a flop. The first good kicker we rode was a stepdown roadgap which was a lot of fun to hit, I got 4 different tricks and each of the isen crew was happy with the results. Rene had one really sketchy bail on a frontside 720 attempt where he didn’t clear the road and caught his heel edge on the knuckle and got a whiplash type smack to the back of his head, luckily he was ok after a minute of disorientation…anyway the sun was out with early summer temperature and so we got our tanning on for a short break. After that we headed back up to session the other two kickers we had built the day before, which turned out to be shitty, plus I broke my board on a hard nose-dive in the heavy slush. So we drank some more redbull cola, talked some nonsense and enjoyed a fun ride down to our cars. On the following days we were into shaping again, lots of shaping. We wanted to get another decent kicker since our rate was about one decent kicker out of three shaped objects. Plus there was also a down day. We were worried about the weather turning on us and rain washing all of the snow away. The kicker we started building did shrink a little bit until we returned a day later, but we just piled up more snow so it was rideable in the end. Michi and rene had their eyes on a grass gap that looked pretty nice, inrun, table, and a slope like grass gap wich ended into a small tranny landing with snow and a flat exit. An old rule proved itself true once again, sometimes the best shots are the ones that have the least work involved. I tested the kicker, but was very disappointed in its physics. Tobi tried two hits but didn’t think it was very safe either so we started a session on the grass gap, in which I dedicated myself to filming. Some hard slams and nice tricks were shown, and the Isen crew had some more shots that would definitely make it into the movie. the photos also looked way better than I would have expected, good stuff!

On the last day, the dudes from Isen had to leave earlier, since the had a long journey awaiting them. Fizzle joined us in company of his favorite toy besides the snowboard, the potato-gun!

We blasted some potatoes into the stratosphere and then headed uphill to get some jibbing done. Tobi had this crazy idea of jumping into a tree doing backside rodeos which had a highly entertaining note to it. At that time rene, michi and me started goofing around on a big branch that kind of looked like an alphorn. In the end we had our mini line with alphorn to mini rainbow rail. It was epic. Before the guys left we started shooting around more until we ran out of potatoes, so we loaded it up with dirt, yes, it looked like shit. That’s when we had the most brilliant idea of the week. We filmed michi’s naked ass shooting off a load of dirt at the hoch ybrig logo. Lol. That was a perfect ending for a week full of laughs at hoch ybrig.

We headed up to this small resort in wallis for the annual eleven team week. I have never been in grächen before and was curious about the snow conditions there since in wallis the resorts are mostly rocky and really high altitude so the fresh snow can’t stay powdery long.

I met Kim André Eliassen on the way and later on we found Howzee in the Village with his cell phone trying to find our house. Finally we arrived in our crib which was at the end of the village but with lots of space around the house to build the traditional backyard shred, with a nice chillout lounge with a 900 channel tv and a tablesoccer court. Tablesoccer was one of our favorite occupations during the evening.

On the first days we spent a lot of time looking for spots around the whole resort and it was generally better to shape in the lower parts where the forest protected the snow from the nasty winds that froze up and carried away most of the snow. Also there were lots of rocks underneath the surface. In the village there were plenty of urban options like an abandoned indoor swimming pool that had a nice fence gap with a bonk pole and a flatrail to bombdrop.

We also found a nice pile of rocks where we could make a nice quarterpipe and a treeride in the forest. I knew from day one that there wouldn’t be a kickersession during the teamweek, but as adaptive as we are we found heaps of legit ways to express ourselves on ice, powder, concrete, metal, wood and rocks. The treeride was a full success as well as the urban spots down at the pool, which we even decided to session for a second time with different riders.

On the quarterpipe we only got one nice pic, but we had plenty of good material already. Every morning we split up the riders between the three photographers Creager, Howzee and Ruedi, then we headed up into the “battlefield” to meet again at dusk, always with plenty of crazy stories to discuss. And of course drink a beer and play tablesoccer.

One night we had an epic gap session right in our backyard, guys were flying over our patio while we were hanging out around the house.

At the end of the week there were heavy snowfalls and lots of fog so we shaped and chilled, a real bummer was when we got kicked out from a spot after only one try, which seemed to be really nice to ride…damn. But after the big dump hit, our minds were all set on dropping some nice pillows anyway. So on one day Andreas Arn and me headed into the Woods along with Howzee to get some Powder action. We were in paradise! We saw all these pillows and drops around us and couldn’t get enough until Howzee’s camera seemed to be at the end of it’s capabilities to swallow more water and we had to head back to a warm dry place. Ändu and I were totally over it but really hyped about what just went down, especially because we thought we’d never get to ride pow the entire week. Good times… eleven week is always fun, not every time easy to get the shots in but everybody is always really motivated and ready to put work in for it. And the house with all of it’s luxury like free drinks and lots of good food is perfect to collect enough relaxation and power for the next day. Thanks to everyone who helped make this ish go down! Props…