News & Features, Photo & Video — 2 July 2014 at 6:26 pm

Shams: Extreme Sports Videographer

As you know, we at Adventure Medic HQ love nothing more than a bit of beautifully crafted outdoor footage. And few films come finer than those of up-and-coming French extreme sports cinematographer Shams. Creative shooting, precise editing and an obvious love for adventure are his trademarks. Adventure Medic Editor Matt caught up with him fresh back from Norway, where he has been shooting and editing this year’s Ekstremsportveko.

How long have you been a professional videographer? What were you doing before and how did you find the transition?

I have been a professional director and cinematographer since 2011. But I have loved cinema ever since I was a little kid. I started making movies with my friends when I was a teenager.

Then, to be filmmaker was only a dream but it was always on my mind. I just had no idea how to follow the dream. So, I went to university and did a masters’ in computer image processing. Then I started a PhD but after three years I realised I was wasting my time in an office behind a computer instead of being outside, doing what I really liked the most: climbing, paragliding and shooting video.

So I quit, and said ‘let’s do it!’ And I knew that if the worst came to the worst, I could go back to my previous job as an imagery developer.

And actually, it turned out much easier than I had thought. It was by far the best decision I have ever made in my life. Even though I make less money, now I do what I love.

My first “pro” edit was for a paragliding acrobatics pilot named Francois Ragolski and it went viral in the world paragliding community. Thanks to that edit, I went on be hired by a big paragliding harnessbrand. Then, one month later, I found myself in Norway for Ekstremsportveko, the world’s biggest outdoor and extreme sports festival. And so it begun.

Shams at work

What do you find most satisfying / hardest about your job?

What I like most? It’s to be able to travel all around the world, to the most beautiful places, places that most people can only dream of. I always have a big smile on my face when someone asks me ‘and you’re paid to go there?!’ Haha! Yep!

But often, they don’t realise that it’s not a holiday. The goal is to come back with beautiful images, so you work all hours: wake up for a sunrise, climb a mountain for a shot, make timelapses during the night, and when you’re not shooting you have to empty memory cards, recharge batteries, and the check footage etc.

Where is your favourite place to travel? And do you have a particular sport that you enjoy filming the most?

This is the hardest question. I think that you can go anywhere and find something good. How can I choose between the top of Kilimanjaro, a small village in Pakistan close to K2, and the beauty of Marquesas Island in the middle of Pacific Ocean? And I can add my home: I am always happy to come back in my mountain in the south of the Alps!

My work is 70% paragliding, because that is where I know the most people. But now, I am trying to shoot a greater variety of sports. I would like to make surf movies, skate movies, and my new addiction is freeflying/skydiving.

Hushe and the Karakorum

You’ve been to some far-flung places – have you ever had any medical problems? And what do you take for a medical kit?

I am lucky never to have had any serious problems. But my biggest scare was in Pakistan. As soon as we arrived in Hushe, the small village in the video above, with almost no electricity and no phone network, we climbed at 4.000m to find a take off for the paragliding. During the hike, I began to feel really bad: big headache, vomiting and no energy. I thought I had altitude sickness but I was acclimatised and had been on top of Mont Blanc and Kilimanjaro in the past without any problems.

For four days, I couldn’t eat, move, or to do anything apart from go to the toilet with vomiting and diarrhoea. So on day five, I said to my friend ‘I have to call France’. We had to drive an hour in a jeep, then climb half an hour to get… one bar of signal. I called a friend who is a doctor – she thought I had a gut infection and told me to eat rice and drink flat Coca Cola. Two days later I was playing cricket with the kids.

After that experience, I put together a proper medical kit with drugs for the stomach, headache, ear problems etc. But even then, I still got a bad fungal infection in my foot in Bulgaria. And my last bad experience was in Polynesia: the day we arrived, our friends there warned us about a new mosquito-borne disease. Three days later, they got me!

Do you have any advice for people filming adventure or extreme sports? Any tips for GoPros in particular?

GoPro has really changed the world of filmmaking… GoPro and the Internet. Because now, for a few hundred Euros you can get an incredible shot of you, your cat or whatever you like. But for us, it means that we can put camerasin places that we could not even have imagined.

And thanks to the Internet, everybody has started sharing their ‘hero’ moment. And people are always on the look out for new stuff. The wingsuitbasejumpers (the guys who look like batman) are now famous thanks only to the Internet and GoPro cameras, because now we can all witness the feeling of flying at 200km/h, a few meters above ground.

But making good movies is like cooking good food (and I am French!). You need a mixture of different things: beautiful cinematography, intense action, and a good story. Alternatively, you could just shoot your little cat doing something and get a million views on YouTube!

Finally, do you have any advice for us medics working with film crews? And do you ever find it hard to stay behind the camera and not get involved in the action?

I don’t have any special advice for working with a film crew, except to remember that making beautiful movies takes time so please be patient!

And of course, even when sometimes I would love to turn off the camera and go play with my friends, getting great pictures makes me happy and I know that there will be other moments to play!

You can see more of Shams’ fine work on his website and on Facebook.