Hard to Ride, Harder to Produce: The Longest Action Sports Highlight Ever?

One Shot, released today, has no editing, and there are no breaks; it's just Brandon Semenuk, the best mountain biker in the world for this style of riding, bombing a track down the side of a mountain for two continuous minutes. He only rode the full track once, he nailed every jump and trick, and he did it with an injured left wrist.

You won't find another clip like it. Reel-worthy action rarely lasts several minutes, and, even if it does, a single camera is often an inadequate point of view for that long. Not to mention that the logistical coordination required to set up two minutes of sweet reel is prohibitively expensive and time consuming.

But if anyone could pull it off, co-production partners Teton Gravity Research and Anthill Films were likely candidates. TGR has been producing and distributing action sports media since 1996 and consulted for both the first X Games and the first NBC Gravity Games, in 1999. Anthill Films, which has won a slew of awards over the years, has long set a high bar in action sports film production.

"For a decade, we've had this idea, this dream to do the longest shot possible, to a do a whole segment in one shot," says Darcy Wittenburg, producer and co-founder of Anthill Films. "The original vision came from years of driving around and always thinking, What if there was a trail that followed the road where you could do an endless shot?"

Finding a location was the first challenge. Wittenburg and the TGR team scouted half a dozen private tracts of land: it needed to have a hillside pitched just so, with the right kind of dirt, and no trees. They eventually chose a 2,000-acre ranch in Cambria, California, near San Luis Obispo. A crew of men with a mini-excavator and a Bobcat skid-steer spent a month building the track, the jumps, and the road, parallel to the track, from which the crew would film Semenuk.

The TGR and Anthill crew spent a week on location to get the shot. There was only one cameraman, TGR's Brian Wulf, and a single camera, a Red Epic. Darren McCulloughoperated the focus for the camera, while Collin Jones called out the vehicle pacing to Wittneburg, who was the driver. All four people acted as a single unit. A custom-built rack in the bed of a Toyota Tundra pickup held the camera mount, which was originally designed for aircraft: the GSS C520, a gimbal-stabilized camera housing that famously provided the ultra-smooth footage in Planet Earth. A Honda generator strapped in the bed of the truck powered the camera, and Wulf filmed through a monitor while sitting in the backseat.

For One Shot to be successful, the conditions had to be perfect (Cambria's pervasive wind is not conducive to back-flipping a mountain bike), Semenuk had to run the entire track without a flaw, the truck had to match his pace exactly, and Wulf had to pull off the shoot cleanly. In the week leading up to filming, Semenuk practiced the top section of the track, several times, though he never rode the lower section. Meanwhile, the film crew practiced the drive, marking the road with signs to indicate speed and pace for Wittenburg. The pressure on Semenuk was obvious to everyone on scene.

"You could see it in Brandon. He's a pretty chill guy, but I didn't even want to talk to him," Wulf says. "In the action-sports world we're often around people risking their lives or doing things of high consequence, but it's typically not for too long, not continuous. I think you have to give credit to Brandon in that respect."

On the last day of shooting, in March 2014, the wind was calm, the weather clear, and Semenuk and the crew made the first full run on film. "When we finished the run," Wulf says, "I was like, he's going to do it again, right? We thought, Yeah, he'll probably do it again. Then Brandon came over and watched it and was like, 'Fuck yeah, we're done here.'"

Semenuk, for his part, is fairly casual about having a six-figure investment riding on two minutes of greasing a track.

"Obviously having one camera rolling leaves no room for error," he says. "This wasn't so much added pressure for me, but for the filmers to nail it when I do. Their part was just as hard or harder than mine, I'd say. I got to the bottom and just waited to hear the cheers."

One Shot was produced as part of a larger film called unReal, which was released on iTunes earlier July 21. TGR and Anthill will release additional cuts from the making of unReal throughout the year, as well eight 30-minute television episodes that give a behind-the-scenes look at producing the different segments for the film and the athletes featured.