“Into the Mind”
“This is a story of rising to the ultimate challenge. Having the courage to risk fatal exposure and the perseverance demanded on the quest for achievement. These are not solely physical feats, they are mental conquests. From the creators of the award winning film “All.I.Can”, Sherpas Cinema is proud to present their newest feature film, Into The Mind. With stunning cinematography and groundbreaking storytelling techniques, the Sherpas blur the lines between dream state and reality, and immerse you into the mind of a common skier as he attempts to climb and ski the ultimate mountain. Innovative athlete segments are actually a glimpse into his dream scape, each one harboring messages that help inform our hero’s current, real-life choices. As you experience the majesty of Alaska, Bolivia, the Himalaya and beyond, Into the Mind paints a philosophical portrait of human kind. How do we balance risk versus reward? Why are we inspired to rise to the challenges in our lives and what do we learn on this journey to attain them?”
This movie is like no other movie I've seen. Normally ski movie premiers are full of excitement before and during the movie, if you see something you like, you make sure the whole theater knows with a loud, “WOOO” or “Hell Yeah!”, but this was the only time I heard someone get 'shushed' because they were breaking someone else concentration. It was as breath taking as watching Planet Earth or LIFE in full HD for the first time, and as suspenseful as a good horror movie. Being able to edit and use CGI (computer generated images) to enhance the viewers time in modern cinematography has really set a new standard for film making. It is full of symbolism and can be interpreted into many different meanings. The movie is built around a heroes journey model and shows a brand new perspective and changes the way a viewer will look at his or her immediate surroundings.
Chapter 1. Call to Adventure
The movie starts out with a clip of a Nepalese man spinning a prayer wheel, what looks to just be a cool opening is actually a pretty important detail throughout the movie. This prayer wheel is the beat of the movie, its movements will impact the movie as your watching it. Normally opening scenes are the most fought after, they are the one of the biggest parts to action films, they grab the attention for the next two hours. This movie is different though, a common person who loves skiing more then the next, born into a skiing family in a skiing town, from a young age our mystery skier has big dreams. The movie shows a POV (point of view) from our common skiers eyes, showing us what he sees, from packing the room filled with gear into the trucks and planes, to waking up from nightmares of crashing in his tent before his ascent up the mountain.
Chapter 2. Meeting The Mentors
After climbing out of his tent he is greeted by a black bird flying overhead. The movie cuts to day dreams, visions, and memories of things our common skier thinks about during certain moments in his trip. Many say the feeling of skiing powder is close to flying, weightlessness and floating. This is why I think they chose to cut away to 3 professional skiers skiing chest deep cloud like snow while being chased by a bald eagle, snowy owl, and falcon. The skiers are zooming in and out of trees with the birds weaving between the branches above them. Birds are the masters of the skis, they are not bound to roads or forests, they are free to travel swiftly and gracefully wherever they wish.
Chapter 3. Crossing the Threshold
The tone quickly changes from a calm mood to a very upbeat mood. The next scene is a Native Indian ceremony. With loud Indian dance music and a very distinctive drum, they natives were dancing and celebrating around a fire and doing some form of what looked like a transformation. This just happens to take place in the chapter of where our hero crosses from the ordinary world to the special world of his journey. Our common skier is close to halfway up his mountain when his partner makes the decision to turn back, with the sun warming the snow he doesn't want to take the chance. This is where I started to realize how deep the movie was going to take me, as a skier you never ski alone, especially in the backcountry where one fall could mean death.
Chapter 4. Road of Trails
After continuing on by himself our skier has another vision. This time he thinks of his hometown, Whistler, B.C. Personally I love this place, full of good times and better people. Everyone in that town is there to have a good time. The vision takes us across the resort with hundreds and hundreds of skiers and snowboarders going everywhere, jumping off anything they can find. This is where the editing really starts to make its impact. Instead of just changing from one shot to another they rotate the camera down into the ground and the next shot is the camera rising from the ground. While jumping around the mountain you also jump into the town itself where you see groups of friends laughing and enjoying what they're doing. Before the next chapter the scene finishes with a clip of our Nepalese friend with the prayer wheel, the wheel slowly starts to speed up and every time it passes the camera, the sound of the air rushing by gets louder and louder, building a lot of suspense.
Chapter 5. Confront the Shadow
While staying at Whistler, the next vision is my favorite scene of the whole movie. It shows a great struggle that I and thousands of other athletes have faced, overcoming yourself. Being a professional half pipe rider is one of the toughest things to do on snow. It is the most demanding and one of the closest competitions in the sport. The vision shows a snowboarder who is about to start his run when his doppelganger cuts him off and does exactly what he was going to do but better. The real snowboarder is shocked. He gets back to the top and drops in again, this time he crashes mid run while his shadow lands the trick perfectly. Then another shadow lands another trick perfectly. Our rider is on the ground watching himself land every trick he knows perfectly all around him. Its not just a physical sport, its a mental one too, you have to commit 100% every time, because if you don't the only person holding you back is yourself.
Chapter 6. Enter the Darkness
Our common skier arrives at the top of his mountain. The view is absolutely stunning. Every shot in this film is absolutely stunning, it would almost be harder to see it better in person. Some think being a skier is a curse, only because you only get to have fun for five months and suffer for seven. There's a lot of die hard skiers who take any chance they get to strap their boots on, this includes skiing in a city. With the creation of freestyle skiing, you no longer need a mountain, all you need is a ice rink for ice shavings and a hand rail. The next day dream is a chase scene of two professional freestyle skiers chasing each other through downtown Quebec at night. With lights showing only glimpses of the skiers as they race past cars and buildings. When they catch up to each other the air rushing sound from the prayer wheel starts up again.
Chapter 7. The Ordeal
Our skier is standing on top of his mountain looking down past his skis thousands of feet and then he drops in. Meanwhile the prayer wheel is making its noise but slowly starts to fade once he starts skiing. Once hes about halfway down the sound disappears and he falls. His skis come off and he tumbles all the way down the mountain missing rocks by a couple feet. The camera man from the helicopter follows him all the way down hoping to see movement. He zooms all the way to and shows how tiny the skier really is, just a small dot on a huge white mountain. The shot cuts to his POV camera and he is breathing very hard with blood dripping into the snow from his face before he collapses into the snow.
The cut away to his POV camera is an important clip because it really connects the audience with the common skier, instead of just watching him fall you almost experience the fall by watching from his eyes what he just went through.
Chapter 8. Death
The movie takes another turn at this point. Less action and almost no skiing makes you think you are watching a documentary on Discovery Channel. But this isn't a boring documentary, you are still greeted with breathtaking HD shots of mostly South Eastern culture. Jumping from a couple of shots from massive strip mines to huge piles of garbage and then jumping back to the small town in Boliva with a lot of footage of Eastern medicine and rituals from shamans and Sherpa. This scene makes you think of the difference of culture on our planet. Its almost like a different world.
Chapter 9. Rebirth
Now you see the other side of the world. The one that we, in America, are more used too. Inside the hospital room of our common skier is almost depressing. Very quiet and white, only noise is coming from the life support machines. Compared to the colorful, musical, loud, and emotional eastern medicine, it was a huge sudden realization for me. The camera picks up the sound of our skier breathing, assisted by machines, Everything slows down to match his breath, almost like a new beat, replacing the prayer wheel. After the half pipe scene with all the CGI 'shadows' riding at the same time, it was hard to expect this next scene. To match the breath, the movie shows time lapses of clouds, ice, and tides moving up and down, like nature was breathing. I noticed a small pattern in the breaths, they were telling their own story. The clouds breathing moved to ice breathing which turning into water and then rain and then back to clouds. It was showing the life of the snow that he was skiing on. Along with those shots there is also a lot of other hidden comparisons, the seemingly random shots of waves crashing on a beach and snow being thrown into the air. The shots of a river from above and then the river fading into a ski trail full of people in the same shape, or the heard of elk running on a mountain side and then fading to a huge group of skiers coming down the hill. It is showing the comparison that we too are a part of nature, we don't stand outside or along side of it, were in it. To finish this scene, our common skier wakes up. You are looking through his eyes as he wakes up and he lifts his arms the same way he did before he collapsed into the snow when he blacks out and the film cuts to the footage of his POV camera during the evacuation. It was like he was remember what had happened. You see shots of him being loaded into a helicopter from the snow, being flown across the world, and entering the hospital. Then he wakes up again and you hear the first words of the whole movie, “What was I thinking?” The sound of the prayer wheel starts up and a short clip of a skier skiing what I would call an ideal situation, everything about that segment was perfect skiing, the backdrop, the snow, the weather. Our common skier then fumbles for his phone and he ignores all the get well texts and emails, and texts his buddy, 'Were going back.' This starts to show the moral of this moral filled movie, why we do what we do. What drives us to do it.
Chapter 10. The Road Back
This was a very short action-less scene mostly showing travel. Clips of salmon returning home and fighting the river. Our common skier leaves the hospital in a wheel chair and packs yet again for the very similar trip. Not much symbolism to be found here other then the point of the salmon showing how much of a struggle it can be just to get somewhere, then once you're there you still have what you went there to do.
Chapter 11. Seizing the Sword
Another short scene that isn't a too big of a part in the movie, other then having the only other sentence in the movie. A couple of skiers and snowboarders climb a mountain and ride down it. One of them says, “These moments make everything worth it.” If you're going to only choose to put two sentances in a movie, how would you choose them? I think the director did a perfect job of that, after being in a couple of situations where I've asked myself, 'Why did I do that?' and then later to answer it, 'Oh yeah, that's why.' I've noticed what makes me really enjoy life.
Chapter 12. Return with the Elixir
Our common skier appears on the top of his mountain looking down in a way that feels way to familiar, this part of the film is crucial I think. It shows the necessity of going back and doing it exactly how you did before but better this time around. Our skier gets to the bottom of the mountain and turns into a snowflake falling from the sky. The snowflake then lands into a puddle that turns into the ocean. After watching the movie for the first time I didn't think much of it, but then when I remember the time lapse water cycle idea, I chuckled a little bit, our everyday common no-name skier who fought intensely to battle this one feat is still the same as trillions of other water molecules in the ocean that have the chance to one day become a snowflake, fall on a mountain and start the cycle again.
Chapter 13. Master of Two Worlds
The movie takes the ideas and most of the chapters from the heroes journey model but they added their own chapter in the end to summarize the symbolism and make it clear to those who didn't concentrate on the film. The final scene is one of the most moving of the whole movie. It starts out in our common skiers hospital room again and he is with his mother and she is showing him a photo collage of him growing up. He then passes out and has another day dream, this one taking the form of a home video. It shows a small boy with his mom and dad learning how to ski, you then realize the boy is growing up, around six or so I noticed the father is no longer present in any of the footage, only the mother and boy skiing. He then grows up to around twelve where he really starts to ski some extreme stuff, then he becomes the person he is in the present, our common skier, skiing on the skis he had in the film, then he grows older. His beard starts to grow out long and gray as a symbol of his age. Around 50 or so a big change happens, another young boy appears, and the man then teaches the boy how to ski. The man grows to become very old and the boy grows a bit older and they ski off into the sunset. During this home video, the boys and man are chasing the seasons around, where they are about to go is dirt but once they pass it it changes to snow and then back to dirt. It was really mind blowing to watch this transition happen so fast and unexpectedly.
After looking into the heroes journey model and the ending of the film, I was curious about our common skier. I did a little research and came to the conclusion that the final chapter of the journey, Return with the Elixir, is a symbol itself. The other steps are pretty self explanatory, Call to Adventure and Death, but when I first thought Return with the Elixir I thought of our hero physically returning with a prize to show of his triumph, but then where does the Master of Two Worlds fall in? Turns out our common skier lost his father to the mountain because of skiing. The real prize wasn't the actual overcoming of the feat but the recognition of the journey and the amount of distance our hero covered and still has to cover.
