Exit Strategy
I'm a decent chef - Anthony Bourdain
Photo credits to Edwin Poulston and Nick Thucydides
Regarding crews, it's fair to say that Chef (formerly Chef Boyardee) is what you would want from a group of friends. Dedicated skiers, who like to film, and have fun. After producing edits for years, the group of 20-odd skiers came together to drop their first feature film, Exit Strategy.
Queuing up a 30-minute Facetime with filmer/editor Nick Thucydides and Rider/Producer Leif Wilson was mellow and the guys were stoked just to recap how their last winter was. We ended up spinning yarn about their beginnings, the overall shift in focus for their crew, and filming on an HVX.
The crew is based out of Grouse, one of the three main mountains for people living around Vancouver to get their skiing fix in. For the history nerds, Grouse has produced some of the best riders coming out of BC (remember Simple?) and those that came before have set the tone for everyone lapping Grouse’s park. Chef has gracefully carried the mantle as the next crew to blossom from lapping this small mountain and won’t be the last.
“We all met at Grouse skiing, it’s the place that formed our community and the community aspect at Grouse is really what it has going for it. That environment solicits everything fun and what skiing is supposed to be.” - Leif Wilson
With everyone being friends since they were kids to now being “adults” this crew is often far away from each other and each member's lives differ greatly. Some are on the World Cup Circuit (See Alec Henderson) others are grinding out University degrees or working in construction. Still, all of them unanimously came together to make time to film for Exit Strategy.
“Beginning of the year - the question was could we make something happen? Most of us are on the comp schedule. Who was going to be available and when? Our Baker trip wouldn't have happened if the Mammoth NorAm hadn’t been canceled. We all went to Baker and started getting clips while the other half of the crew was in Nelson skiing street.” - Leif
“As fun as it is to make park edits, it's fun to have a project that we wanted to film on and off for months. Then the reward for coming together to edit and see the collective effort that everyone put in. We are still learning as we go but we learned so much and gained so much respect for everyone else who films a project every season. It's beyond comprehension what goes into filming whole movies; compared to an Insta edit, it blows it out of the water and you’re stressing so much about everything that's going on in the beginning, during, and after.” - Nick Thucydides
While some have never touched a slope contest, many of the boys and girls that make up Chef have had (or are still having) successful competition careers. Nonetheless, Leif Wilson speaks on the majority of the squad opting to go all in with Chef.
“The majority of us are out of the comp circuit [now] and we want to keep skiing and keep going for as long as possible. The main shift for all of us was to be the best well-rounded skiers we could be and keep working on what we’re passionate about. We have always been drawn to videos, we all have different approaches to skiing but we can all come together to work on a video project. Our community has solely allowed me to transition from competitions, and Freestyle Canada fucks up and doesn’t produce skiers, they produce coaches. We want to break that mold and show people in Canada there are other ways to make it in skiing than by living in Salt Lake City and doing triples.”
Getting support in this industry is a topic that is consistently beating a dead horse nonetheless Arsenic took notice of the Chef crew along with several notable brands putting on a lot of the individuals riders (Line, Surface, Head).
“It is sick where we are now, two years ago we were scraping pennies together to buy skis and now we’re starting to get some skis from people who want to help us out and it's cool to see when companies recognize that we have something to offer. Skiing doesn’t owe us anything but it's cool when it does give us something.” - Leif
While no dollars are getting thrown at Chef’s projects, just getting traction with companies was high-octane encouragement for the boys to double down on filming, and when the fall came around the boys decided to give a premiere a shot.
“Our premier was fun but we kinda blew it. We wanted to do three originally but only did one. We ended up doing a premiere in late August and had planned it at a university then remembered that school hadn’t even started yet” - Nick
“We didn’t know if it was going to happen until like 2 weeks before. Red Gate Brewery hooked it up and split the door and drink money with us and we even made money from it. I thought nobody was going to come and we ended up getting too drunk to tell how many people showed up. - Leif
The event ended up being a blessing as unbeknownst to the guys, Jeff Schmuck was in the crowd. “He came out of nowhere and afterwards, he told us to enter IF3 even though we were past the due date, we even ended up getting a nomination for amateur film of the year. We didn’t check any of the boxes that would make it win and were the only people who shot on HVX in the whole competition so it was kind of funny.” - Leif
While Exit Strategy isn’t the kind of flick you would expect to see at IF3 (Think cookie-cutter narration and sound effects) it’s nice to see a film in the amateur category that actually looks amateur.
“After IF3 we never wanted to watch a ski movie again, some are brutal. We like our videos relatable, movies like Eat the Guts where even though the skiing is top tier, the filming style is relatable. We don’t have the budget for a Red cam or a drone or anything but if people see movies at IF3 with a shitty cam then they can use anything. - Nick
“HVX and optic is the poor filmer set up but we make it work. We have been running handy cams for a while. We started using GL2 and then bounced from a Sony Handycam and then to a DVX and now we're at HVX. We don’t plan on changing anything filming-wise, so hopefully, the HVX will resonate with someone.” - Nick
Chef is currently filming for their next film and it will probably be good.
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