Behind the camera

So what was it like to shoot Crackoholic? What was fun? What was hard? Did everything go as planned?

The first challenge when shooting a climbing movie is making the decision to put your own climbing on hold for a while. Sure, you'll have some time to climb yourself, but shooting climbing in Sweden is not something that you can do full time so you will inevitably sacrifice your own climbing time.

Then comes the tricky part of fund raising... Finding someone willing to finance a climbing movie is not an easy task. Although this project is far from fully financed, the Crackoholic team was fortunate to sign a contract with Arc'teryx and Black Diamond as main partners. During 2006 a few other companies jumped aboard as well.






We started shooting in the spring of 2006 (my god, has it been that long!?) and we had a rough idea of which routes we wanted to shoot and which climbers we wanted to meet and interview. Of course we were unable to stick to the plan 100%... Sometimes the climber just doesn't make it, sometimes the route is wet, sometimes it's too hot, sometimes it's too cold, and sometimes you forget a vital piece of equipment (like DV tapes).

Since our budget did not allow us to pay the climbers we were always more or less at their mercy. Which in a way was good. Your chances of getting good footage are greater if the climbers themselves are psyched to climb the routes (but then, maybe they'd be even more psyched if there was money involved...?) So a big part of the time we ended up following a bunch of climbers on their projects. Some projects were totally unpredicted and some were actually on our wish list already. We also had to keep our eyes and ears open in case something special was going on. Many phonecalls and e-mail conversations...All this proved both time, patience and petrol consuming since both of us live in Stockholm, a six our drive away from Bohuslän...

Mind you, not all of the shooting took place in Bohuslän. We went to Oslo to interview Björn Myrer Lund, Marius Morstad and Dag Kolsrud, who were part of the Norwegian "invasion" in Bohuslän in the late 70's/early 80's. And we went to Gothenburg to talk to Ingemar Strandberg, a former climber who set up some of the very first routes in Bohuslän in the mid-70's. We also got to interview some visiting climbers from abroad, like Leo Houlding and Neil Gresham who left their marks in Bohuslän during a short visit in the late 90's. These are just a few of the interviews we've done during the process. All in all we've interviewed some 20 people who have all been involved in the development of the Bohuslän climbing. It's been an interesting, thought provoking and joyful process, with a lot of hard work. Not only on our part. Big thanks to all of the climbers who have willingly let us shoot them while climbing!