With the World premiere of the Stevie Smith documentary ‘Long Live Chainsaw’ having aired, we talk to Anthill Films about how it came together.
Pete sat down for a chat with Anthill Films’ Production Coordinator Daisy Maddison to chat how the long-anticipated Stevie Smith documentary, ‘Long Live Chainsaw’, went from concept to reality.
Photos by Sven Martin.
Why did you decide to make a Stevie Smith film?
There’s a number of reasons we wanted to make this film. First and foremost, we wanted to honour his leg-acy the best way we know how, which is by making a film. But we also felt that his story is so inspiring it needs to be told. He is the classic underdog overcoming the odds and I think there’s a positive takeaway for anyone in that story.
Once you’d made that decision, what were the next steps?
The very first thing was to talk with Stevie’s mom, Tianna, about the project and make sure she’s on board with it and communicated with on everything. From there it was a matter of securing some base funding which came mainly from his former sponsors that supported him during his career. Once that was in place the real collaboration began, reaching out to everyone that knew him and filmed him, to gather footage and start to wrap our head around how to tell the story. I had written up a 15 chapter outline which served as our guide, but his life is an amazing story so it was jut a matter of highlighting those key beats.
How many people were involved with the project?
In the end, hundreds. At the core was the team at Anthill as there is a lot of moving parts from sponsorship, to distribution, marketing, premiere tours and of course the largest task editing the film which was done by Darren McCullough. It was a major collaboration so we worked closely with locals in Nanaimo who were part of his life and the Stevie Smith Bike Park. Also all the riders, filmmakers and photographers from around the world helped out in a major way by providing interviews and archival footage. It’s hard to sum up all the moving pieces to be honest. I can tell you it was a solid year of full time work coordinating it all.
What did you want to achieve with Long Live Chainsaw?
We wanted to tell his story so it’s accessible to as many people as possible. Stevie was an inspiring person and the more people who know his story the better. Also, the underlying goal was to do this film as a fund-raiser for the Stevie Smith Legacy Foundation. So this means all proceeds from the film sales and premiere tour go direct to the Foundation.
How long did it take to get the final edit together?
Darren McCullough led the charge on this over the course of roughly 6 months. We shot somewhere around 75 hours of interview footage plus had to source and organize tonnes of archival footage that came in every format you can imagine.
How many versions of the film did you have before you got to the 92-minute version?
Well, in the end there’s a lot of micro versions and things really tighten up but I think there was 5 major rounds went through to get the main structure set. Once the framework is in place then all the big pieces get worked on separately such as colour, sound, graphics and score. Then each of those have multiple rounds of changes as well.
How did you know when you’d got it right?
When the time runs out haha. I think most filmmakers would agree that it’s never “feels” finished or perfect, there’s always things you’ll want to tweak even after the clock has run out on the project. Eventually you just need to know that it’s in the best place possible given the time and resources you have.
Favourite moments?
My favourite moments are still watching the big wins in MSA and Leogang in 2013. I love reliving those mo-ments no matter how many times I’ve seen them.
Any disasters?
Where next for Anthill?
Our company has been really busy throughout making this film, continuing to do lots of work with Shimano and many other commercial projects both inside the mountain bike scene and beyond. During this time we also completed the 2nd Season of Return to Earth TV for Outside Television and we have another feature
length doc already in the works. It’s too early to talk about that one but we have a bunch of traveling coming up, so you’ll see us bouncing all over the world on our social media. Always lots of ideas on the go.