Industry Insights | Ft. Taylor Congdon

In this installment of Industry Insights, we talk to Taylor Congdon, who produced and directed the Moto: The Movie franchise. Taylor discusses his early inspirations, how he started making movies, and more.

For the full interview, check out the Vital MX podcast right here. The audio version below includes more of Taylor's story. If you want the condensed written version, scroll down a bit further.

Jamie Guida – Vital MX: Let's start by telling us about your background.

Taylor Congdon: I grew up skiing in Sun Valley, Idaho, in a mountain town. I watched and loved ski and snowboard movies. When I was in high school, we moved to California. Moving away from the mountains, I had to find something that was close, and I got into mountain biking. Mountain biking consumed me, and I ended up racing a lot through my late teens and early twenties. I did okay in racing but was never going to be one of the top guys. So, I decided to grab a camera, and having such an appreciation for watching action sports through the years and having all the top riders as friends, I started filming when we were on the World Cup and National circuit. I made a movie called Bragging Rights, which was crazy. I never thought of it becoming a career, but when that movie came out, it did pretty well. It sold good, and Greg Fox, the President of Fox Racing, called me and said, "Hey, dude! I saw Bragging Rights, and I thought it was cool. Would you be interested in making a mountain bike movie for me?" I was blown away at the opportunity, and he offered me something close to $30,000 to make a movie about the whole national mountain bike scene. I thought it was more money than I could ever imagine, and I spent all year racing and videoing, making a movie called Headliners. That led to the sequel, called Transcontinental, which was on the World Mountain Bike circuit. Then I did Chain Smoke 2 for Fox. At the time, the mountain bike industry was kind of fading, but I saw moto being such a big segment of Fox. They were making the last couple of Terrafirmas when I was making the mountain bike movies, so I approached Greg to ask if there was any way I could get into the moto stuff. So, he gave me the opportunity to make Fox Racing Greatest Hits with Jessica Young. It was one of the first moto DVDs ever made, which was a huge deal.

Vital MX: How did you end up working with Transworld?

Taylor: Donn Maeda hit me up and asked if I wanted to make some movies for Transworld. I made five or six, including Why and their instructional movies with Ryno (Ryan Hughes) and one with Andrew Short. It just snowballed. After Transworld, I reflected on the movies that inspired me the most. It was always the Terrafirmas, and I decided I was going to make my own version because they were done making them. I then made Moto: The Movie. I made it for myself and self-produced it. I used every resource and connection I had and did it out of my own pocket. Moto One turned into Two, Three, Four, all the way to Ten. It was crazy and a great career. I miss it.

Vital MX: How did you organize everything once you started doing the first one on your own? There are helicopters, music, and numerous other things involved.

Taylor: It was a super low budget. We would call the local helicopter company closest to where we were filming and see if they had a helicopter school. Then, some instructor would take us up, take the door off, and we'd be hanging out the side of the helicopter. I can't believe I'm alive with some of the stupid things we were doing trying to document these movies. We wanted to make them look like big-budget, awesome projects because that's where our inspiration came from in the snowboarding, surfing, and skating world. They had a budget, and we just did what we could by being resourceful.

Vital MX: I remember people being excited when the first one came out. It felt like the moto videos were back

Taylor: Yeah. The first one sold okay. It was still in the era of DVDs and Apple had just started to sell movies and they had a sports section on their site. So, downloads and rentals were a small means of making money, but it wasn't on Amazon or those types of sites. It was still physical, like DVDs. Then around Moto 3 Blu-Rays came out and the quality was insane compared to DVD.

Vital MX: For Blu-ray to be possible, camera and filming technology advanced so quickly. You must have had to constantly upgrade.

Taylor: Every single movie throughout the series was probably shot on a different camera and format. It was a big investment every year to get the latest and greatest. Towards the end, we started to taper and say, "We don't need the new RED (RED is a leader in professional digital cinema cameras). People were never going to know the difference. It was more of an ego thing at the end as far as what cameras we were going to use, and in the end, it didn't make a difference in the picture quality.

Vital MX: I rewatched most of the movies on Amazon in the last few weeks. Around Moto 3 or 4, there was a lot of slow-motion. Was there a moment you got a new toy to really slow the footage down?

Taylor: Oh yeah! I think for Moto 4, the REDs came out, and we could shoot faster than 50 frames per second. Before that, we were shooting on film, 16mm and Super 16, and we'd have to rent an Arri Sr Super 16 high-speed camera. It would cost us $1000.00 per day, and we wouldn't see the footage for weeks after shooting because it had to be developed and colored. There was a lot of evolution in equipment through the movies.

Vital MX: It was also cool seeing the riders' evolution. It was awesome watching Adam Cianciarulo as a little guy, Austin Forkner as a kid on a scooter, or Ken Roczen when he was teammates with Jeffrey Herlings and wore black eyeliner.

Taylor: Yeah, we worked with pretty much every top rider throughout the ten years of making them. It was fun working with all the top talent, for sure.

Vital MX: The locations used varied, and you didn't have a huge budget. How did you line those out and decide where you would go

Taylor: That's back to being resourceful. A huge part of the movies involved collaboration with other filmmakers. I worked a lot with Mikey Neale over in Europe. I never even went to Europe. I would just pay and contract him a day rate and have him go work with Herlings, Roczen, or whoever the rider was. Allan Hardy in Australia was so awesome to work with. He did the Josh Cachia and Jackson Strong segments. Collaborating with other filmmakers was huge. It was guys who specialized in their segment within the sport. There was no way we had the budget it appeared we had to go to these places. It was cool working with so many talented people. There were sponsors, but it wasn't like real money. It was a couple of grand. Sponsorship was difficult in the moto world. It helped, but the movie was mostly self-funded.

Vital MX: I found it unique how you were able to bring out the riders' personalities through their riding style and location.

Taylor: We kind of had to, or it gets boring. There is only so much riding you can watch. In the moto world, there are only so many places to ride, and how many times can we go back to The Farm? We had to find ways to make the segments interesting, so we worked with the riders and who they were to make the movie watchable repeatedly. A good movie is one you can watch over and over, and I had those from the snowboard movies I was inspired by. The Mike Hatchett movies and The Art of Flight were so amazing. Taylor Steele and his surf movies were also inspirations.

Vital MX: How was the editing process? I would imagine cutting footage that you know is great for time purposes would be difficult.

Taylor: That was the most painful part of the process. We would start in August and had to finish the movie by the first of October. If you didn't have the movie done by Thanksgiving, you missed the boat regarding holiday sales. There were thousands of hours of footage, and it turns my stomach to think about what we had to do regarding post-production. To this day, with my new company, I have to do commercials and tours of the vans we've built, and I have serious PTSD when I turn on an editing program. I'm freaked out about how badly I'm affected by the editing process. It was hard. A lot of effort goes into a film shoot, and you want to use all the best stuff. You hate not using shots or content that will never be seen just because it didn't fit in the edit.

Vital MX: Can you talk about some of your favorite moments, shoots, or riders from the film? For me, seeing the Kurt Caselli stuff was great. I never had the chance to meet him, and it was cool seeing the footage.

Taylor: Kurt was always awesome. We worked with him a handful of times, and he became a close friend. He's a great example because he put a lot of effort into his segments. Trey Canard was always super fun to work with. Ryan Dungey was awesome. DeanO (Dean Wilson) in Moto 8 was fun to shoot. In Moto 3, Justin Barcia worked with Wes Williams, and it was epic. Ronnie Renner probably put in the most work of anybody in our segments. Those shoots were nothing but laughs. There are so many.

Vital MX: Let's talk about your current work. You started a company called Vannon, building customized vans. What brought that on?

Taylor: Making movies, I always had built-out vans. My dad was a general contractor, and my mom is an interior decorator, so I thought I'd go into construction when I was done making movies. I always built out my vans for our movies. When I was shutting down, my brother-in-law, who was the President of Sector 9 Skateboards, was looking to start something new. We collaborated and started Vannon. We started by building our first two vans at my house, sold them, and then opened a small shop and hired some guys. Since then, we've built it into a legit manufacturing facility building performance adventure rigs. We've built everything from surf vans to moto to mountain bikes. We are catering to an action sports lifestyle industry. It's awesome and very different from making movies.