At some point Red Bull is going to run out of unique, picturesque places to shoot obscenely talented riders. Today is not that day.
Red Bull dropped trials ace Dougie Lampkin and a film crew into a Northwestern Finland forest and they went to town. "Town" in this case is the , an ice hotel made of nearly 800,000 pounds of ice, with 28 guest rooms, a 120-seat restaurant, a 50-seat chapel for weddings, and a 52-foot snow dome.
The temperatures – dipping below -10 degrees – were an obvious challenge, but it was even colder in the hotel since it's basically a giant, luxurious freezer. Add in the lower ceilings and the slippery surfaces, and even the studded tires on the bike weren't enough from keeping Lampkin from impromptu slushy eating.
They were originally going to shoot the entire film indoors, but were taken with the surroundings, so they grabbed some spare ice blocks from the hotel's construction and found a downed tree to create obstacles for the first part of the flick.
The finished product is kind of hypnotic, and doesn't hint at the difficulties and work that went into the shoot. Although watching it, my teeth are inadvertently chattering.