Ultimate GT: Episode 5 | World Championships of Beach Ultimate (Dubai)

by Elliot Trotter | April 4, 2016, 11:29am 0

To be honest, I wasn’t even sure this episode was going to happen. It wasn’t something that I planned out far in advance, at least. When I got the call to be a part of the Australian Men’s team for the World Championships of Beach Ultimate in Dubai, that became my focus. I was honored to don the green and gold to represent Australia alongside many of my teammates from the Melbourne’s Heads of State (featured in Episode 3).

Filming an episode takes a lot of effort and focus and I was worried that such effort would take away from competing with Australia and enjoying the event. GT’s chief cinematographer David Picon, who was producing video at the event with Skyd, encouraged me to film the experience, assuring me that he’d help take on the brunt of the work and that we’d be able to work with other Skyd cinematographers like Adam Knight to produce a beautiful episode.

Once we confirmed the production, I got to thinking about what the story of this episode could be. I soon realized that Dubai would be an opportunity to approach the production differently from the other episodes and tell multiple stories — there was my playing with the Australian team, the Dragons competing for the championship they had talked about in Episode 1, and an opportunity to focus on more women’s ultimate, through the lens of the USA Women’s Team. As a male ultimate player and host of this show, I don’t have as many opportunities to feature women in ultimate. So I wanted to take advantage of a great platform in WCBU to do so.

Picon was right and thanks to his encouragement, we’ve produced one of the most visually stunning pieces I’ve been a part of. Dubai lends itself well to photography, as you’ll see in the episode’s many drone and high speed shots. In the end, thanks to Dragons video from Ian Lunger and Akira Yamaguchi we had more footage in Dubai than any of the other episodes. Strung together, I hope this video does justice to the incredible experience I had in Dubai (many thanks to organizers Patrick van der Valk and Patrick Fourcampre-Maye for putting on a tremendous tournament). And I hope you enjoy it too.

Also, big shout out to Boon Technical Clothing for supporting the show! They’ve been great supporters and I look forward to working with them on another episode (which you may be able to see a preview of at the end of this episode).

And of course, thanks to the awesome artists featured in UGT. Your music brings my stories to life.