10 MINUTES: With Nico Melendez
I started seeing Will Wissman and Adam Clark’s names everywhere. For a long time, I thought Adam was a snowboarder. I don’t read a lot of ski magazines, and I saw his name in snowboard publications. I approached those guys because they were the type of people I wanted to work with.
I didn’t want to just hurry and put out a product. After we had our logo, I wanted to build a team, and just build that before we started marketing it. We didn’t want to just put out a film and I didn’t want to work with other companies, just wanted to be independent.
Our logo is a symbol of living on a higher plane. People who spend 100+ days a year on the mountain just don't fit in with mainstream society the same way. Once you have spent your life at a higher elevation you can't just go sit at a cubicle from 9-5 and then deal with the traffic coming and going...my only idea of traffic is weekend warriors or getting stuck behind the bus on the way up the canyon.
We don’t have any sponsors. Everything is out of pocket, independently funded. We’ve had a lot of offers for sponsors, but we’re not ready for that yet. I think once our first film comes out, we’ll stand tall on our own.
A lot of our team riders are guys that got passed over by the industry, and a lot of our guys are not heavily sponsored. It’s a blue-collar company
We don’t want to charge for our films. Our films will be the hangtag on our clothing. The riders get all their trips paid for by sponsors, and they’re living the life, going on heli trips, and everything. To turn around and charge the public for that doesn’t seem right.
We wanted to put some soul behind the product.
I don’t necessarily believe politics belong in skiing and snowboarding movies, but at the same time, if you have an audience, I think it’s important to make sure you make people stop and think about what’s going on around them.
We’re two and a half years into it, and everyone has been wondering when it’s going to come out. We knew we needed to get something out. We were sitting around having drinks one night, and this idea [for the trailer] came up. I didn’t want to do a one-minute clip. The response has been more good than bad, but even the bad… it’s like, “it worked.”
Our film is actually going to be like a B-rated horror movie that incorporates skiing. It’ll just be more fun on the production end. You can walk into most ski movies halfway through, and you’d have to ask which movie it is. They all have similar criteria, similar formula, I want people to walk into a Levitation movie and know something crazy is going on. I don’t think we can even flatter ourselves and say they’re “B” movies. They’re more like “C” movies. It will definitely be the first horror/slasher ski movie.
We dealt with what we had, and I definitely felt that in Utah… everyone comes here to film, but there weren’t any production companies based out of Utah, so it was important to have a solid Utah base. But we’re starting to bring on other athletes from elsewhere. We just got back from Canada and shooting with Dan Treadway and Bryce Phillips. So we’re expanding. It’s more personality based. If you’re down and you’re killing it, then you’re on. It just so happens that 99-percent of our team is Utah based.
We have a clothing line. We have a street wear line that launches this year. We’ve been letting a little bit out to the public here and there. We’re getting into the outerwear side of things in 2008-2009.
On the side, not directly involved with Levitation, I started a publishing company called My Turn Publishing. We started a snowboard magazine called Artboard, and we’re starting a ski magazine next year. Both our magazines are free. If you look at most clothing companies, they spend a lot of money to advertise in a lot of different magazines. For that amount of money, I figured we could start our own magazine. We hand pick our advertisers based on whether we liked their creative.
Next year we’ll have a coffee table book with photos from our photographers, and journals from our team riders. All team riders are required to keep a journal of all their travels.
It’s hard to put a finger on it. It’s just all aspects of expression. We have artists we’re working with, graphics designers, photographers, cinematographers, web designers, clothing designers, writers—a full staff of really talented people. Everybody is pretty much at the top of their game. It’s kind of like the Knights of the Round Table.
When you put a Levitation sticker in your window, it means that you have your priorities straight and that does not include worrying about being three minutes late to work... It’s all about first trams and if there is no snow in Utah you head to Mica Creek for pillow lines and Heli service.