A Chinese Snowboarding Movie?

It may be summer, but the Mellow Parks crew can’t seem to get their minds off the snow. They’ve just released the teaser for Happy Niu Year- a Chinese snowboard movie featuring highlights from last year, due to be released later this year.

If you’re wondering what the level of snowboarding in China is looking like these days, check out the teaser here- and prepare to be very impressed.

the Beijinger asked Mellow Parks' big kahuna Steve Zdarsky about the film:

What riders are in this video?
Mainly the Quiksilver China team- Mingming, Xfox, Marco Huang, Zhangwei and me. But also all the dudes that rode with us at Nanshan all winter. Fanlei, Bobby (USA), Ken from Shanghai, Alexey (Russia)...we have a huge friends part with shots from pretty much everybody that was shredding this winter. I call it an all Chinese snowboarding movie because its all filmed in China and we are kinda all Chinese...kinda…

How many hours of filming did you do?
We finished up 21 tapes of footage (one tape is 60 mins) and out of that we are cutting a 20 minute movie. That means LOTS of bad stuff and lots of stupid stuff too. Filming and making a snowboard movie is not easy.... really....so much footage for only 20 minutes!

Did you have any difficulties in making the film?
Hell yeah! Everybody has a kind of list in their heads of what tricks they want to do and what they have to look like - and sometimes that one trick needs hours to be filmed perfectly. Doing the same move over and over again until it’s perfect can be a little bit tiring.
Also we all are not professional filmers. Think about yourself doing a sick trick but the filmer missed it. Then weather, park conditions, too many people in the park – there are lots of difficulties, but if it was easy, everybody would do it and this would not be anything special!

What are some of the best segments?

Every part is different. We of course cover the best riding of all the boys but also lifestyle and fun. Thats what snowboarding should be about - fun, right? I of course would say my part is the best, haha. No, honestly - every part is different. We really tried to have tons of different angles, different tricks etc. so that it is all new and exiting to watch. 20 minutes of different footage in just one park is pretty hard!


What locations was it filmed at?

90% at The Quiksilver Nanshan Mellowpark, 5 % all around Nanshan (rails outside, bombdrops from the lift etc.) and 5% from our roadtrip to Yabuli. That was fun too.

When is the full film coming out?
The full length movie will come out December, and will be available for free in all Quiksilver stores, all stores that carry Dakine, Nitro, 9010 Snowboards, Skullcandy, Neff, and at all of our events and pretty much everywhere that snowboarding is happening. We’re making 30,000 copies of the DVD, which will be jampacked with other movies too - the Pirate Movie Production segment on the last year’s Nanshan Open (a new cut, nobody has seen yet), the full Nitro Road Warriors movie (with china in it), the hotzone.tv movie (also with china), the best of the ‘09 Nanshan Open as well as a travel movie about shredding in New Zealand, because in August the boys and I will hit up New Zealand to shred and film over 100 minutes of snowboard footage! This DVD is all about China- who says there is no snowboarding in china?