Interview: Drop In Producer Mike Johansen

How old are you?

I’m going to turn 29 in a few weeks.

Where are you guys headquartered?

I’m headquartered in a spare bedroom in my house in Calgary.

What goes into the making of Drop in that the average fan wouldn’t see or think about?

There is a lot of behind the scenes where the camera isn’t picked up until well into the day and that’s because we don’t film everything anymore. Season one I woke up first and grabbed the camera and stuck it in someone’s face and woke them up…That was kind of season one but we had so much footage to go through that we couldn’t keep doing it that way, with cost of editing and time to go through it all. So now it’s a little more planned.

How hard is it to get people started? You guys feature the Drop In lifestyle and sometimes it seems pretty raucous, is getting out of bed and shooting sometimes a hard thing to do?

No…season two we played up the whole partying (side)…and that everyone was sleeping until late in the day but it wasn’t as bad as we made it out to be. We wanted to show the other side of it. Season one was very tame and when I watched it when we were making season two I was unimpressed. If I was someone watching I didn’t want to see someone buttering their toast, I want to see them out trying to pick up girls or something else… Each season is dictated by the average age it seems. Some people appreciated that and some people didn’t. Season three is different again. We have to keep the kids happy and the old school thinkers happy who thought we were giving Mountain Biking a bad name.

When you guys are shooting Drop In are you always busy with camera work or do you take care of other things as well?

I’ve been trying to get other people involved in the camera work more now. What I’m doing nowadays is getting everyone organized, fed, getting them all in the truck, make sure they all have their riding gear. If their prone to bonking two hours later because of lack of energy I make sure they have lunch with them like Dylan (Tremblay) needs.

You play a bit of mom I guess?

Oh yeah… Used to be worse though. Now I make sure the camera guys have all their gear and make sure they have somewhere to shoot that day, keep everyone fed and out of trouble as much as possible.

Mike and his bus

You guys had a couple of additions to the production side of Drop In this year. “Milkman” Toni Muendel and Ambrose from Pist-N-Broke Productions. What did those guys add to Drop In?

We took Ambrose along for a month this year and he’s coming with us to New Zealand (in 2005). We made Toni kind of in charge of the show...Toni was the editor this year and basically the creative director…When we were thinking about what we were going to do the next day we kind of looked to Milkman to put in his two cents first.

So it was more of a collaboration this year? Would that be fair to say?

That would be spot on. After the first season I was dead. I got home and I think I slept for 22 hours straight. We worked up until the shooting which is just as exhausting because you’re working in front of a computer or on the phone all day. And then we jumped on the bus and we did all the filming and we tried to keep up with our office stuff like trying to keep up with networks and sponsors and stuff like that…We (producers Mike and Tim) know were not the best guys to be pulling the trigger on the camera. Sometimes we get lucky and we come up with a good shot but for the most part getting guys like Toni and Ambrose creating these segments…and getting what everyone wants to see in a really cool way that’s what everyone wants to see in the show and Tim and I can concentrate on organizing trips to New Zealand and stuff like that.

Mountain biking is a creative sport. How much rider directing can a film crew do?

It’s more of an open dialogue than a direction. And that comes from feedback from the riders from the camera side of things and me saying we gotta go…And everything we do. The riders have to know that they have an option because as soon as you start placing pressure on the riders that’s when mistakes start being made. It happened a couple times last season that rider X was too tired or the stunt was too wet to attempt it but for whatever reason they place that pressure on themselves and things went wrong. It’s all a matter of them having the option to walk away. They know as well as I do that the show has to be exciting, they are the ones in the show so they decide if they should go HUGE or save it for the next day.

What’s the workload like for you guys. Production can be pretty busy but is there an off season for you as well?

There’s no off season that I can think of. It’s go, go, go. But it’s starting to get better. We’re not running around like a couple of chickens with our heads cut off like we were in seasons one and two…Now that Milkman is on board he’s taken a lot of the weight off. And I’m married now so the longest I can be away for a tour is a month. This past season I was away for two months and it was just too long.

Da Milkman

You make your living through mountain biking. Would you say you’re living the dream?

I’m living my dream. Tim and I have been best buddies since we were in high school. We started skiing together and we took his parents camera out. After seeing Greg Stumps Blizzard of Ahh’s (Skiing Video) it just got us wanting to make ski movies but everyone knows that that market is locked up and we knew that we would be idiots to try and compete…with the big name production companies that have the support of the industry already so we thought lets start out with biking…We’re in love with it and we know so many other people that could be if they just knew what was going on. Then we started and we realized we didn’t know what was going on. We were pretty surprised by some of the things that we were filming.

What moments were those?

(Mike) Kinrade did a few bug hucks. He did one in Nelson…it was stupid I didn’t know it could be done. And obviously Kamloops that first season went off pretty big. And then the first time I met (Darren) Berrecloth on (Vancouver) Island…We were watching him tailwhip his mountain bike and big threes, stuff that wasn’t the norm and we proceeded to put it on T.V. Stuff that wasn’t in most of the movies yet. Dylan’s 360 and barspin off a drop 1st season, and Romaniuk being on the show for season two.

Steve Romaniuk really seemed to hit his stride when he got back to Kelowna in season two. Before that he seemed a little out of his element but when he got back home and started ripping up his local trails he started going off. That’s what it seemed like as a viewer anyway.

That’s exactly what happened. He was trying to prove himself. Nobody knew who he was and he was trying to keep up to these big time mountain bike stars. Tyler (Klassen) started noticing how good of a rider he was and he started getting more confident and he kept saying ‘wait until we get to Kelowna boys.’

What was the original spark for drop in? What was the push that made it come together?

It all came from growing frustrations in what I was doing which was the film industry. I was working long, long hours for the man making someone else’s idea of what was entertaining which was a bunch of crap for T.V. and I hated doing that. Then Tim called me up one day and told me how frustrated he was with his job. He had a job selling software to doctors. He was pretty much on the brink. We decided to take a vacation, take the bus which we owned with a bunch of friends. So we took the bus and I put out the word to the towns that we were going to be hitting, putting the word out at the bike shops. Saying that if there were any locals that were going off that we would get in touch with them when we got to there and we’d see what we could do. By the time we got to Nelson and saw Dylan and Shawn (Denny) we were pretty blown away. It was a pretty eye opening trip, just to see how everyone was so stoked on mountain biking and everybody wanted to come out and ride (and be filmed). That’s pretty much how it all started, when we realized there was a whole culture that no one ever got to see really (outside the movies).

How do you make a go of it? Is Drop In a money losing thing right now?

Yeah, we’re having a hard time with our distributor right now. They haven’t been able to sell Drop In to anybody…Sponsorship just covers the cost of doing the show and just getting it out there. There is just so many other costs that just keep adding up and our debt just keeps getting higher. If anyone has any network connections let me know, oh yeah, and the DVD’s for sale through our site www.dropintv.com (ha ha plug!)

How do you guys pay yourselves?

We’ve incurred so much personal debt over the past couple of years that Tim and I take the minimum we need each month to pay ourselves back, and that’s how we pay our minimum payments on our credit cards. I have three credit cards and a line of credit and Tim has a line of credit and five credit cards that are maxed. If anyone out there wants to know how to talk to a collection agency than they should probably just drop Tim a line because he’s got that figured out. There’s a bank, that gave us the original loan to start Drop In, which has decided to write it all off because they knew they’d never get it back considering all of our debt. That was great!

It’s obviously something that you love to do otherwise you wouldn’t be doing it.

Yeah, it’s something that we’ve invested a lot into and some of that is money. When it gets tough I just jump on my sweet (free) VP Free and go for a rip. I can do that whenever I want because I’m the boss. That’s the best part.

Cameron McCaul

What about the new guy Ryan Schnepf, how did he get hooked up with the Drop in crew?

He’s in the second season in the Kelowna episode. He’s the guy who had the cast on his foot he was doing the big stuff with. That kind of opened our eyes when we showed up and he’s got a size ten shoe on one foot and a size eight shoe on the other foot and he’s hucking 60’ airs. And he’s just a really intense guy about the sport. Whenever you talk to him he’s just super supportive of anyone out there riding and just out there to have a good time.

What about Cam McCaul? How did he get hooked up with you guys?

I met him at (Red Bull) Rampage after the second season. I was just sitting back and watching some of the riders and Cam just happened to be hanging around where I was hanging around in that big abyss of freeride heaven and I heard him talking to a few people and just kind of checked out what kind of guy he was because I hadn’t officially met him and I just kept an eye on him. I noticed he was starting to make a name for himself with his style so I thought it’d be a good chance to get an American rider on board.

That was conscious to get an American guy in Drop In?

You can’t just keep it (Drop In) a Canadian thing, it’s got to be world wide. This next season we’ve got an American, we’ve got Canadians and we’ve got New Zealanders on the tour.

Can you say who will be on the tour for season four?

We’re over in New Zealand with (Darren) Berrecloth, Steve Romaniuk, Randy Spangler, he’s the American. We’ve got Mr. Shawn Denny making a comeback, he’s stoked beyond belief do be doing the Drop in thing again. We picked up a guy by the name of Nathan Greenwood in the South Island. Nathan is the brains behind Dream Track, the insane stuff in New World Disorder 5. He is supposed to be the gnarliest rider in New Zealand and he’s going to come on tour for the entire trip. Webe host a bunch of international guest riders too.

What kind of a relationship do you guys have with the riders? Do they get a salary when they are working with you guys?

No we don’t pay them. We’ve helped some of the guys out but that was just out of our own pockets to help them pay the rent and not have to sleep in the streets.

What the thing that get’s you stoked about mountain biking?

I like riding. Once in a while I get to ride and I get stoked. It’s not like any other sport, especially in the mainstream. You can ride side by side with the best in the world and they won’t give you attitude about your skills (or lack there-of). They know how hard it is to ride well, it is definitely a culture. Riding’s the biggest thing that gets me stoked, I don’t get to ride much but when I do it gets me through until the next time I get to ride. I have my wife on a brand new Heckler this year so riding will probably help my sex life too. When she jumps off the bike she’s full of adrenaline. What do you do with all that energy…? That’s good.

Klassen and explosives on board the bus...

Now that it’s been three years and you guys are getting known what’s the reaction when you guys show up in a town in the drop in bus?

It’s pretty big. Almost every day when we come back from filming there’s 15 kids sitting there waiting for an autograph. Word travels pretty fast.

You guys have featured the Pinkbike logo pretty prominently on Drop In in the past. What is the connection between Drop In and Pinkbike?

Pinkbike is our web partner. It’s our only relationship where there is no contract. That’s how close of a relationship we have. Radek at Pinkbike has just got amazing vision and technical skill as far as websites go. Having a guy like Radek on your side and believing in what you’re doing is pretty great. We don’t sell our DVD’s anywhere else and Radek makes sure we have a website. We’re planning a lot of things for the future. This summer we are going to be officially joining forces to create RIP.tv. We’re sick of bending over for the TV networks so we’re going to create our own… On the Web. Stay Tuned.

The Mountain bike industry is full of good dudes. People who are stoked on biking and want to see the sport do well.

Yeah, there’s a couple bad apples out there but all in all everyone is pretty much bro-bro. Sometime it’s hard to deal that way, if you want to talk business…But it’s a bro-bro industry and the longer we’re around it seems the more we’re trusted (in the industry).

Drop In isn’t a mountain bike movie and it’s not a documentary. What words would you use to describe what type of show Drop In is?

Well these days I’m calling it a lifestyle television show…This is lifestyle T.V. for the new generation of sports stars. No kids that I know have posters of Jarome Iginla or whoever the biggest football star is… I don’t even know. The posters they have are Tony Hawk or Tyler Klassen, the biggest action sports stars out there.

What about hooking up with the Collective filmmakers Darcy Wittenburg and Jamie Houssain in Chilliwack, what did they bring to that episode?

They brought their 16 mil cameras. It was pretty tough to organize it but we knew we wanted to do some shooting together. We were able to get them out there in Chilliwack for just one day. And what we were looking for was getting some 16 mil shots for our opening sequence and we did get a couple out of that but it wasn’t the best day for shooting 16 mil.

Drop In is a sponsor driven T.V. show. How much of an effort do you guys make to get your sponsors logos in your shots and in the final product? Is it a conscious thing?

It’s a conscious thing for whoever pays for that consciousness. The show doesn’t make itself and our credit cards are maxed so we don’t pay for the show to happen anymore. People like Adidas Eyewear and Santa Cruz and Progressive Suspension and Block 8 they pay to make sure that their logo gets in the show. It’s called marketing.
The companies that think we can do the show with Product support only don’t understand what we’re doing. We aren’t making a $3000 film with music that we rip off. Product helps us be able to put our bikes together.

You have some companies that believe that they shouldn’t have to sponsor a rider team and also pay for film makers and television producers like us to have those riders in front of the world. Things are changing I think. A photographer has no problem charging a company for a shot that they will use for an ad in a magazine or poster. We are all just photographers, our pictures just move.

Extracted from a recent interview in Pedal Magazine.
Reporoduced with kind permission of Mike Johansen.