Why I started When I was twenty-four, the Špetlafilm production company didn’t exist yet. I was shooting motivational sports videos and music videos with millions of views, but I always wanted to work in film. I wanted to be a director of photography. I wrote scripts that investors liked, but external production companies that took them under their wing eventually failed to follow through every time. I was wasting a huge amount of time and getting frustrated. I told myself that since I was already shooting motivational sports videos, I could also shoot a feature film with athletes I partially knew.
From a short film to a feature Originally, I wanted an authorial film of fifteen, maximum twenty-five minutes. On Startovač (a crowdfunding platform), I raised about fifteen thousand crowns and invested it in audio equipment. I shot on a borrowed Red Epic camera, which was equipment worth millions at the time. Mirrorless and DSLR cameras were nowhere near matching the image quality of cinema cameras back then. However, I infected too many people with the idea. I brought on board my girlfriend at the time, now my wife Denisa, with whom I currently run the production company. People reached out saying they knew athletes and would set it up. One of them was co-producer Patrik Semmelbauer, who arranged for freestyle motocross rider Martin Krátký and Libor Podmol, who wasn’t riding the Dakar rally yet. We found sponsors and were supposed to shoot the film for two years. But most of the athletes, just like us, were around twenty years old; they were going through personal development and changing their opinions. Injuries also happened, for example, Adam Rossi tore his bicep. The filming thus stretched out to three years (2012 to 2015).
Penniless, but with an idea Money was lacking. I traveled around the country by train, there was no money for hotels, so I often slept on train station benches waiting for the next connection. When the stations closed for the night, I waited outside. However, the production value was raised by the fact that the athletes obtained and helped me license footage from all over the world: from the USA, China, South Korea, Great Britain, Switzerland, Spain, France, and Slovakia. Wireless audio systems cost a fortune back then, and I was just starting out with sound. We solved this by mostly not seeing the athletes speak, but rather hearing their inner voices, what was happening inside them. I recorded them on a handheld field recorder and covered them with a blanket for better acoustics. We recorded the introductory voiceover with actor Jiří Nebenführ in his café in exactly the same way. A professional studio was financially out of our reach. When we made some money, we bought new equipment to make the film as good as possible. I couldn’t keep borrowing a professional cinema camera all the time; a day cost a lot, plus the travel and the responsibility.
Custom-made music Film composer Karol Antonín composed custom music for us. I recommend this to every producer. Library music costs a fraction, but original music reacts exactly to the emotions, you don’t have to adjust the edit to it, and it won’t be heard anywhere else. Many viewers later asked about the soundtrack. In addition, the band ERA composed a track for us combining rock and rap, a sort of Czech nu-metal in the style of Linkin Park. It plays at the end of the film and was also released as a separate music video.
Post-production at home Nine athletes, over forty shooting days, and the resulting ninety-nine minutes meant a massive amount of footage and hundreds of hours in the edit. It was our first large documentary done entirely in-house. I had to learn how to mix audio for cinema according to standards I didn’t know from YouTube, and export a DCP, the format for digital cinema projection. It was complicated back then, but we managed it.
A premiere that no one wrote down We held the premiere in Olomouc at the Metropol cinema, where Denisa was studying journalism. Many future directors study there and screen their student films at Metropol. The manager thought we were one of them and forgot to write down our screening. In the end, she was surprised herself: the hall with a capacity of 533 seats was full, around five hundred viewers showed up, and we had to add repeat screenings. We invited journalists who wrote very positive articles, and we secured a distributor. We started in single-screen cinemas with Q&A sessions. Some were repeatedly sold out, while in smaller towns they might have been only half or a quarter full. At the International Festival of Outdoor Films in 2016, we won third place in the main category and a special CzechTourism award for best film. Thanks to this, the film reached more cinemas and was eventually bought by Prima Zoom, which broadcast it in prime time for the station’s birthday. Today, it holds a 77 percent rating on ČSFD (Czech-Slovak Film Database) from more than 240 reviews.
A film about growing up Gravitation is about athletes, but its message applies to any life path. It’s about growing up, and we ourselves were growing up at the time. The stories begin in school and childhood, continue with a love for sports, building a foundation, and facing failures, and end with absolute success, represented by Libor Podmol as an X Games winner. Towards the end, the stories interconnect because the athletes know each other. Occasionally, someone for whom the film helped through a tough period would come to a screening. I remember a mother and daughter for whom the film was a great support during their hardest time. That is the best reward a creator can get. It was mentally demanding for me. I had to constantly motivate myself while capturing things that are hard to bear. When you spend so much time with people, you worry about them. I am proud of where the film got to. And what else would it deserve? To be sent out to festivals around the world. Even though it was released in 2015, its content will not age.