Published April 5, 2023 at 10:00 a.m.
| Updated April 5, 2023 at 12:32 p.m.
click to enlarge
Courtesy Of Nick Stefani
A still from "A Hidden Path"
Skateboarding and filmmaking have always been linked for Williston-based Nick Stefani. Growing up in Richmond during the early 2000s, he got interested in climbing on the board after stumbling across tapes of skaters and snowboarders at video stores and flea markets. Most of that footage was filmed across the country in Colorado, but Stefani responded to its "incredible and really motivating energy," he said. Before long, he had both his first board and a little camera that he used to shoot his own videos with friends and family.
What started as what Stefani called "simple, stupid stuff that a million other kids were doing" turned into a freelance video business that he operated in Burlington after graduating from Champlain College. Working with clients such as WhistlePig Whiskey and the University of Vermont, Stefani honed his storytelling chops and learned about the craft that had started as a hobby. Meanwhile, he continued to pursue his love of skateboarding. The two passions crashed back together for his short film "A Hidden Path."
The nine-minute short centers on a wooden skate park that Stefani and his friends built between 2012 and 2016. When his father bought a cabin in the Northeast Kingdom with a parcel of mountainous land attached, Stefani was inspired by rural builders such as Richard Proenneke who went into the woods and made something "beautiful and unique," as he put it. For him, that meant cutting a path through the forest, scoping out a clearing and building a wooden skate ramp with a view of the valley.
Stefani started the project's first leg, clearing the path, with high school friends. When it came time to build the ramp itself, however, that first crew peeled off because none of them skated. "I needed to find people who were ambitious and skateboarders, which is sometimes a hard combination to come by," Stefani said with a laugh.
Luckily for him, a group of college friends fit the bill, and they got to work hauling up wood and turning the empty clearing into a skater's dream.
Once completed in 2016, the ramp began slowly rotting and falling apart, like anything built deep in the wilderness. Back in town, Stefani shuttered his video business and moved on to work for a sign shop in Williston.
While proud of the ramp, he realized that maintaining it was unsustainable. "You could tell someone in their early twenties built it, because it's a logistical nightmare," he said. "You're just putting money into something that will rot away."
Now 34, Stefani decided it was time for the park to get one last ride in the form of "A Hidden Path."
He bought a Super 8 camera because he believed the "old-school colors" and "nitty-gritty grain" of eight-millimeter film would best match the project. With camera in hand, he rounded up his friends, and they got to work restoring the ramp to its former glory for the curtain call.
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Courtesy Of Nick Stefani
Tommy DeLitto taking a nap on the ramp after a full day of working and skating
They took on broken stairs, disintegrated patches of the ramp and corners where the woods had crept back into control. Ultimately, their work transformed the ramp back into what Stefani calls his "perfect vision" of it.
He shot the film over a weekend in July 2022. Saturday was devoted to capturing the trip from Burlington to the site and up the path, while Sunday was dedicated to the ramp and skating.
Stefani initially worried that his friends would call him a "hypocrite" for bringing a camera, he said, after years of enforcing a strict no-social-media policy meant to safeguard the ramp's location. But they uniformly embraced the idea. He sent the film off to be developed and then, he said, spent "a few weeks not sleeping very much" to edit it together.
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Courtesy Of Nick Stefani
A still from "A Hidden Path"
While Stefani said he originally made the film only for "a sort of closure" on a project that had taken up so much of his young adulthood, his friends encouraged him to share it more widely. The first step was uploading the full short to YouTube, where it still lives. Stefani has also submitted "A Hidden Path" to the Mountainfilm festival, an extension of the Telluride Film Festival that happens each May in Colorado, and plans to submit to other festivals, too.
Asked what he hopes viewers will take away from the film, Stefani kept it simple: "Challenge yourself to build beautiful and different things, because why would you make anything normal?"
Smiling wryly, he added, "I could have built the ramp at the bottom of the mountain, you know? But then we wouldn't be sitting here talking."
The original print version of this article was headlined "Ramped Up | A short film gives Nick Stefani's mountain skate park one last ride"
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