OverDrive Media Group

The 2009 riding season has officially ended for OverDrive, and it's been quite an eventful one. This was the first season OverDrive has been in existance - it was only in early June that I created OverDrive Media Group?at the age of 15. In the 6 months that OverDrive has been running, we're released 3 videos (one of which was nominated Video Of The Day on PinkBike, the world's largest MTB website), created a website which is ever-increasing in popularity, and have plans for many new projects in 2010.

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It all started in February 2008, when I met Vivian Viljoen. Myself and Vivian were the only two people riding downhill at school, and being classmates we had plenty of time to talk about mountain biking. In February one of us casually threw around the idea of making a?video together, and after days of brainstorming we finally came up with a name - 2WO FO4R ZER0, which stands for 2 Riders, 4 Locations, and Zero gravity. That summer, in July, we went to film for a week in Verbier, Switzerland as my family have a residence there, we we had plans to shoot in 3 other locations in Germany. However, the project stalled shortly after shooting in Switzerland due to exams at school, and we only resumed work on 2WO FO4R ZER0 in April 2009. About a month before we had planned to film at the other 3 locations, Vivian has some bad news to share. He had just found out that he was moving back to his home country of South Africa - in 4 days' time. We frantically got back to work and filmed the Hamburg, Germant segment (one of the local spots) literally hours before Vivian had to pack his bike up for the move. Vivian's early departure meant that we never managed to film in the other 2 planned locations, so we had to leave 2WO FO4R ZER0 as it was. Editing the thing took me almost 3 weeks, as I had never edited a video in my life before. It was finally released late May this year, just over 10 months after we started filming. In the end, 2WO FO4R ZER0 was never really a success, but nevertheless we were proud of what we managed to achieve. What 2WO FO4R ZER0 did do was show us how much fun we could have filming, riding, and editing a movie together. I decided that I would persue this new hobby and make more videos in the future, so I created OverDrive Media Group as a name to go by for my future videos.

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Fast forward a few months and OverDrive had released two more videos: Felix van Oost - Riding 2009 and the 2009 Demo Reel. Felix van Oost - Riding 2009 was a self-filmed video I made, which took me 6 full days of filming and 10 hours of editing to complete. It was released in August 2009, and turned out much better overall than 2WO FO4R ZER0 as I had learned from a lot of the mistakes we made in our first video. By this time?OverDrive Media Group started gaining popularity, and in October we released our 2009 Demo Reel, which was a compilation of the best shots from both 2WO FO4R ZER0 and Felix van Oost - Riding 2009, with some previously unseen footage thrown in. On the 26th November, the 2009 Demo Reel was nominated as Video Of The Day on PinkBike.com, the largest MTB website in the world, and it had been watched over 17,000 times over a period of 24 hours - a very positive note to end the season on.

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I think that the unique thing about OverDrive is our age - because of this our point of view on the sport of mountain biking?is different to anyone elses' so we have unique stories to tell, and this is what I?believe will make our future videos entertaining to watch. I'd just like to take a moment to thank all the people that have supported us and our work, without which our videos would never be what they are today. We hope 2010 will allow us to step up a notch with our videos, and we can't wait for the?new season to begin!

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Felix van Oost

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