Rider Mike Hopkins bridges a gap in the Kootenays of British Columbia in Life Cycles.

If you build it, they will ride.

It’s the cardinal rule for any action-sports enthusiast. Whether you’ve got a snowboard under your boots or a BMX attached to your feet, action-sports junkies are always trying to jump higher, go farther, and pull off the most elaborate scenes imaginable.

Making sure all that insane athleticism gets documented is an integral part of the culture, and the recent release of Life Cycles may have permanently altered how that happens.

“We started talking about it in 2004 and spent a couple of years talking to get in line with what we wanted to do,” Derek Frankowski told Wired.com. Along with co-director Ryan Gibb, Frankowski spent years pulling together this Odyssean project, with a result that’s nothing short of remarkable.

Frankowski, a longtime still photographer for mountain-bike and snow-sports media, made the transition to video with the clear intent of pushing the genre, made harder because action sports movies typically trod a well-worn path. It’s a comfortable genre where viewers know pretty much what they’re going to get.

Life Cycles is a clear departure. (See more behind-the-scenes here.) If Bud Browne’s string of 1950s surf movies helped set the die for the action-film industry along with Warren Miller’s ski films, then Life Cycles is more akin to The Endless Summer, the 1964 release from Bruce Brown that attempted to impart some storytelling and broaden interest past the usual groms who’d attend area showings.

By raising action sports’ filmmaking bar with a series of technically inventive and beautifully shot scenes done like never before, Life Cycles is a movie that anyone, even those who don’t ride, can appreciate on various levels.

“We threw out what we knew about bike films and built this movie from the ground up,” Frankowski told Wired.com in an exclusive interview. “Typically, shots in a bike movie are a rider-based or location-based segment. You go to Alaska with some riders, or you do a segment at a dirt jump track with a big name.

“We threw that out the window. Our approach was more cinematic.”

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