Student wins Red Bull video contest

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Last Friday, Kayla Higginbotham accepted a ride from a nice guy in a sweet car. But it wasn’t just any nice guy. It was extreme sports star Travis Pastrana, in his top-of-the-line rally car.

Higginbotham, Overland Park junior, won the Red Bull Rough Cuts video contest. Red Bull paid to fly Higginbotham, who is majoring in film and media studies, to Steamboat Springs, Colo., Thursday, and she met Pastrana on Friday.

Contributed photo

Kayla Higginbotham, Overland Park junior, prepares for her rally car ride with driver and extreme sports star Travis Pastrana. The ride was part of the prize Higginbotham got for winning a video competition put on by Red Bull.

Higginbotham and 2,500 other students from across the U.S. were given 60 minutes of raw video from Pastrana’s motocross and rally car racing career to edit into a highlight reel of less than three minutes. The public chose ten finalists on the Red Bull Web site, and in May, Red Bull announced that Higginbotham’s nearly two-minute video was the winner.

The eight-minute rally car ride and opportunity to meet him were her only prizes, but Higginbotham said it was well worth it.

“It was just like a day that never ended, and that I never wanted to end,” she said.

Travis Pastrana is an extreme sports star and stunt performer who has been racing motocross since the age of 4 and rally racing since 2003. His most spectacular crash was in 2005, when he rolled his Subaru rally car seven and a half times and walked away unhurt.

“Are you alive? Are you alive? That was a hell of a ride!” he cried to his co-driver immediately afterwards in a video taken of the crash.

Although Higginbotham said she had reason to feel concerned when she rode in the car with Pastrana on Friday, she didn’t scream once. He noticed, and was disappointed.

Higginbotham said he told her he didn’t feel as though he did his job because she wasn’t scared.

Rally drivers compete in timed sprints on unpaved roads varying in terrain from smooth gravel to ice and snow. The roads are typically rural public roads that have been closed so drivers can drive at full speed.

Higginbotham had experience editing highlight videos for her high school’s sports teams, and said her goal was to become a sports video editor.

“At first I think it was, ‘Oh here’s an opportunity,’” she said. “It was a free contest, no money, and rarely does that ever happen. But the more I got into it and the more I started doing it, the more passionate I got about it.”

Higginbotham said her participation in the contest started off as a simple, fun thing to do. She had only watched rally racing one or two times before, but said she was familiar with motocross because of its inclusion in the X-games. She said she knew that Travis Pastrana was a rising star, but was not familiar with his work as a rally racer.

Higginbotham entered the contest more than a year ago on the advice of her friend Natalie Cordray, a junior at Arizona State University and fellow Overland Park native, who won a Red Bull video contest in 2007 and was awarded a trip to Canada to snowboard with professional snowboarder Zach Leach.

Cordray said she and Higginbotham had played sports together in their childhood and took a Radio and TV production class together in high school. She said their Red Bull contest wins helped bring them closer together.

“We call each other Red Bull sisters,” she said. “We both won these outrageous contests through Red Bull and got to experience the some of the craziest things we’ll ever experience in our life.

Higginbotham said the trip to Colorado also provided her with valuable contacts. She said that there was a chance she might work with Pastrana on a new feature film produced in collaboration with Gregg Godfrey, a movie director who previously directed a movie with Pastrana called “199 Lives: The Travis Pastrana Story.”

— — Edited by Abby Olcese

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