USD Magazine Summer 2010

DAY 42

“As time goes by, the disease progresses and my muscles start to waste away. By waking up in the morning and saying to myself, ‘Where am I going to go today?’ I want to prove that I’m better than what I’m perceived to be.”

duction, Shelley quit his job and Duprel and Pandza took a semes- ter off school. They left the United States a few days after Thanksgiving with little idea what to expect. n New Zealand, still on the first leg of his trip, the Zorb wrangler asked Shelley to change his shirt. (A Zorb is an inflatable globe big enough for a person to fit inside and roll down a hill — the latest thing overseas, Duprel I

explains.) Because the inner shell is filled with water, Zorb employ- ees — called wranglers — give riders clothes to wear so they don’t get their own wet. Changing a shirt, though, isn’t always a simple task for Shelley. He doesn’t have enough strength in his arms to lift them high enough to pull a shirt over his head. Instead, he swings his arm and uses momentum to reach his collar. On tape, the wrangler, standing tall at a good

foot over Shelley, watches in sur- prise as Shelley starts to swing his arm. The scene unfolds awkward- ly as confusion crawls across his face. It’s clear he doesn’t quite understand what Shelley is doing or how he should respond. The look on that wrangler’s face is one small moment in thousands of hours of footage that Duprel and Pandza captured during the trip. But like so many

impact that could only have been captured as it happened. Duprel credits the scene with a decision they made early on — somewhat naively, he concedes now — to film Shelley nearly all day, every day. While that made editing a monumental task, the vast amount of footage allowed them to pull together a documentary that feels honest and real. “I think if a larger company did it, they might try and film select things, and they wouldn’t get the

others in the film, that one moment delivers a visceral

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