Abe Kislevitz

Abe Kislevitz is a senior creative director at GoPro and a popular content creator.

He has more than 150K subscribers on his eponymous YouTube channel and has more than 130K followers on Instagram.

Abe was also an avid skier.

Introduction-

Abraham Kislevitz (Abe Kislevitz) was born on 26 November 1986.

He hails from Wilsonville, Oregon, United States and grew up listening to a lot of melodic classical music.

His mother, Barbara Harper, works at Blissborn Birth Hypnosis.

The late Harry Kislevitz was his father.

Abe has an elder brother, Sam Kislevitz, and a sister, Beth Braunstein.

Love for art, technology & skiing-

At a young age, Abe developed a passion for art and technology; he used to surf the internet for long hours, looking for new technology and gear.

Thanks to his tech-savvy brother, he used to work with editing software, Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver, 3D modeling, etc.

While in high school, Abe started skiing in the park without any formal ski training.

As he has been an introvert, he wasn’t into socializing but was very much into skiing; every weekend, he used to go to the mountains to ski.

Abe studied music in high school.

Working for 4FRNT Skis, thanks to viral paintings-

For his advanced art studies in high school, Abe painted a series of photorealism acrylic on canvas ski-themed paintings inspired by the pictures posted in the Newschoolers forum.

He uploaded his paintings on the Newschoolers forum, which became viral; one of his paintings was the top-rated and commented photo on the forum for a few months.

Thanks to Abe’s viral paintings, Matt Sterbenz, founder of 4FRNT Skis, reached out to him and asked him to do top sheet graphics for 4FRNT.

So, in 2005, he started graphic designing for 4FRNT, which he continued till 2014.

After graduating high school and through college, Abe did 40 top sheet designs; he did most of the MSP graphics for the first five years.

Education; rocking the USC Ski & Snowboard Team-

In 2005, Abe joined the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, California to study for a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Mechanical Engineering.

At that time, he was extremely poor, so he got a full ride to USC.

While at USC, he worked as a web developer and graphic designer on campus.

Abe graduated in 2010.

Originally, he wanted to study Product Design at USC but as at that time, the university didn’t offer that course, he had to choose fluid dynamics.

Abe hated engineering and it became very evident to him that he wouldn’t settle in an engineering job.

After graduating, he took an extra semester and took database design and iPhone programming classes; at the time, he was into web development, he built a carpool application for the USC ski team and worked on this app for a couple of years.

At USC, Abe’s primary focus was on skiing; he was very involved in the USC Ski & Snowboard Team.

He used to ski for USC at Mammoth.

Abe, along with his friends, Chris, and Caleb, used to ski every single weekend; they won the National College Championship, two years in a row.

Starting his YouTube channel; stumbling upon GoPro-

As Abe along with his friends used to ski on the weekends at Mammoth, away from his classmates, he decided to start a YouTube channel to share his skiing adventures with them.

Also, he envisaged having a YouTube channel would help him recruit people for the ski team.

So, on 7 February 2007, Abe started his eponymous YouTube channel and started publishing USC ski team videos.

On 21 February 2007, he published his first video, ‘Switch 5 & 3.’

At that time, Abe used to shoot his videos with a Canon Digital ELPH camera; its video quality wasn’t great.

In 2008, Alex Clarey, one of USC’s ski team officers attended the Action Sports Retailer (ASR) trade show, in San Diego, and here, he met Justin Wilkenfeld, a GoPro employee.

Alex requested Justin a couple of GoPro cameras to shoot the ski team’s YouTube videos.

So, Abe received a couple of GoPro Wide HERO cameras, powered by AAA batteries, in mail; the video quality of these cameras wasn’t better than that of the ELPH camera.

On 22 January 2009, he published the first video with these GoPro cameras, ‘USC Ski & Snowboard Video of the Week.’

Abe was impressed by the GoPro cameras, as he could just mount them on his helmet, without having to hold them and focus on skiing.

Working for GoPro-

Abe was stoked on knowing that GoPro believed in the USC ski team and sent them a couple of cameras for free.

So, he decided to give them back by shooting an entire video on GoPro and editing it meticulously envisaging an epic video.

So, Abe shot the video and instead of editing in his usual style using iMovie, he used Adobe Premiere and spent an entire night editing the video.

In the morning, he showed this video to his team and then, uploaded it to YouTube; the CEO of GoPro watched his video and sent him an appreciative email.

At that time, GoPro had around eight employees, and Abe’s video got shared with all the GoPro employees.

Thanks to this, GoPro invited him to come to Mount Hood to help filming with a prototype GoPro camera and editing the ski promo for the launch; he filmed ‘The Ski Movie’ for them.

At that time, Abe was one of the earliest people to shoot with GoPro cameras while adventuring.

He started publishing GoPro tutorials on his YouTube channel showing people how they can shoot high quality cinematic videos with affordable GoPro cameras.

Joining GoPro formally-

In the summer of 2009, at Mount Hood, Abe was handed a couple of prototype HD Hero GoPro cameras.

He skied at Timberline for a day and filmed with these prototype cameras and was amazed by the quality of their HD footage while editing the video.

In 2010, GoPro offered Abe a full-time job, but he deferred the offer as he had a couple of classes to take at the university.

After graduating, he decided to take a break and ski for six months and then join GoPro.

In the winter of 2010, Abe moved to Mammoth and lived in the ski team house and skied every day.

At that time, GoPro gave him a couple of cameras; he started filming his skiing and learning everything about the cameras; his learnings were based on other branded others’ film cameras.

Abe used to relay his knowledge to the GoPro employees; at that time, GoPro didn’t pay him but sent him free cameras.

He got invited to the NAB Show of the National Association of Broadcasters; here, he met the GoPro team and got flown out to Las Vegas.

Here, Abe’s job interview was conducted which included standing in front of a 3D TV and explaining the future of 3D cameras at the trade show.

At that time, he also had a job offer from 4FRNT Skis for the creative director position, thanks to his work there of doing graphics and building their website.

Initially, Abe was torn between GoPro and 4FRNT Skis; but after meeting the GoPro team and understanding their grand vision and mode of operation, he decided to join GoPro full-time.

Nick Woodman, the CEO of GoPro, was impressed with his YouTube videos and hired him to make similar videos for the company.

In July 2010, Abe joined GoPro as a production artist in the media department; he was the 31^st employee at the company; he started working at the office in Half Moon Bay, California.

He worked in various roles at GoPro like colorist, editor and then, started working as a Senior Creative Director.

As a Senior Creative Director, Abe is mainly involved with launch videos, new GoPro commercials, creative direction, filming and editing, and product testing in the field.

Thanks to his engineering background, he also helps in the engineering side of GoPro.

As a part of his job, Abe also went on trips with popular snowboarders, Travis Rice, and Shaun White (former snowboarder and skateboarder).

A popular content creator-

As of September 2023, Abe has 158K subscribers on his eponymous YouTube channel.

And has 138K followers on Instagram.

Abe works full-time for GoPro and is a part-time content creator.

He, through his socials shows creative approaches of using GoPro cameras to shoot entire films.

Abe has a website and is an outdoor enthusiast; his other hobbies are mountain biking and surfing.

He lives in Carlsbad, California and is a polyglot as he knows English and Japanese.

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