There are a couple of different routes you can take to becoming a documentary filmmaker. One is to go to film school, make a couple of student flicks, apply for grants, and cross your fingers. Then there’s the Jaret Belliveau method: team up with your high-school best friend, spend your life savings on film equipment, travel and sleep in a Volkswagen camper van for months on end, and start filming.

“It was just a total, like, get up and see what you can do scenario,” recalls the Moncton, New Brunswick–based Belliveau, whose debut film, Highway Gospel, documents the often hilarious subcultures of downhill skateboarding.

An established photographer, Belliveau, 30, stumbled into documentary film after his buddy Craig Jackson, 28, then living in Kelowna, B.C., and training as a downhill longboard racer, invited him to visit.

“He approached me with the idea of coming out and taking still photographs, and after he was injured in his first race—he seriously hurt his knee—he kind of had to come back to Moncton where we both were from,” Belliveau recalls on the line from Moncton. “From there on, we kind of started deciding it wasn’t really a still project, it was a documentary, a film.”¦We bought a $100 DVD that explained to us how to use our camera, and that’s how I learned. Craig did sound; he had never done sound before.”

In the summer of 2007, the pair headed out across the country in Belliveau’s ’76 VW van, gathering footage of 15 characters in the downhill-skate scene. Upon their return, they whittled down their vision to three main characters, then followed up with them over the following two summers to create a documentary with a mockumentary vibe.

There’s Bricin Lyons, a larger-than-life skating promoter based in Pender Harbour, who, in the first five minutes of the film, is seen barrelling down highways alongside transport trucks at more than 100 kilometres per hour. There’s the Yoda-like Jody Willcock, a former shop teacher turned skateboard innovator based in Kimberley, B.C., who, despite a heavy beer and pot habit, builds a computer-controlled jigsaw out of scrap metal and eBay parts in his garage. Rounding out the cast is the sympathetic Ottawa-based Claude Regnier, a former slalom skateboarding world champion who, at the age of 50, is determined to regain his title, despite the toll his obsession has taken on his family—not to mention the matter of ongoing heart problems that landed him on the operating table in 1999.

“What ended up happening is we ended up following people who are extremely passionate and have not given up on their dreams for any cost,” notes Belliveau, who says being surrounded by such relentless enthusiasm helped him bring his documentary to fruition.

“I really feel like these people rubbed off on us,” he reflects. “Their passion definitely rubbed off on Craig and I. Being our first film, we just really wanted to see it through and finish it.”¦This has been four years of free labour. We would rent rental cars, like vans, that had stow-and-go seating, and we would put the seats down and build the bed in the back. We were, like, sleeping outside of these people’s homes. I had to sleep in a parking garage for two weeks in Toronto while we were editing.”

He pauses and adds, no pun intended: “It’s been a wild ride.”

Watch the trailer for Highway Gospel.

Highway Gospel screens at 9 p.m. at the Rio Theatre on Friday (May 13) as part of the DOXA Documentary Film Festival (May 6 to 15).