Tyson Cecka

Is for suckers! The past few days I’ve been stuck inside just about all day with very strange sleeping habits, just researching like mad all day. Researching everything, everywhere, no film school needed when you have the Internet!

I spent two days researching external hardrives, a day researching shotgun mics, a day doing basic research on lighting, and a day researching DIY dollys, cranes, and skaters. I’ve watched every single IzzyVideo podcast (50+), read a ton of articles on Wikipedia, and I’m currently browsing DVXuser like the bible that it is. I’ve already bookmarked more than 60 sites that are useful for audio, video, stills, and every aspect of production.

At this point right now I basically do parkour full-time, this is my life. When _FILMS starts making other stuff than just parkour/freerunning videos it will be different. But for now I have no other job than my independent stuntwork and production, I’m not going to school (taking a year or two off), I’m not receiving any financial support, I’m actually surviving and I’m loving it!

Shooting at 600p requires an incredible amount of light because of the extremely fast shutter speed. Today we shot inside which means they used practically every single lamp they had. They even specially rented some humongous 20k+ beams of death that I didn’t even know existed. We couldn’t stay in front of the camera for very long because it was so hot that the makeup would melt. Which brings interesting challenges when you are trying to throw flips and things, the lights in your eyes are blinding yet you cannot look away…

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I forgot to bring my camera again today so sorry for the lack of pictures. While almost all of my parkour buddies are up in Bellingham training like mad, indoors and out, I sat around today on set and did absolutely nothing for seven hours… Although my call time was at 10:30am I didn’t actually go on camera till sometime after 5pm. That is not a unique occurrence for commercials though, sometimes there are days where I never even go on camera!

But I’m not complaining, Continue Reading »

Ah, it feels good to be on a professional set again. This time it’s a commercial for Mervyns fashion. And when the footage comes out for this one you are all going to be blown away. They are shooting at 600 frames per second…in HD. That is 20x slowmotion at perfect sharpness at high resolution!

Today I jumped over some walls, created this new weird two step angled extended sideflip thing, and played on a huge trampoline on top of a parking garage in downtown Seattle. It’s feels really good to work local, this city really is the best.

And good news, I am now eligible for entry into the Screen Actors Guild! Things are getting exciting

And the link to the video on King5. I thought it came out quite well, Lori did a great job. Here’s to hoping she’ll come out for the Femme jam This is also the first mainstream media reference of the PNWPA which is pretty exciting.

They seemed to really like that cat leap footage…good edit though, especially because we barely seemed to have any filming time before the sun went down. Wish they had used more of my interview though, it was a fairly long one but one of my best so far. Getting better at speaking for these things.

This is a run we pieced together through UW. We made it all up on the two days we shot but the cool thing is is that this is location-accurate, meaning we didn’t cheat the locations. This is an actual run that can be done through UW, although it is very tiring.

The DVD quality version of this video is also now available via Azureus utilizing the Vuze network. Azureus is a peer-to-peer torrent downloading program, and Vuze is a HD video sharing network that spreads and super-seeds its videos to the point of an average download speed of 300-500kbs. There is some really great content already on Vuze, and that’s where our next stuff will be released as well so check it out! Just click the picture on the right.

This is also Underscore Films’ (_FILMS) first project! We certainly learned a lot from this project and our next should be even better. We made this project for TWI productions – the people who sent me to Tokyo. Unfortunately because they needed it quickly I ended up editing this one without music in mind which made finding music for it and re-editing a major pain in the ass. We definitely need to find some independent music producers. This is also my first attempt at proper color correction and integrating different cut effects.

Let me know what you think!

If you want to share this video on your own site, feel free to either link to this page or use the embed code on the underscore_FILMS website.

YouTube, Yahoo, MySpace, Metacafe, Revver, DailyMotion, Blip.tv and Brightcove

Tune in tonight the 18th at 6:30pm to see myself and a bunch of friends at Freeway Park speaking about and demonstrating Parkour!

Damn, I really tried hard to get the footage from the show but it looks like it is not coming (need to start writing this stuff into the contracts). I wanted the full footage because the TV edit cut out some good stuff from the floor routine and because I could have edited together something really cool…

Oh well, there are some videos out there, click through for the youtube ones – one from the audience and one from the TV edit. I’m the one on the floor in the stupid bright green pants

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Thomas has written up a great little post on how some of the original traceurs in Lisse used to train and how training with them changed his life.

All of these guys had been through some much more intense training than me, and there was in Lisses a taste for very hard work. They were all very good at finding a sneaky way to make every exercise, every jump even harder. They did it as a game, creating little “fun” challenges all the time. The emulation in the group was the best I’ve ever seen. If you didn’t train your ass off, you were called lazy !

It offers a lot of insight into how parkour in Lisse was before all the arguments and commercialization and splits that we see nowadays. Fortunately, reading his post reminded me of a lot of the same experiences I had when I was first learning even though I started many years after he did on a different continent entirely.

I’m sure many things will be changing when parkour enters the mainstream, but I’ve always believed that the true spirit of parkour will live on forever in the dedicated people (like Thomas) who let it enter their being and change them forever. I’ve been very lucky to be able to travel a bit and meet some of these amazing traceurs and the communities around them, and it’s definitely not a spirit that can be broken easily.

*On another note I’ve added a blogroll to the sidebar where I’ll be adding sites I visit and the blogs of traceurs that I respect a great deal to.

I’m sorry to everyone I’ve had to blow off this past week, I’ve been pulling all nighters editing and experimenting with a new video that should be out soon.

But anyway today King5 news came out to Freeway Park to do a little story on parkour. This one should be interesting because they actually wanted to do a story on the benefits, dedication, and safety aspects of parkour rather than the usual “what is this crazy shit the kids are doing?” news story. We definitely needed more time with the sun out, but I think we got some good interviews and action shots in to make a pretty sweet story.

It should air on Monday, I’ll post when I know when!