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…
Actually there are a lot of interesting challenges to set-work that mesh well with the adaptability that us traceurs train to such a fine point. When one reel of 35mm film costs over a thousand dollars for example, there is a large pressure to get thing perfect the first time you try them on the first take. Many times you aren’t allowed rehearsals for fear of injury or lack of time. Other times you have to be very precise in your landings and take-offs to hit the marks you need to for the camera while also not running into the immense amount of expensive equipment around (and the other actors too…) Not to mention the amount of body-awareness needed to be able to tell the director exactly what you can do in an area without being able to really practice or experiment much.
But now we’re done, the footage is shot, and I am extremely tired. It sounds like these will be out fairly soon, and there may be as many as 16 different commercials coming out of this footage. Oh and check out my new Mervyns look 
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Yeah, welcome to stuntworld: hitting marks and such, dealing with real-world issues like “how will I do it so it looks good but like it’s completely unplanned, around this limited space and limited time?” …Sounds like you are doing great!
My advice for your future: keep a journal about the things you are learning - you will need them as descriptions for your promo, plus to tell the other folks in your Tribe to remind them.
Best wishes
I started carrying around a journal ever since I started traveling to keep track of all the travel info and everything, now it comes in handy on set all the time, definitely a good idea.
It’s kind of funny for traceurs some of the situations I was in. We train to always land on our feet and never use pads. Yet on set insurance and and the amount of time you repeat the movements require pads. Then sometimes they ask you to do things in the air that makes your instinctual landings impossible. So really they hire you because of your videos or auditions doing parkour / freerunning, then on set they have you do something totally different than what you would normally do in the real world. Speed vaulting into a proper back fall landing was not an easy task to convince my mind to do…
Do you find it really tough to perform infront of cameras? Do you get really nervous, or do you just block everything else out? Do you ever worry about trying to impress the people that hired you?
I’ve gotten very used to cameras by this point and I have no real problems on set, although that last bit about impressing is sometimes annoying.
Whenever I am training outside if I don’t do something perfect the first time then I’ll just keep trying until I”m satisfied. But a lot of times they’ll take many hours to set up a shot, shoot a single take and be done. While I’m sitting there going “well I could do it better with more practice, could go higher, or hold my feet up longer,” etc… I’m a picky person when it comes to performance as I like to showcase my best rather than just the shot the director wants.
Part of the reason I started underscore_FILMS