Update: I’ve moved this post over to the PNWPA blog where a lot of this stuff will go now, check it out!

Before the first video has even been completely finished and released, a new one we just shot in Seattle is coming out this Friday the 8th. Graciously sponsored by Stoel Rives law firm, this one focuses on a race in a full business suit across Seattle shot in full 4K (about 8 times the size of 720 HD) by the RED ONE camera.

Scout Day

The project started with a scouting day where myself and Jereme crammed into the production van with the NüRD guys (what the production company is now called), and basically just hit as many different possibilities as we could find downtown. Scouting with another traceur for a video was new to me but I really liked it as you can bounce ideas off of eachother and find new opportunities with more sets of eyes (the production guys still need a bit of work on their parkour vision). We then picked the best of the best and laid out a shoot plan for the next and only shoot day.

The Shoot Day

Was about 11 hours of work in an uncomfortable business suit in the hot summer There were two really harrowing spots we had selected, so we set one for the first shot in the morning to give the most prep time and one at the very end in case I messed up and we had to scrap it.

All considered though, the day went great! There were some setbacks and some last minute changes and improvs, but that’s how it goes and that’s what we’re the best at Plus, a last minute change at Freeway Park got me to revisit one of the hardest wallpasses I’ve ever done (with success in after 30 tries of getting used to it in the suit…)

-Full Flickr set of photos-

See the video!

Credits

Produced by NüRD Productions
Sponsored by Stoel Rives LLP
Starring: Tyson Cecka
Make-Up: Jessica Serna
Original Music: Mason Kaye
Recorded and Mixer: Tyler Westen
Violin: Yousi Ma
Cello: Mackenzie Israel-Trummel
Musical Consultants: Alexandra Forman and Caitlin Anderson

Updated with new footy!

Blog’s been quiet recently as I’ve been having a little mini-vacation with my folks in Vancouver, WA. I came down originally for a video shoot with some cool guys but I ended up staying down for Mother’s Day as well (love ya Mom!).

The shoot went really well though and I’m very excited to see the finished project. Why? We shot on the RED One digital camera system 110fps at 2K resolution, that’s about 4x slow motion in higher than full HD resolution.

Update: The song is “Death of a lonely superhero” by Clover. Here’s a link:

Click -here- to see a hires rough cut of a few locations, and see below for the photos!

One day of quick location scouting led us to an awesome MAX station stop and all the fun stuff around PSU. The next day was entirely filled with jumping over stuff and hugging hot women. Check it:

Was a crazy fun day, and the footage is looking absolutely amazing. Thanks go out to the folks at Picture This! and Sean Rawls, keep checking back for when I can release what we shot!

Click -here- for the full Flickr set.

Well, my “vacation” in San Fran in between tour dates got sidetracked a bit yesterday as I needed to travel to Vegas for a day to check out a new set being built for a job in Hawaii, but we made up for it today. It’s surprisingly though how boring Vegas is in the middle of the day when you are there alone, all I had to do to pass the time till my flight was to lose some money playing poker

But for my last day in SF we got some great wandering training in, although I’m a bit sick currently and couldn’t push very far. I did find out that I can lache farther than I can standing jump Need to find some more of these:

I forget where we went…but it was pretty…and the scaffolding in SF kicks ass!

Guess the Challenge

And here’s a new game if anyone wants to play. If you can guess the challenge I came up with (and eventually got) for this spot in the comments…I’ll send you a video of what our performance choreography looks like. So who thinks like I do?

I actually need to get some sleep here pretty soon, as I’m flying to Vegas for a few hours early in the morning tomorrow to check out a different set that’s getting built there. Will update with more info on what we actually do on this stuff later in the week.

An ardent reader of this blog will notice that the only images I have been posting have been of either sunrises or sunsets. Well it’s not my fault. It’s Boston man, every time that sun hits the horizon it just looks amazing (you can click on the thumbnails to see what I mean).

But anyway, today and yesterday were great days and we got some great training in. Yesterday we explored around Harvard and found some fun stuff, and today I introduced an old good friend of mine to parkour at MIT. Which at first didn’t look very promising from the car, but there is some very cool architecture hidden around that campus that I’m digging a lot.

We even did some exploring inside when I convinced her to follow me up this crazy staircase to the roof of the CS building (all college roof access points seem to be the same). Was a bit chilly up there, but what a great view:

Boston seems like such an amazing city for parkour with the billion college campuses they have, and I look forward to exploring the rest of them! Which means I definitely need to get some sleep now. If it doesn’t rain horribly like it did today we’ll get to meet some of the local traceurs tomorrow for the first time.

The blog’s been quiet lately which generally means that I’m crazy busy, case in point this last week. Apart from having to shoot and edit some last minute audition videos I finally got to see my folks again as we traveled to Granville Island in Vancouver, BC (Canada) for my dad’s birthday.

About Granville

Granville Island is now officially one of my favorite places. The whole “island” rests underneath the Granville bridge in Vancouver, is surrounded by huge skyscrapers (mostly apartment buildings), and used to be a entirely populated and polluted by heavy industry.

Yet the whole place has been very cleverly redesigned into a bustling “urban oasis” that’s part park, playground, art house, and public market. And it’s clean! All of Vancouver was a breath of fresh air for me (literally) after being in places like Hong Kong and Tokyo. The skies are clear and the water is beautiful, it’s quite impressive for such a huge city and I definitely want to go back. Most of these pictures are of Granville’s or Stanley Park’s view of Vancouver but there are some of Granville further down.

Wooden Boat Festival

The main reason for our visit was to see Vancouver’s wooden boat festival, a small but interesting gathering of some of the most beautiful wooden boats and their makers.

Public Market

But my favorite place was the public market. It was much bigger than these photos suggest and filled with the most diverse and interesting people, and food!

Capilano

We also visited the Capilano suspension bridge, which is practically an eco-friendly version of disneyland, but that’s enough pictures for one day. The full set is here.

Cheers!

That’s right, I install new things for my blog! You can navigate between them using your left-right keys or by clicking on the left or right area of the photo as well. It also works on videos as you can see by the videos in the sidebar or just click here.

Edit: I originally took those pictures because I thought I looked like that guy from Street Fighter, well two people have now told me I look like Guile! Pretty funny, maybe I should dye my hair blond and wear militay pants everywhere…

The previous post and next post links above the title are also new.

Tech Stuff:

To get this to work I’m currently using two hacked versions of Slimbox and Videobox. I modified Videobox to work with Revver videos and allow links in descriptions, and I modified Slimbox to automatically add Flickr links in the description properly. I’m working on simply combining both of them so they run faster but I’m new at this and am still learning. And if anyone can tell me why the combination of SWFObject and mootools breaks youtube and google autoplay functionality as well as fullscreen I’d greatly appreciate it.

Oh and I’m now using a different method of fetching my recent Revver videos in the sidebar. Originally I was using the Revver Widget, but it was slow and offsite. I learned a bit of PHP to code my own little widget and I now fetch directly from the Revver API. Man I really need to get outside…this is sad.

Doh! So I remembered to bring my camera so I could take many wonderful pictures of beautiful Arizona, yet I forgot to bring the necessary memory card which turned it into a rather heavy paperweight because I’m too cheap to buy another. Which is too bad because I could have gotten some good practice at shooting in tricky lighting conditions, which, um, you can see a bit in these photos from Mark Sorry Mark.

But anyway, the performance went perfectly. They built us some sweet obstacles, and we choreographed a great little run in the day’s preparation that we had.

My favorite part of the performance was that we integrated it with the fashion show they were doing “catwalk” style. The audience had no idea what was coming, they thought they were just watching a normal little fashion show albeit with a few strange structures lying around. They had no idea that Levi and I had snuck around to the back to prepare for our little surprise. As one of the models was jogging down the catwalk to showcase some new shoes, Levi rushes up onto one of the obstacles jumps to an underbar and rolls out of sight – an absolute blur of color. The model comes back acting like nothing happens and the next one comes out to do a bit jogging. I take my cue and dive into a double kong across the stage, rolling out of sight.

The audience is freaking out at this point, the energy in the room is crazy. The next model brings Levi sprinting up the entire length of the catwalk and I follow him up after a quick tic tac. This is where our performance really begins. Huge kongs and underbars onto the stage, flips practically on top of the audience, large jumps over them, coordinated near misses of smacking into each other, and a sweet sychronized catleap near the finale ensues. Video to come soon

Everyone at K-Swiss seemed to really love the show. It culminated in probably the first standing ovation I’ve ever had. We had some great talks with some big executives there, we may have convinced a few shoe designers to come to Mark’s gym, and the bottom-line – we entertained a lot of people. Even after the show actually, as we burned off some extra adrenaline on a sweet cat leap we eyed earlier.

Today we went to Paramount Studios and got everything choreographed and locked down. This is going to be an amazing show, and everyone will be able to see it on AMC TV because it’s for the Taurus World Stunt Awards! Somewhere in-between the explosions, pirates, car wrecks, and The Rock we are doing an 8 person 2 minute performance across roofs, an armored car, a crane, and like a jewelry store or something… Bah just look at the pictures: