Wow, call time is at 5:30am and the weather is looking like rain… We’ll probably end up being there till 7pm too, this is going to be ridiculous, good thing we have a lot of people behind this one.
Edit: Still raining, taking a break while it clears up. It’s damn cold!
Edit: It cleared up for a few hours and actually went really well!
I know I know, I disappeared for awhile. But all is good and I have lots of pictures and posts built up that I just have to sit down and get out there. Unfortunately this blog is not a high priority for me right now as I’m straddling some very important projects at home that require as much attention as I can reasonably give. That and I’ve just been having too much fun and training really hard 
Anyway, we got Times Square as part of the K-Swiss tour! I’ll be performing and teaching right in the middle of it along with a bunch of friends from the Tribe this Friday the 4th from early AM to 4pm. My plane leaves in a few hours and I’m psyched to be going back to NY. We’ll be there all Saturday as well before heading out to Hawaii, so let’s get a big jam going!
More Dead Tired, and Sunburned
Today and Yesterday feels like a crazy dream that can’t be true. We did three performances in Vegas, immediately drove to Dallas, got out of the car, and put on three more plus some workshops. That’s just crazy, and I need more sleep. Also, Texas sucks. The weather is random as hell and I just got very sunburned on a rather cold and windy day. But now the guys from San Antonio are here and it’s time to go eat and play. I should be able to sleep in the next week of training before Houston.
Hour 20 of the K-Swiss Roadtrip
The 14 hours that have passed in between these blog posts has just been a mangled mess of junk food, pissing in the desert, Skipper getting pulled over, bad toilet jokes, uncomfortable sleeping positions, and too much time in a car!!! Oh well, we are almost there and our magical set awaits us along with some cool buddies from San Antonio and Austin. Apparently they can’t put the banners up because the towers would be blown over by the wind and the forecast has a high of 63, but we’ll adapt and have a good time regardless. That’s just how this stuff tends to go down with this group.
Hour 6 of the K-Swiss Roadtrip
Well it’s dark now, and I think we missed the Grand Canyon. Nothing exciting has happened, except for a brief break to play in the snow. Mark is curled up with the suitcases in the back and it’s Skipper’s tun to drive…about 13 more hours to go, 100mph winds and flooding continues in Dallas where we are going…
Hour 2 of the K-Swiss Roadtrip
Looks like we are now passing Hoover Dam and are all filled up with Chipotle burritoes in the Jeep Commander. We have one spot in the car to lie down in and sleep so we can get some shifts in on the way, but nineteen hours is still a long time no matter how you slice it. It sounds like all the flights in Dallas have been canceled and there is now apparently some flooding going on….will make for an interesting demo
The Vegas performance is done and we kicked some ass. It broke down into three two minute sections with about an hour break in between them. The crowd was really enjoying it, we were hyping them up into clapping and everything. Mark even filled in for Tony (his knee is still pretty bad), and did a pretty damn good job (he never bills himself as a performer, but we decided we needed him to keep the symmetry). It was a really hard set of performances though, I was pretty much dead after the second one where I have no rests. It was a good thing we had different shirts for each performance though, because I was sweating like a mofo. Mark says if my blog smelled like my feet do right now, no one would come
Directly after the performance was finished we found out we needed to fly out that day to Dallas for the K-Swiss tour, but apparently there are tornadoes circling around all of the airports and our flights got canceled.
After spending about an hour searching for alternatives, we are now renting a Tahoe and driving the nineteen hours to Dallas so that we can hop out of the car and perform directly afterward 
After some quick choreography the day before, we ran five separate 5min demonstrations followed by some impromptu teaching to anyone interested. The day went pretty damn well, although running five performances in a day is a little tough.
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.
K-Swiss Freerunning Commercial Director’s Cut
As promised, this is the Director’s Cut from Ken Arlidge of the K-Swiss commercial “Even Playing Field” featuring Tyson Cecka, Victor Lopez, and Anna Kournikova advertising the new Ariake freerunning shoe.
We also had Mark Toorock (from my team - The Tribe) behind the scenes acting as the parkour consultant (scouting, choreographing, managing), as well as Frosti, Skynative, and Xin jumping in whenever needed for additional stunts (none of their stuff made it into this commercial unfortunately, but you can see Levi’s whole other commercial here).
Ken went through around three days of footage to cut together this 49 second version for his personal reel. He even sent me to a sound studio in Seattle to get the first second of audio. But we were doing a lot more than just sitting around for those three days of shooting, there is still some really good footage out there that hasn’t seen the light of day yet.
But no worries, that extra footage is definitely not going to waste. In a few weeks I’ll have both a higher quality version of this commercial (both TV and Director’s Cut) up for download, as well as all of the original footage from every shoot day to put into my new stunt reel! Thank you K-Swiss and Aero Films!
You can find out more about this commercial on my media page, or keep checking back here because the full write-up of the amazing experience is coming soon. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for automatic updates.
My K-Swiss Freerunning Commercial
Is now up on http://kswiss.com (as TV commercial #1), which means that it’s showing on TV! Now I just need to get a TV…
The last one showed on ESPN, TNT, and MTV so I’m guessing this one will as well. It certainly was a lot of fun to be in, and the finished product is amazing! I also have the director’s cut (which is awesome) prepared by Ken Arlidge, and I’ll get it up here as soon as I have permission.
Just want to say again how great it was working with Ken and the stunt coordinator Gary Jensen, both are so good at what they do that I actually feel honored to have been there. Check out some of Ken’s other work on Aero Film’s website, and you’ll see what I mean. The other principal in this, Victor Lopez, was also really fun to work with on this spot and on the Taurus Stunt Awards.
You can find out more about this commercial and other work on my media page.
Can now be seen here.
Enjoy!
