I´m not one to be impressed with green screen rigs and the filming that goes with it. It´s just a cheaper and less creative way to recreate something you could shoot in real life.
However, this clip is pretty impressive. Open up my eyes to what is possible. But I´m old school, screw green screen, compositing and post production.
The Church Of Apple showed us the iPad today. It´s basically a large iPhone. But it will eliminate owning a desktop computer for many people.
I can see myself at a summer house, by the water. Chillin in a hammock with some Brämhults orange juice and browsing the web or watching last nights hockey recap on my iPad. I might actually have to buy a summer house before I buy an iPad, I need one that much.. haha.
All kidding aside. It´s a great product, spend 8 min on this video and see for yourself.
My friend Trevor Graves uploaded this photo of Craig today. It was shot in Riksgränsen, Sweden, in 1989 and has an interesting story behind it (click to enlarge).
As most of you know olympic podium hopeful Kevin Pearce is in a coma after snowboard related fall. Now Danny Davis hurt his back and needs to have back surgery and will miss the olympics.. sucha shame. Not only that he injured himself, obviously, but he was my hope for the olympics.
From what I gathered he might have been playing around at the DC Mtn Lab with his friend Elliot on atw´s when they got hurt. Elliot was also part of the equation when I broke my neck at the Mtn Lab.
So now the odds of White winning the olympics are prolly about 1.05.
Here´s a clip of Danny from the last half pipe contest:
Here´s a two min clip I made of some of my favorite Gino tricks I found on Youtube. Style for miles.
Saturday, January 09, 2010
I wish I could travel by train more often. Full bed, electricity and cell service. Not lame.
I just (yes in this position) edited a tribute clip with Gino Ianucci too. During one of my procrastination sessions this week I got on Youtube to check out the grace that Gino skates with and figured I might as well make a short edit. So I did. Unfortunatly this train doesn't have wifi so I'll post it later.
Getting on the train to Stockholm right now. Been packing and evaluating what to bring since I'm aiming to stay for a bit. This is what I ended up with. I wonder when I'll get to move into my own spot and empty out my Luleå and San Diego storage units..?
Now I have season 4 of Dexter and about 10 new movies to choose from to cure boredom on my 14 hour trip to Stockholm. Maybe I'll check out the bistro, it's Saturday night after all.
While going through all my shit I found those Robot Food movies and decided to check out the bonus features on Lame. And then I saw that we made 10-ish slide shows from me, Bendek, Zacher etc.. so here´s mine.
Photos I shot in 2003, while filming for Lame.
I'm going through some stuff at my parents house and found these, not lame.
Kevin Pearce was severely injured about a week ago when he hurt himself in the Park City pipe.
Kevin's family has set up a Facebook page where they let us know how he's recovering. 20,000 people have joined in just a few days.
Then ABC News stepped in with a story about how dangerous snowboarding is and how the IOC who in their minds are "the leaders of this sport" need to evaluate how they get less injuries in this dangerous sport. I, obviously, got pretty upset by watching yet another tool on tv talking about snowboarding without having a clue what she's talking about. This wouldn't happen in any other "traditional" sport, trust me.
Not that I expect much else from people working with sports on national tv. Heck ESPN doesn't even know what they are doing with the X-Games and they've owned and operated it for 15 years or something and they STILL don't get it.
The olympics is, in my mind, about the best performances in each sport. This isn't the case in snowboard, for a number of reasons. Reason 1: The Swedish olympic (or national team who are supposed to find and support the best snowboarders in the country) team for example havn't supported the best riders. I mean in the last olympics they got €2,000,000 or something to get some good riders to the olympics. I could have saved Lexmark or whoever paid for it (hopefully it wasn´t taxpayers) that money since no Swedish person could have gotten top 10 in Torino even if half the people in the contest fell. The best riders from Sweden, like Ingemar, Hampus, Jakob, Chris, Johan etc never got any backing (of relevance) by the Swedish national team to grow as snowboarders. Not that they (well Ingemar could have been a podium contender) were olympic material, but that didn´t stop the Norwegian national team to help the likes of Mikkel, Torstein, Fredrik, Andeas etc to become better riders.
Reason 2: Halfpipe doesn´t show who the best snowboarder is. It´s probably the easiest discipline to judge and pretty interesting for the endemic viewer who doesn´t know/care about what snowboarding is. Yes, boardercross and slalom are easier to judge, but I don´t consider the slalom people to be snowboarders. They are skiers on a narrow snowboard with ski boots, with skier mentality. And even if halfpipe did determine who the best snowboarder was the IOC definitely aren´t the best ones to portray it. Just take the Vancouver halfpipe.. not the best resort / location to have it. The mountain doesn´t like snowboarders and if it rains I bet they will still force the riders to drop in. Does skiers get that treatment? Eh, no.
Ok, Shaun White is a great snowboarder. Maybe the best. But he´s not on my top 10 list for snowboarders I like to see. Same with Travis Rice. Some might say he´s the best, but he´s not on my top 10 of riders I like to see come down a mountain. I´m not saying I´m right because there is no right or wrong. But snowboarders I like watching are, Gigi Ruf, Nicolas Muller, Jussi Oksanen, Jake Blauvelt, Devun Walsh, Travis Parker, Hampus Mosesson, JP Solberg and others. They probably can´t physically do what Rice and White does, but imho you can´t categorize snowboarding like you can figure skaters. The IOC and 90% of the people watching the olympics will never get that and that´s ok. But it´s not ok when ABC News put this bitch Christine Brennan on tv to talk about snowboarding. And it´s not ok for the X-Games to crown the gold medalist by having Americans text in their votes before the riders even drop in to do their trick. So basically I´m fucked for even thinking that someone who has a suit job will ever understand my pov, which is a healty pov, cause I know better than them.
That is frost on the inside of our door. -30 outside and +22 inside.
This day it was only -15 and we treated moms cousin and bf from Australia to a bbq. The temperatures where they live never goes below +10.
Aussies on skis. They were a little unstable, but enjoyed the tour behind our house.
Shredding a place called Bygdsiljum around x-mas. This part of Sweden got 1 meter of pow in a weekend. That´s almost as much as the annual snow fall. Bygdsiljum is a tiny mtn though, around 100 meters I think. We ventured out of bounds and I got caught in a field of rocks. The pow was the fluffiest I´ve been in for years. Lighter than Utah pow. So you went though 70cm right without a problem, which resulted in me hitting my leg pretty hard on a rock. Took a week to recover from, all good now.
This is a street in Skellefteå just hours after it was plowed. Dump of the decade, no contest.
I´ve made some highlight clips (2006 and 2007 among others) for Ken before and enjoyed it as well as shooting some of his driving. He´s opened up a lot of doors/eyes for rally in America. Mostly through his viral videos. Using a skate/snow marketing in an industry who wouldn´t know what Facebook is if it hit them in face hasn´t hurt his reputation. Some still argue that he´s not a good driver compared to the WRC people and yes sure Solberg might be a better rally driver but Ken has never claimed to be better than him. If you know that WRC use a completely different race technique (with recce) compared to the American rally circuit you´d know better than comparing the two. And since Ken has friends / staff in the video / photo / video department and thinks along lines the other rally people don´t he´s created a great outlet for his ideas, online videos.. How you can hate on someone who drifts his car around an airport ate call him a bad driver caise the video is editing I have no idea. I do know that a lot of people are morons, and I guess that´s the answer.
Anywho.. here´s Ken´s 2009 highlights. Made by Josh Martelli at Mad Media, enjoy.
If you haven´t seen Ken on Top Gear, check it out here:
If you have any interest in knowing how complicated and corrupt that terrorist attack was you should watch this. If you don´t care then move along to Facebook.
Unfortunately I could only find it in 12 parts on Youtube. Here´s the first one. The events of 9/11 were tragic, but the aftermath even more tragic. It´s really mindblowing how a government can get away with such poor governing. It´s so sad.
If you don´t want to educate yourself by watching the whole (110-120 min) documentary. Here´s a short trailer:
I could go shoot Ken´s jump due to Discovery Channel but he handed me a little dv tape with a bro cam angle and short interview. I uploaded the clip and it had 1 million views in no time. Now it has almost 15 million + a few million on other uploads.. Youtube power.
Here´s Travis´jump:
I know Ken had plans on doing some bag ass jumps, we´ve tried a few times but been turned town by weather etc. I´m sure he´ll beat Travis´ soon.
