They cut out a few cool things, but the quality is amazing! Behind the scenes post is -here-

Edit: Check out http://nurdproductions.com for the HD version!

Well that was an unnecessarily long travel time. I started out from Seattle at 3:30am, had a short layover in Houston, and finally arrived in Columbus at 4:30pm. Shortly afterward we all gathered to meet PK Gen as they came in and then went to dinner. I got to see Dan, Stephane, and Julie again, then got to meet Kazuma, Johann, and Forrest for the first time. Very cool to be talking with such experienced traceurs, I’m really looking forward to training with them and learning as much as I can.

The Ohio guys kick ass. They’ve arranged a crazy amount of stuff for this in short time, and still managed to fit everyone in (so far) for sleeping arrangements (the whole floor is covered in memory foam!) We had a quick late night creative training session that I really really enjoyed, and now I’m keeping everyone up with my typing…

Tomorrow is natural environment training on the rocks! Glad I brought my climbing shoes

RED One

The RED One camera :) Plus lens, matte box, battery, hard drive, huge monitor, and double rails with a few grips.

From: Tyson Cecka

Comment on this image via Flickr

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!

Continue Reading »

Today Tuesday the 18th from 3-4pm on KOMO TV be sure to tune in to the Northwest Afternoon show to see Rafe and I blathering on about parkour, live (ish)! We’re heading down there now to meet the hosts, wish us luck!

Edit: We got them to try some parkour! W00t!

I’m returning out of my blog-hibernation to let everyone know I’ll be featured on KOMO TV January the 31st at 11pm on channel 4 in Seattle.

These guys specifically wanted to do this one on just me this time, and we spent four filming sessions hitting a PSCS parkour class, Gasworks, Freeway Park, and UW. They had to have captured some good material in there somewhere, so it’s definitely worth a look.

Here is a short (~1m) sampler I put together for a few different sites, the first time I’ve actually had a time restriction on an edit. The footage at the beginning is all old video memories, and the footage after that is a mix of FloShizzle, the K-Swiss commercial, the Tokyo doc, and the Mervyns commercials. This is also my first edit using Final Cut Pro on my new MacBook Pro, and it kicks ass

You can view and download the high quality version (480p) through torrent -here- or by using the button on the right.

Enjoy!

YouTube, Yahoo, MySpace, Metacafe, Google, DailyMotion, Blip.tv, Veoh and Viddler

I helped organize this quick webisode for KIRO-TV’s IWitness video website at UW. Luckily the rain held up long enough for us to demonstrate some fundamentals, a traversal challenge, and parts of the new “Brutalist” gauntlet. Thanks go to Michael Fox, KIRO’s videographer, for putting this all together and doing a great job. Check out his recently learned wallpass at 1:41

Traceurs involved: Tyson Cecka, Jeremy (Raindog), Kellen (Recurve), Christian, Jonathan.

I really like how he simply had us narrate the whole thing, rather than doing the usual media thing and inevitably getting something wrong. On the flipside of that I need more work on my grammar for this kind of thing, some dumb stuff still came out of my mouth

-Link to thread on WAPK-

-Original video page-

I took my old UW06 redux video, rendered it correctly this time, ran it through some smart filters in VirtualDub, and compressed it intelligently. But of course encoding it for internet flash kills most of that work. But be sure to check out the download below the video for full quality (and the last release of this video, I promise!)

You can download the 720×480 full quality version through Vuze or bitorrent by clicking here.

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

Credits

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).

More to Come!

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!

Check Back

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.

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.

Enjoy!