How was this skate video made?

[Sunny Singh]

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=soWwa_Xwy7U

My questions (probably rather naive):

1. How is such smooth slow-motion possible?
2. How are those special effects so realistic?? I don't think they used any type of green-screen in the shots and added the effects in post---or did they??

[Jay Kavi]

Wow, neat intro!

Ok I'm gonna say HVX for the slo mo and the explosions were real. But your guess is a good as mine Sunny. Try emailing whomever produced the vid and ask them.

[Joe Lawry]

All the explosions were real. They built all the obstacles with the explosives in them.

And it was all shot on 35mm with 4 cameras, 2 of them running at 300 FPS.

They had HVX's shooting the behind the scenes stuff, however none of it was used in the intro's final cut.

[Sunny Singh]

Thanks for the info, guys!

[Cole McDonald]

gotta love skaters..."hey, could we have you do tricks over these obstacles we've rigged to explode as you go over them?"

"Yeah, AWESOME!"

[Lloyd Claycomb]

You say 35mm (HDMAX type?), but is this something that a prosumer video cam. is capable of doing (not the 35mm part)? Specifically a Canon A1, for example? If you were to want to record something and slow it down that much, is this something that's possible and would look good if done in a mini-dv prosumer scenario? If so, what frame rate is best to record in for slow-mo playback purposes? What's the highest FPS you can get in a A1-type system?

As far as the explosions, some look real, but others look overly fake. Like the one part where the the exploded "things" were flying all over in front of the skater--all over the ground--and it didn't even trip him up. I've been on a skate board and know that a tiny pebble can spell disaster if you hit it wrong.

Some others were where the onlookers didn't even flintch when a million pieces of concrete the size of a grapefruit were coming their way. Even the best actor in the world couldn't stare down a concrete bullet or two, or a million.

I vote for it being mostly fake (albeit well done). Moreover, it looked like a public drainage area, or something. The last time I checked, at least outside of Bagdad, you can't just blow up stuff without drawing a little attention to yourself and getting the ATF or SWAT team paying you a serious visit..... Unless of course it was all done on some special graffitied set........... :)

[Eric Stemen]

I bet the explosions were real. The concrete could have really been made out of foam, or just drywall. Still very cool. And I don't know how to achieve a 300fps effect with an A1. Maybe if you shoot progressive if at all possible on your camera and use the slow motion program by gooder video. I don't they this supports high deff, but I could be wrong.

http://www.goodervideo.com/videos/SmVideos.html

[Nate Weaver]

Originally Posted by Lloyd Claycomb

The last time I checked, at least outside of Bagdad, you can't just blow up stuff without drawing a little attention to yourself and getting the ATF or SWAT team paying you a serious visit.....

You can't shoot ANYTHING in LA without a permit [edit: in a semi-public space], where Film LA, in this case, would post notices to every residence and business within 500ft about the noise and pyro work.

So in LA at least, where I'm sure this was shot, it's not that big of a deal at the budget level they're working at (and a one day shoot, with 4 35mm rigs working shooting high speed, I'm guessing the budget was north of $150,000)

My vote is there is no composites in there.

The real reason behind my statement is that this is the opening for a skate video. Doing it fake is to defeat the purpose, the whole point of a skate video is to show the kids what the pros actually pulled off.

[Chris Soucy]

You said your piece with such authority there, I'm curious as to whether you had a hand (or any other part of your anatomy) involved?

If not, perhaps you could give us some pointers as to how you know what that was all about?

It's not that for one second I disagree, it's just trying to figure out how you got there so darn quick.

Are you in "the business"?


CS

[Stelios Christofides]

Originally Posted by Joe Lawry

All the explosions were real. They built all the obstacles with the explosives in them.

And it was all shot on 35mm with 4 cameras, 2 of them running at 300 FPS.

They had HVX's shooting the behind the scenes stuff, however none of it was used in the intro's final cut.

Joe
Were you involved in this? Fantastic work!

Stelios

[Joe Lawry]

I am an action sports shooter yes,

however i had nothing to do with this at all.. i just am part of other forums such as the skate and snow filming ones around the net.

and it was just a stoke of luck that i posted so quickly straight after the initial question.

and yes, Nate is correct, it was shot in LA.

[Alessandro Garabaghi]

It wouldnt suprise me if some of it was shot at their own skate park, more than likely not open to the public. But im sure their budget was high enough to be able to afford the permits to do such a thing in an open place.

[Andrew Almendarez]

The director has been asked a few times about it in interview, the most in depth....
From skateperception.com,



"Well the way it came about was throughout the course of the video obviously I'd sit down with Spike and Rick. Originally we had the idea of making the intro just really crazy with guys trying tricks with their boards shooting out into the street like a car swerving, missing it and hitting something [or] causing a crazy wreck to happen and the other guy would be smashing things, punching through walls. Just different stuff that'd be super over the top. I think the final version of what we ended up doing was a pretty timid version of what we were first thinking about doing, ya know?

So it kind of got started from there but Spike was obviously been really busy finishing his film. So basicially it started where he said he at least wanted to do something to where the guys would be skating and the spots were exploding and that was pretty much it. So between Rick and I, we had to figure out where could we permit the spot to build this stuff, what stuff do we need to build and who we'd need to help us. Once we had all that stuff kind of figured out another friend of ours a producer named Emma that has helped us on some stuff in the past helped she kinda just lined everything up everything else like handling all the permits and lining us up.

Our friend Marty helped with the pyrotechnics stuff. From there it kind of went on to where we'd go to Marty's place and explain to him what was going on, what we were trying to do and what we were trying to figure out. It was funny because the whole time Spike was busy and wasn't really there for a lot of it. He went once to Marty's and kinda looked at what we were doing and kind of made some changes. Then we ended up building all the stuff at Marty's. Brent Kronmueller helped us build all the stuff and basically the way it worked we'd build all the obstacles and we'd leave spots inside the obstacles where Marty could figure out where the pyrotechnics would go and he would put explosives inside the spot we left opened then he'd place pyrocell which was like a fake cement on top of that to fill in the square. Finally we'd just spray paint it to make it look as real as possible.

So that worked from there, we'd just built everything at Marty's place and then loaded everything on to a couple of flatbed trucks and flatbedded the stuff all over there, set everything up in one day, then the next day we shot it, then the day after that we finished shooting, then the day after that we processed & telecine'd, the day after that I made a rough edit and the day after that Spike and Rick came by and I showed them the rough edit. We made a couple minor changes but the edit you guys saw in the video was pretty close to the first edit I made the first night. I mean that's pretty much how it all came about. We had so many ideas that we wanted to do.

Its funny some people are like "its like the Yeah Right intro you've already done that with the super slow-mo". But obviously you want to see all the stuff in explode in slow-mo, it really gives a different feel like you're in a different world. Originally we tried to rent the Phantom HD camera which can shoot 1000 frames a second. Originally we were going to do that, but looking back on it now it might of been too slow. We probably would have had to do was a bunch of speed ramps. I think what we ended up using worked out pretty good. We had three 35's, the first main camera that Spike operated was a Photosonic 35 that shot 300 frames per second, I think it did up to 360 but we shot at 300. The second camera we shot I believe was an Arri 435, our friend that's who's a DP his name is Mark Williams he was manning that camera which went up to 150 frames. The third was my camera which is a 35mm Arri 2C and that maxes out at 72 frames per second. So that was basically that's what we had for filming and obviously we had a bunch of HVX's going for the behind the scenes stuff."

[Bill Ward]

Too bad the video's been pulled...

[Jeff Kolada]

pulled from youtube, but i found it again.

http://www.lifelounge.com/Best-Skate...ntro-Ever.aspx

absolutley incredible. Ty evans never ceases to amaze me.