. . .hang out in the garage.

A couple of things fell through/in line to make this episode happen. The first was work, I had a shoot cancel with about one week's notice. Sweet, now I can be a part of the All City Showdown that Uprise was putting on..or so I thought. Well, that didn't work out either, we were too late to sign up. So, that left me with a Panasonic GH4 package for the day with nothing to do. Cut to 5 minutes later and get a call about painting some skateboard decks in friends garage...perfect. I think I was more excited to shoot this then any of the other opportunities that had fallen through that day. Lots of fun/beer was had and we even found a new spot. I've said it before, it's the surprise sessions that always turn out to be the best.

Skateboarding is still fun

. . .skate a little longer.

Sundays Episode 48 - Night Moves from peter w. on Vimeo.

. . .sweep that again.

Sundays Episode 47 Broken Glass from peter w. on Vimeo.

This time we were smart enough to leave the warmup spot while our old legs still worked. Even better, the spot was only a few minutes from the park. Way to think thing through for once guys. But yeah, Randy mentioned this closed down car dealership by his house that looked skateable. It actually was, except for the 2 inches of broken glass that covered the entire joint. We did alright though, Zach was the only one that managed to cut himself.

One thing that makes me laugh is the super arty footage of Larry skating the tiny out ledge. We decided to up the production value and dribble some broken glass in the foreground. It's pretty much "Saving Private Ryan Part 2."

Skateboarding is still fun.

. . .build a dumb ramp.

It feels good to be back.  Chicago's winter was the worst that I could remember.  We had our first 60 degree day and what do we do?  Build a dumb ramp out of scrap wood in Randy's backyard, it makes sense if you think about it...
So yeah, most of the plywood that Randy had was only two feet wide so that's how wide it ended up being.  Two feet is way narrower than you think.  Oh, and the coping was made of branches.

. . .get a job.

Sundays Ep. 45 Red Bull Daily Grind from peter w. on Vimeo.

If you watch only one office skatepark themed video with a Dolly Parton soundtrack, make it this one! 

Every once in a while, I get lucky enough to work on something that involves skateboarding.  It's great when passions collide (That may be the name of my next romance novel).  Back in November, we worked on Daily Grind with Red Bull.  Pretty much the idea was to build a skatepark on the 23rd floor of an epic office building in Chicago's loop.  Unfortunately, I wasn't going to be shooting this one but I was there to make it look like a real functioning office. Not ideal but still really fun. So we put up some cubes, hung a bunch of terrible posters, and so on.  It turned out really well, I think?

Even more fun than the set dressing (that's an odd statement),  was the skating.  The Daily Grind was actually skateable for about 3 weeks or so.  If you've ever been in Chicago in November, you know how much you need an indoor skatespot come winter.  Somehow, the Sundays crew was able to get in there and get a little bit of shred on (See shredding above).

Here's Red Bull's edit.
 

Sundays Ep. 44 All City Showdown Chicago from peter w. on Vimeo.

Two, maybe three, months ago the Sundays crew signed up for Uprise's All City Showdown (ACSC).  Inspired from the Seattle contest of the same name.  How it works is you have a team of 3 skaters and one filmer and you get 8 hours to get clips.  At the end of the day, everyone turns in their raw footage and they make a video out of everyone's footy.  So, probably the most epic Chicago skate video was made over the span of 8 hours.  I think there were 29 teams (That might be high) in the contest this year.  Crew's came from Michigan, Ohio, Dax even flew in from Arizona for it.  Needless to say, Team Last Place (That was our team name) was in for some stiff competition.  Spoiler alert, we did not win.  We had a few clips in the final edit, which you can buy from Uprise.

So, this is my edit of our footage from that day.  I decided to forgo the GoPro and use a big boy camera for the day, I rented a Sony FS700 from the boys at Magnanimous Media and borrowed a slider from Mo.  Not going to lie, I was really pulling for Best Use of Books Found Under a Bridge or Most Dramatic Shot of Sweeping but to my dismay, neither of those are real categories.

No one on our team thought we would win but this is skateboarding, it's not about winning.  It's about the experience and getting rad...which, I think we did a pretty good job.

Thanks again Uprise. Also, big thanks to Team Last Place: Randy Korwin, Zach Martin, Bill Wiora, and Larry Dobson (Life Coach)

. . .paint more curbs.

Winter's coming and sessions are getting shorter and further apart. I'm not going to lie, I was a little bummed that the dudes wanted to skate some random Chicago suburb school with painted curbs. For some reason, I thought we'd end up somewhere epic...about ten minutes into the session, I realized this spot was epic! So yeah, we ended up skating our asses off for 2 hours, eating some lunch and then heading back to the school for another round of slappies. Somehow, we managed to film all this in about 35 minutes which is good because we're old and had nothing left in the tank.

If this ends up being my last outdoor session of the year, I'm okay with that.