A friend of mine, pro skater Patrick Melcher (significant other to SkinGraft‘s Katie Kay, and 2nd place Moustache World Champion), just completed the pilot for an action sports / reality show concept he co-concocted called “Good Times Roll.” The gist is: Melcher and his BMX buddy Jon Peacy get dropped down in a random city, meet up with their homies, go scope out some spots to skate and ride, engage in some friendly competition, and, as the title would suggest, let the good times roll. A little bit The Amazing Race meets Shaq Vs. meets huckjam, the pilot was shot in Vegas last month and shopped around the traditional network way but didn’t get any concrete commitment. So, last week the trailer got *(cough)* “leaked” online, covered on ESPN, viewed like 19 thousand times, and now networks are hitting them up. Like you do in the digital age.
The show looks absolutely sweet. Excited to see where it lands!
Just checked out the new Lacoste Red site today, at the recommendation of John Drake. In theory, this is the kind of website that gives me nightmares. All flash, long intro before you actually get to the navigation of the site itself, loud music playing at you without warning–all the kind of stuff that I’ve considered a crime to do to a website for years.
But amazingly, I actually really dig this site. I get what it’s trying to do, and I think it’s pretty darn cool. It’s playing with the way you’re accustomed to a website behaving; reimagining the typical experience you’ve come to expect in your browser:
Part website, part music video, part special effects sequence, part fashion editorial, part video game, it definitely doesn’t feel like a standard website experience. I think in so much of “interactive” development we have become stuck in this mobius loop where we continue to create website experiences that conform to what website experiences are expected to conform to. The internet is full of this kind of boring but navigable (blogs) or pretty but useless (flash) tract housing. Which is why there’s really something to be said for experience design that can reimagine the way we expect to navigate the inside of a browser window, and create new and unexpected yet effective and compelling experiences there. Hope we may start to see more of it.
as much as i love movies about teenagers i love movies about superheroes. i haven’t figured out exactly what the connection is between the two, but there’s definitely something similar about characters that experience everything in extreme.
last night i watched blood and chocolate and realized something that i’d already noticed happening in casino royale: the application of parkour into the “superhero’s” arsenal of moves. the weird thing about this is that parkour (also known as free running) is not something that was created using any kind of special effects–well, at least not the digital kind of special effects, anyway. it’s a totally real philosophy of movement that hollywood is starting to use to define a larger-than-life character. in blood and chocolate it was particularly appropriate, since the characters are werewolves, though in casino royale it’s definitely done on a much more intense scale. either way, it verges so close to magic that it’s hard to believe it’s something that evolved and can exist entirely outside of an action sequence choreography.
in fact, what’s really interesting is that after movies like the matrix and crouching tiger/hidden dragon and hero all acclimated us to this kind of movement being a wholly fabricated, cgi, bungee-harnessed, soundstage fairy tale, it’s now getting applied back into movies in a way that presents it as completely within the scope of biological human achievement as it is in real life. stunning not for man’s rule over pixels, but for the sense of his mastery over the laws of physics and physicality themselves.
it’s a peculiar cycle of life imitating art imitating life. the original superhero access to the realm beyond the physically-possible was through kung fu. and undoubtedly there’s an influence of the martial arts movie legacy in the genetic structure of parkour–after all, the artform is based on martial arts. so in the same way that fashion trends influence fashion trends, do movement trends influence movement trends? just how far can we stretch the canvas of our physical bodies once given the creative inspiration of a new possibility? and mind-over-matter stylie, could the unprecedented access to witnessing exponential evolutions in motion actually take us to places we could not have gone before?
