CANVAS VS COLORS

In the Spring of 2010 Joey Brezinski approached me about helping him out with an idea he had for Red Bull. Joey’s original idea was to essentially use his board as a paintbrush. He wanted to dip a part of his board in paint (wheels, tail, nose, etc.) and then skate on a blank skate obstacle using it as a canvas. His thought was that the marks he would leave from repeated attempts, would eventually yield an abstract image. After meeting with Joey and Red Bull, they decided they wanted to shoot it in 3D, so I called my buddy/directing partner Bucky Fukumoto and we teamed up with some 3D gurus. Next, we shaped Joey’s idea into a loose narrative that would involve a majority of the Red Bull skate team. The concept was simple, we decided that they would skate in a stark white world filled with everyday inanimate objects that were also void of any color or detail. Paint would then be thrown, splashed, spilled, dripped and exploded onto the riders, their skateboards and the surrounding environment. To capture the most interesting images, we intended on shooting with a super high-speed camera (Phantom). Ideally, for us, the end result would be a skate video that resembled a cross between a Jackson Pollock and a preschooler’s finger painting. This all sounded great on paper, but everyone’s main concern was whether or not the riders could actually skate with all of that paint. Bucky and I didn’t want to over commit and promise something to Red Bull that couldn’t be executed, so we decided we’d shoot a scaled back version of our idea for a test. This meant a few things, first, we opted to only shoot it with Joey since he was willing to eat shit in the paint and it was his initial idea. Our second concession was not to shoot it on a Phantom camera (too much $$$) so we shot it on a Red instead. Finally, we only built a ledge for Joey to skate since we figured it’d be the easiest to skate with the added hazards of wet paint. The edit you see here, “Canvas”, was the test shoot. It was originally shot in 3D and it was supposed to serve as a building block to create a short film with the entire team. The short film never happened but it looks like our test inspired someone in the advertising world… Colin Kennedy