I always have a hard time posting about my self, but this is a project that I’m super proud of and very happy to finally be able to share it with everyone. Over a year ago I was at home browsing Netflix and I came across a documentary by Ken Burns about the Brooklyn Bridge. I didn’t have anything else to watch that night, so I threw it on and ended up getting super inspired.

I think the two main things that really got me thinking was that I ride/walk/drive over the bridge all the time and never really take the time to look around and really think about the bridge it self… and also that I grew up on the west coast (in Seattle) in such a new area that there wasn’t really anything that old, or historic… and the fact that I now live really close to this massive structure that was basically hand made in the 1800′s and I didn’t even really think twice about is kind of crazy. For everyone who lives outside of the states and is reading this… yes, I know you have buildings that you probably live in that were built in the 1300′s and that is just nuts… but back to the topic… Essentially, I watched a documentary about the Brooklyn Bridge, woke up the next day, grabbed my camera and went and shot a bunch of footage.

I didn’t really have a plan for what I was going to do with the footage, but a few weeks after I shot it, I ended up scanning through the clips and throwing a rough edit together. The first cut I used Pink Floyd’s “Cluster” and some voiceover’s from the Ken Burn’s doc… I ended up throwing it up on my Vimeo and sending it to a few people… I had done a project for Nowness before and they were one of the people I sent it to. They hit me back saying they loved it and really wanted to use it… But that I’d need to get clearance for the voiceover and music. This is where I got caught up and essentially had “writers block”. A few months had actually passed from the time I put it together and sent it to Nowness and by this time I was really attached to the piece in it’s current form. It was super hard for me to take it apart and figure out new music and a new voiceover…

Months went by and I kept trying different royalty free tracks and trying to figure out what I could do for a voiceover. I ended up working on a project with Fisher Steven’s who I got connected to through my friend Zach Sky and while we were at my place editing, I showed Fisher The Bridge piece… I told him how I was trying to figure out what to do with it and he offered to do the voiceover… Crazy. Now that I somehow ended up with an Oscar winner narrating my piece, I knew I needed to do something more than just finding some bad royalty free music. Luckily I grew up in a family of very talented people and happen to have a brother who’s an amazing musician. I sent him the video and he wrote an original track that he recorded with his band Song Sparrow Research and I finally had all the pieces in place.

The film went online this past Monday and I couldn’t be more blown away by the amount of great response I gotten. Huge thank you to everyone who’s watched it and even bigger thank you to everyone who help me in any way.

Nigel Sylvester just released his second signature watch with G-Shock and to kick off the launch, Nigel put together a quick tour through Europe, properly titled #Trippinthrueurope. The plan was to start in Tallinn Estonia at Simple Session, then head to London for a few days, from London to Paris, then spend the last weekend in Warsaw, Poland.

The trip consisted of Nigel, his manager Hawaii Mike and myself. The whole thing went by super fast and I’m not sure if we slept for more than three hours each night. We really tried to cram as much in as possible and even though we barely had any time to ride, we had a really great time. Huge thanks to everyone we got to meet up with on the trip and hopefully I’ll get to go back to all of these cities again and spend more time exploring and seeing everyone.

The photos in the gallery are in no particular order. I was filming most of the time and I didn’t get to shoot as many photos as I would have liked, but I did manage to capture a few moments. I shot the most in Warsaw when we spent the day walking around the city. It’s so crazy to me that the entire city of Warsaw was completely destroyed in World War II. So tragic.

Hope you enjoy the photos and keep an eye out for a video from the trip. Big thanks to Nigel and Hawaii Mike for such a great trip!

Continue reading Photogallery: Trippin Thru Europe →

Here’s the second part to my 2012 gallery… I posted a bunch of my iPhone photos last month and this is the follow up with all of my other photos that I shot through out the year. Just a bunch of random photos from my various adventures through out 2012. Thanks so much for all the positive feedback on my iPhone gallery and I hope you enjoy these photos!

Continue reading Scrapbook 2012: Harrison Boyce →

Well, if Harrison is gonna post on me, I’m gonna post on him!

Hit up the newly re-designed DIGGEST site to check out a detailed breakdown on Harrison’s gear (above).

Are we internet famous?

2012 was a great year for me. I got to travel all over the world, work on some great projects and spent my time with some amazing people. I was going through all my photos to put a gallery together, but ended up having too many for one gallery, so I split them up into two. The first one is all my iPhone photos. I always try to shoot as much as I can on regular cameras, but can never put my phone down and probably shoot twice as many photos on my phone as I do any other camera. I posted a lot of these on my Instagram and Tumblr, but it’s fun to look at them all together in one gallery. Keep reading to check out my iPhone photos and check back for my second gallery sometime this week!

Continue reading iPhone Scrapbook: Harrison Boyce →

Here’s Nigel Sylvester’s latest Gatorade commercial, which was masterfully put together by our boy Harrison Boyce.

Click below to check out some behind the scenes pics from the shoot.

Continue reading Nigel Sylvester – Perfect Moment →

MacNeil posted a gallery a few days ago with some photos I shot of Jeff Kocsis and Chris Silva. They came and crashed at my spot for a few days and we ended up cruising around the city enjoying the nice weather. Keep reading to check a few photos and click here to see the whole gallery.

Continue reading Jeff Kocsis and Chris Silva →

Wild in the Wind is a new project I worked on with Chad Moore for Dazed and Confused. Chad shot the photos that are featured as an editorial in the October issue of Dazed and I shot a film to go along with the article.

Super happy with how the whole project turned out and it was great to work with Chad! We’ve been friends for ages (I actually met him at Woodward when he was a camper and I was working there almost 10 years ago). Keep reading to see the film and the rest of the photos and check out the whole thing on the Dazed site.

Continue reading Wild is the Wind →

Here are a couple random photos of Mike Hoder from last week. Nothing better than a late summer day in New York with nothing to do but cruise around the city.

Continue reading Mike Hoder →

The first episode of Nigel Sylvester’s new series ‘Get Sylvester’ just went live! I have been working with Nigel on this project for a bit and am super excited for everyone to get to check it out. This is just the first episode of 10 that we will be working on over the next few months and we have a lot of awesome stuff in the works.

To kick the series off, the first episode documents a trip we took to Barcelona to film an edit for Beats by Dre (that will be dropping on Thursday). Check out the first episode above, make sure to subscribe to the series on Nigel’s youtube page, and if you missed any of the teasers check out all three of them after the jump!

Continue reading Get Sylvester Episode 1 Barcelona →

Super excited about this new project I’m working on with Nigel Sylvester. It’s a part of the new content that Youtube/Google have been working on with Network A. We have some great content planned and I can’t wait to start getting the episodes out. It’s not going to be a typical reality show, but more an on-going day in the life with Nigel. Super raw and curated.

This is the first teaser for the series with some random clips from our nights out in Barcelona last month. Big shout out to Fernando for showing us such a good time out in Barcelona! Keep an eye out for a few more teasers over the next week or so on Nigel’s YouTube channel.

Click below.

Continue reading The School Yard →

Our boy Harrison Boyce cooked up a bunch of promo edits for Animal to showcase their new line.

In case you missed it, check out the look book that Edwin shot HERE, and click below to check out the rest of the edits.

Continue reading Animal →

Our boy Harrison has a good interview over on Breaks Of 10, which touches on a bit of everything that he’s involved with. Check it out!

As an added bonus, check out these amazing comments regarding Harrison on TCU.

Man, that’s a rad pic!!

Last week I was in L.A. working on some projects with Chad Moore and during our down time we got to chill with Nuno and Mike Ardelean. It’s always rad when a bunch of us from Defgrip get to meet up and we made the best of our time together by riding some chill spots and eating at some dialed restaurants.

I didn’t really have any intentions on filming anything or putting an edit together, but I ended up messing around with some shots at the 605 ditch and threw a quick edit together last night. We all met up at Odyssey and headed to the ditch… It was Jim Bauer, Nuno, Ardelean, Luis Pinzon, Maicol Chaves, Ryan Quinones, Chad Moore and me… The edit is super short, with a few clips of Chad, Mike and Jim, but the session was dope. Nothing better than riding with your friends at a quiet spot on a sunny day!

Continue reading Quick 605 Ditch Edit →

It’s Harrison Day!!!

Our boy has a rapid response on DIG, which you can check out HERE.

H-Boy (otherwise known as Harrison Boyce) is on the road with the Macneil crew on their Eastern Canada Tour, and keeping daily updates on the site.

Be sure to check that out HERE, or you can also keep up through Twitter.

Follow me while you’re at it.

Want to know what Mike Ardelan’s been up to? Check out a Weekly Check In with Mike on our friend Matt Rubin’s site. I had a Weekly Check In a while back and our boy Jeff Hamada from Booooooom just had one the other week… Let’s campaign to get the whole Defgrip crew Weekly Check In’s!!

Check out Ardeleans interview here.

Matt from Rsrvs has some of the best Twitter updates out of anyone I follow (aside from Shaq). I started to update on Twitter sometime last year and I was real into it for a while, but just kind of got over it. I didn’t really get the whole idea, I wasn’t following many people and I didn’t have many friends on it at the time. But over the past month, I’ve been getting way into it. for the past three or so months, I was getting way more people following me and it seemed like I should give it another shot. One big thing was downloading TweetDeck, a desktop app that manages all your twitter updates, replies, direct messages, searches, etc…

It’s interesting to see how different people use Twitter. I know Adam from The Come Up is working on an update about all the BMX pros who are on Twitter and I’m pretty excited to see how that turns out. But Matt from Rsrvs uses it as a blog most of the time. Here and there he has standard updates about what he’s up to, but he mostly drops rad links. One that he posted last night was a link to an endless scrolling image blog titled But It Does Float. I’ve been saving images off the site all morning and thought I should pass on the link.

If you are on Twitter, check me out here. We are going to get a Defgrip account going soon, just trying to get the username “defgrip” from someone who’s squatting on it… If the person who has the name on twitter is reading this, hit me up! I’d be psyched to get the name from you!

And finally, check out But It Does Float here.

Shoe-G hit me up with a few questions for his blog about design, BMX, Defgrip and MacNeil. Check it out here.

Right before I headed down to LA for the Nike Lightning Bolts show, Sierra from Nike hit me up to see if I’d be into hosting a Nike “Make Something” class at the Montalban Theater a few days after the show. I was super psyched because I had just seen a bunch of videos on their Sportswear site with artists like Kaws and Mike Mills hosting classes and also because they wanted Bob Haro to do the class, but he couldn’t make it, so they asked me!

I wanted to figure out something really cool to do for the class and with having no teaching experience, I was stressing about putting together something fun, but also teaching something that had substance and knowledge that the kids could take with them when they left the class… After going over a few different ideas, I ended up teaching the kids how to stencil.

Continue reading Nike Make Something →

Steven Vogel from Black Lodges just put together a pretty serious best/worst of 08 feature on his site. The feature is split into two sections and he hit up a lot of really intersting people. Somehow I made my way in there and you can check out what I have to say in the second part.

Check out the feature on Black Lodges here.