I’ve been meaning to cut this for a while… On my last trip to San Diego I found a Groupon offer; $100 to rent an XR400 for the day.  So I bought it and roped in my friend Spencer for a  day trip to the desert.  We arranged to pick up the bike and some redneck gave us directions over the phone.. Turns out the meeting point was at the end of some small road that literally went from concrete, to desert (as you can see in the video).  So, not knowing anything about the area or terrain, we went for a cruise . . . and stumbled across Mexico!

Funny how things work out;  Hunter S Thompson wrote the Rum Diary in the early 60s when he was 22 years old.  I expect he was burning with ambition and optimism dreaming his creation would turn into a huge best selling book, probably in his wildest dreams imagined it might one day become a movie . . Yet as soon as he wrapped the book it was rejected 7 times and he was sent on his way.   Seems weird, ironic & wasteful picturing a despondent 22 year old thats just had his dreams crushed, probably by some arrogant, suited asshole that skimmed over 5 pages before firing out the token rejection letter, presumably without any valuable feedback either (as is usually the case). . Yet here we are now, 2011.  He’s dead, the same 40 year old book that was rejected 7 times is was finally published in 1998, is now a best seller and a movie has been created/produced by Johnny Depp . .  Just seems odd to me how things like that work out some times.  Guess its nothing on Van Gogh though eh?  That poor bastard was dead way before anyone gave a shit about his work!

Tattoo guru ‘Woody’ (google him) reached out to me to shoot a wee vid of his new outrageous tattoo. We got rained off this day though which was a bummer, only rode/shot for about 10 mins. We plan to recommence filming on a sunny day in central London. Hit up Big Ben and Buckingham Palace, get him on a pair of roller skates in Hyde Park!

Its funny, you know how Facebook has been meddling with their messages and instant messaging gizmos?  And if you open the chat thing it reveals your last inbox messages with the person you are talking to?  Even if its from years ago?  I was speaking to my friend Kev a minute ago and apparently the last message I sent him was from Xmas 2008 and it was the spiel we used for a flyer explaining how our friend Slab had died after eating Rat Poison out of a Sugar Puffs box.

Here is the message / flyer text:

After inventing his ricockulous death, we organized a full on fake, xmas, wake party for him and posted it all around Facebook. The idea was that Slab would turn up for the party as a guest of honour, back from the dead and dressed like a ghost with his box of Sugar Puffs filled with rat poison.

We thought this would be ridiculous and far fetched enough for people to see straight away that it was a joke, especially the ‘Jesus riding a pink unicorn through an ocean of cider‘ part.  But people were shitting their pants and believed it.  I was filming the last tit bits with Slab in Wycombe and people were literally running up to him and hugging him cause they thought he was dead.  We felt pretty awful, but it was pretty funny at the same time.

Slab, still alive . . still drinking cider!

His fake Xmas wake party was the sole reason we went on a 72-hour bender to make the Rat Killer film. . No script, pre-production or plan, we made it up as we went along.  Is one of the funnest films I’ve ever made just cause I was making it solely to play at a party to my mates. No other reason; no client, no festival, no pilot, no planning, no bullshit . .  Was therapeutic actually.  Sometimes the randomest things can give you a kick in the ass to make a film.

Give it a watch:

Here is the elusive Release the Bats music video.  A bit of a diversion from the Chicken Man vid and this is my second music video.  I had a lot of fun making this, plus a decent amount of stress.  I probably consumed hundreds of dollars worth of coffee in San Diego coffee shops cutting it.  I did enjoy it, but wouldn’t say Im in a rush to go and shoot more micro budget music vids (we had £400 for this one).  Think I’d rather pour the time into a selfish short film, but really, I’m actually looking forward to shooting a bunch of weird, real life stuff again, want to hit the road and film some fucking wild adventures.

Fucking blogs. I don’t know how people keep on top of them?

I’ve spent the past 4 or so months in San Diego, I seem to be coming back more and more.. Think I’ve spent 8 out of the last 12 months here, and maybe 15+ in the last 3 years?   Has slowly turned into a second home and I wish I could stay here longer.  Its so good for everything I love  –  bikes, the ocean, good weather, amazing dive bars, coffee shops, the desert, the mountains, skateparks, MX tracks, bikes, bikes, bikes. .

My Visa runs out July 10th so this trip will be coming to an abrupt end in a couple of weeks.  One priority while I’m back in the UK is to bite the bullet and splurge on an immigration lawyer ($3000+), see if I can’t weasel myself an 0-1 Visa so I don’t have to keep returning to London and so I could actually do some real work out here.

Heres a few random snaps from the last couple of months in no particular order:

And . . . rest in peace Ryan Dunn.  Was bummed when I heard that news this morning. Always liked the DIY Jackass/CKY story and used to love those CKY vids in the early 00s. Looks like he squeezed a lot of awesomeness out of his 34 years on planet earth.

Just a few random screen grabs from the Release the Bats music video.  Been staring at this stuff for the past 3 days and listening to the same song a 100 times a day.  Is proving to be a tricky and laborious edit but finally seem to be getting a hold on it.  Once I’m done with it compositing wizard Bob Salzano is going to sprinkle his gold dust on it.  Can’t wait to see it finished and out the door. Is quite a departure from some of my recent work.

I’m currently sat in a coffee shop in San Diego where I’ve been cutting most of the day.  I was planning on staying here till mid May so I could check out the Supercross finals in Vegas.  But, the old chestnut Vagabondz made it into an adventure film festival in London and I’m contemplating flying back for a week to attend.  After all the work I poured into that thing, being as its a ‘tv pilot’ that didn’t get commissioned, no ones even really seen it.  So would be awesome to see it on a big screen getting at least a bit of recognition and if it wins it would cover my flight back to the States so I can watch the SX.  Also got a few more big road trip films I want to shoot so hoping to meet some potential contacts there to help make these a reality.

Hmm. Would mean booking a ticket in 10 minutes and leaving first thing in the moring… I’ll flip a coin.

Here’s the cut down Vagabondz festival entry (20mins):

Its funny, it seems like a lot of the people I meet in San Diego that grew up here, totally neglect or appreciate how good they have it in this place. I guess that’s natural where ever you are from but there is SO much good fun stuff to do here in all directions: desert, ocean, mountains, city, amazing dive bars, concrete skateparks, Mexico.. yet people act like they are living in a dull town. I’d love to show them Slough, or Watford, Dagenham or my own delightful home town, High Wycombe:

Since I’ve been here I’ve been hanging out with a couple of transplants who aren’t so jaded on this place and its been a blast cranking around exploring. We went for a cruise around Coronado island last night, was awesome.  The whole place felt deserted.  Here’s some random snaps..

We have our eyes on this beast. For some reason this amazing bridge is totally off bounds for bicycles. hmm.

Pre-ride beer warm up + Cornoda bridge plotting.

We got lucky and spotted the remains of a fire, who ever started it had done all the hard work and left us with a nice bed of red hot embers.  The beaches are littered with these fire pits and these gems seem neglected to me. We claimed this one, found a bit more fire wood and slurped a beer for the road.

After the fire we cruised along the beach front for a while, did some skids in the sand that had blown onto the path.  I ate shit with a pretty ridiculous high side as my rear tire caught a bit of traction in-between the slippery patches.  Skids never get old! Then we found an awesome concrete skatepark (theres seems to be awesome concrete skateparks in abundance), then we rolled onto this look out point over looking down town San Diego.  So good..  For the record we only had 3 beers each, so this wasn’t some massive binge, but rolling around on bikes and finding such pristine beer perchs doesn’t get any better for me.  The whole night cost us about $5 each too.  Splendid.

This time last year UK film makers were all salivating at the chance of winning a wopping £100,000 for Dorito’s epic advert competition.  Was like a modern day gold rush with all kinds of film makers taking a punt.  As the deadline approached, I was in San Diego and up to my tits in ‘paid work‘ trying to turn around 9 x Deadliest Journeys episodes. I had a few ideas for adverts but they were all too labour intensive to execute well and would have involved me actually being in the UK. So I was trying to think of a dead simple, guerrilla kind of idea that was so simple and raw we could shoot it with minimal logistics and no one could tell it was shot in America. No easy task.

I came up with this ‘Dori-o-face‘ idea though, basically it was to throw Dorito‘s at peoples faces/mouths and get a montage of all these weird facial expressions. The type of facial expressions that you pull when you are in anticipation of something being fired into your mouth. Much like porn chicks waiting to be sprayed down with gizm, only we’d be spraying them with Dorito’s. I tried a few candidates but I wasn’t convinced it was going to work, so canned the idea and didn’t enter the competition.

I saw Spencer (the guy in this vid) yesterday and he was asking what I had done with the footage so I dug this rough cut up from an external hard drive.  He is a fucking awesome character and was a good sport. Must have thrown 60+ Dorito’s at his face. So thanks Spencer, and sorry this concept didn’t work out. You win some, you lose some eh!

I just boshed up this edit as part of a pitch for a TV channel.  I’m either going to hell or getting bottled for this one.. ‘A portrait of modern day binge Britain from the all-seeing eye(s) of kebab shops.‘