Before I get started on today's post, let's give a warm welcome to Bolts of Thunder's newest follower, Skoolerpooler! Welcome to the blog, find solace in its contents... Ok, being brothers with Matt and Brian Hart, I might have a somewhat biased opinion of them and their part. But I will venture out on a limb and say that this is the most innovative, revolutionary, skately technical part that has and ever will exist, period. Am I too bold in saying this? Am I being extremely biased in putting this in print on the blog? Am I being completely irrational? Am I offending our readers? Yes. Yes, I am. But that's ok. that's what we do. Ok, so maybe this part isn't the most revolutionary, innovative and all that part that ever existed. Nonetheless, it is a fun part to watch, and it puts a smile on my face every time I see it. More people have told me that they liked this part and the song more than any other part; this part has gotten the most compliments so far. That's quite an accomplishment in my book, and I'm proud of Matt and Brian for putting all they had into it.
First off, what were expecting from a part with Matt and Brian Hart? Those of you who know them should have been expecting something along the lines of flashing dance photos, risque one-piece thongs on grown men, grass rides on epicly long and steep hills, creepy glaring shots, and slappy grinds on curbs. This part brings you all that and more. Those of you who don't know them were unexpectedly surprised by their part and either laughed or swore in your wrath that you would never watch it again. Those are the two generally accepted responses for this part.
So the song idea for this part came rather late in the editing process, about 3 weeks before the premier of the video. We were going to use a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds song for the part, and had already edited it, but Matt didn't like the feel of it. It wasn't his standard MO, and he had bigger plans. So he said he wanted to use the Tupac song, which we had thought might work for Tyson and Garrett's part, and edited Matt and Brian's part to it. The second edit was noticeably much more entertaining than the first one, so we stuck with it. Which I'm grateful for because we didn't have much time to edit. So we found a new song for Tyson and Garrett, a song that I think fits better, and things all worked out. So the Tupac song originally has some expected swearing in it, but being the strong supporter of family values that we are, and being 100% consistent in these beliefs, never shifting, changing, compromising, or faltering, we edited the swear words out. We found an instrumental version of the song and put that in every time Tupac felt the urge to let one go. So for a couple days, I intently listened to Tupac swear vengeance on other men and tell us how utterly bad-A he is as I edited out his rampart swearing. It's a really fun song to listen to and to get in my head, so I didn't mind after I edited the part having Tupac in my head the rest of the day. That's how it works editing, whatever song you edit to plays back in your head over and over and over again. I'd say that the songs that were really fun to have stuck in my head were the intro, ELO, Tupac, and Dave's song. The ones that annoyingly played back in my head and tormented me as I tried to sleep at night were the Doors song and PB&J (Weston and Sam's song). Not that I don't like the songs, but for some reason my mind would turn them into these annoying versions with these hideous British adolescent voices singing the songs over and over. It would get so bad that I would sing them when I was sleeping, and I wouldn't get a good rest. I don't know why some songs became that way while other songs were just enjoyable to sing over and over. I like all the songs in the video, but some were just more enjoyable to edit to. Can't explain it.. Anyway, apparently until the day he died, Tupac was still ballin. Interesting...
So Matt and Brian are lifer skaters. They're the ones that got me into skating when I was younger. Brian didn't skate for a long time, he wasn't the hardcore skate nerd. But every now and then we'd all be out somewhere, and Brian would skate a ramp with us. So filming Brian for this video was one of the highlights of the video for me because he's never filmed for anything before. The 50-50 on the curb at the end of his part is his first ever 50-50 on a curb. So it was way fun filming him because he was learning new tricks at the age of 30. Another fun thing about filming Brian was that he really doesn't care about it like a little skate rat would care about it. He doesn't care about how its filmed, how he looks when he does it, what clothes he's wearing, if he pushes mongo, if someone else can already do the trick, whatever. He doesn't care or even consider any of that. He just wanted to have fun, so we went out and had fun. And it was really fun filming him that way. It reminded me of being 6 years old and trying to build an airplane out of a radio flyer wagon, ply wood, and skateboards. We got Matt Steelwagon, our friend that we loved to hate, to take out a spark plug from his dad's lawn mower and try to make an engine for the wagon to fly. We just put the spark plug on the wagon and hoped it would work its magic. Because that's how airplanes fly: magic. When it came time to test out our plane, we sat up on the top of this steep road with our Kamikaze skateboard supporting one piece of plywood-wing and another skateboard supporting the plywood-wing on the other side. All of us knew in our hearts that the thing wouldn't fly and to attempt it would be death, so we told Matt Steelwagon that he had to try it. Reluctantly, Matt sat in the wagon at the top of the street as we gave him a little push. The wagon actually did get air born, but not in the fashion we had anticipated. Approaching speeds that would create a sonic boom, Matt turned the handle to sharply on the wagon, turning the wheels 90 degrees, causing the wagon to pop straight up in the air, hurdling Matt's body, the wagon, and the ply wood in different directions. The skateboards, fortunately, made it safely down the hill unharmed. As Matt lie on the street, bloodied, broken, and balling, we ran home. It was all we could do... Yeah, filming Matt and Brian bomb down hills is pretty much the closest to building our first airplane as we've come since. Good times with my brothers...
I'm super happy with the tricks Matt got for his part. I'd say they are the most creative tricks in the video. Who would have thought of filming their part on an old school board and hippy jumping barriers to grasshill-bombs? Nobody else has anything even like it. I only got the idea to do the grassriding in my part after Matt was showing me how to bomb hills. Wizard does that one grass ride at the end of his part, but it was because Matt told him about it. Nobody else thought of doing it. So pretty much all of the grass riding in the video comes from Matt's creativity. A crazy thing about that hippy jump to grass ride that Matt did over that barrier is that 6 months ago Matt was learning how to hippy jump over my flat bar. He had never done it before, so he thought he'd try to learn. He did it a few times, but he didn't do it every time we went out skating. He said he wanted some kind of hippy jump grass ride, but we didn't know on what. We almost found some good ones in Europe, but nothing panned out. So Matt went on a trip to Washington with his wife, and he called me while he was there. He told me he found a really good hippy jump grass ride, and that he was going to try it. He called me that morning, then called me in the evening to tell me he did it. I asked him what it was like and he said, "it's a freeway barrier with a big grass hill after it." I couldn't believe it; he went from doing a couple hippy jumps over my flat bar to jumping over a freeway barrier! It was pretty nuts.
Once again, I probably have a biased opinion, but I find Matt and Brian's part the most entertaining of the video. It hits that special spot that most skate videos just can't hit. It's fun, funny, and has good skating in it. I think their part does a good job of summarizing what we were aiming for in making a video in the first place: skating that makes you laugh and gets you excited to go out and skate with your homies. You might not agree, but I think their part does the best job of illustrating that.
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