- So, you got your gimbal, your mirrorless camera,
and some fast lenses, now what?
How are you gonna market yourself differently?
What's gonna push you over the edge
and make your work stand out?
The single-most important thing that keeps me working
and makes my work stand out, is my ability
to develop new skills.
And in this case it's stabilizing the Z-axis on your gimbal,
(electronic whooshing)
giving you smooth, dolly-like shots for every single shot.
(upbeat pop music)
It's like putting your cinematography on steroids.
(upbeat pop music)
Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo.
Yo, yo, Josh Yeo.
Today marks one year that I shot my very first commercial,
sixthreezero, an awesome beach cruiser company
and I did it entirely (grunts) on this bad boy.
Oh my god, ugh, that's an arm workout.
This thing is the ultimate guerrilla filmmaker's tool.
You can get super smooth dolly shots,
speed ramping, perfect freaking paralax,
without having to lug around all this crazy equipment.
For the bike commercial, it worked like magic,
because we wanted guerrilla-style filmmaking.
We wanted to cover a vast amount of landscapes,
different type of environments, to reflect the bike
and its comfy, all-terrain capabilities.
And, because we had zero budget for permits, technocranes
or car jibs, we had to shoot everything in two days.
Most importantly, I wanted an extension of my legs
that would leave my hands free
to operate camera and monitor.
(banging on door) (dog barking)
And that was just the beginning of it.
- Here we are, live on set.
- (laughs) Say hello, right there.
- Yo, yo, Josh Yeo.
- This is my boy, Rainier.
This guy is a sick-ass shooter, editor,
he does a bunch of music videos.
Are you ready to do this?
- Sure, yeah.
- So, I'm gonna stick you in one of these,
I'm gonna show you how to ride it
and we're going to Venice Beach.
This is also how I get B-roll of me.
(upbeat pop music)
So you see the arrows on there?
'Cause otherwise it gets confusing.
- [Rainier] Gotcha. (laughs)
- [Joey] All you gotta do is think about going forward,
and you'll go forward, and then think about going back.
To turn, just lean, you just go like this.
- [Rainier] Oh I gotta lean on there.
- [Joey] Push down on the stick.
- Oh shit.
- [Joey] Yeah.
- Oh my gosh.
- Alright, see?
Look, he's a pro.
Where you going, dude?
It's this way, you're going the wrong way.
Let's go to the beach.
(upbeat pop music)
So I get that this looks like laziness,
but once you stick a gimbal on this thing, it's a trip.
(upbeat pop music)
Look at that, yeah!
(upbeat pop music)
What's crazy is the sheer amount of B-roll we just got.
We've gone all the way down to Venice
and all the way back up.
Perfect paralax shots that you can get,
while you're on this.
Paralax, you probably know it from shooting drones,
it's when you have a focal point way out in the distance,
the camera is moving and you have things in the foreground.
The speed in which things are passing by the camera
is different, some really cinematic shit,
it's basically, Michael Bay does it in all of his shots.
(upbeat pop music)
Sorry! (laughs)
Recreationally, I hate this thing.
You'll never, ever, ever catch me riding this thing for fun,
'cause it's not fun, it goes too fucking slow,
and I look like a dork riding it.
But as a tool, I use it all the time,
I insist on bringing it to shoots.
I get clients that are like, you're gonna bring a Segway?
I'm like, yeah.
(upbeat pop music)
Truth is, is I'm not even a cameraman.
- [Man] Really?
- But I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express, though.
(men laughing)
In one year, I've ridden a combined 340 miles
on both my Segways, and this is what I've learned.
You get about 14 miles a charge, really it's closer to 10.
It doesn't do that well uphill,
it doesn't do that well downhill.
(wind rushing) Whoa!
10 miles an hour is just not fast enough
once you get the hang of it.
This just happened.
Ten miles an hour is plenty fucking fast,
you will hurt yourself if you fall.
It will throttle you if you try to go faster
than the speed limit, it will punish you
by docking one mile an hour off your maximum speed limit,
for every offense within a given timeframe.
And, of course, the beeping.
(electronic beeping) Stop beeping, stop it.
Segway did not pay me to make this video.
My relationship with Segway's very strained
on behalf of the numerous emails I've sent them
requesting to do a firmware upgrade that will eliminate--
(electronic beeping)
That fucking annoying beeping!
And there is no way around this,
unless you have the manufacturer's assembly instructions
and you take apart the speaker wire.
Which I cannot recommend, or know how to do.
So there's this stupid training thing,
that it takes you about a half hour to get through.
It starts off at one mile an hour
and it makes you do all this little obstacle course
within the app, but it's very helpful.
And if you want to use this seriously for cinematography,
I do recommend going through it the whole way.
I have ridden this thing across multiple cities,
I've even taking it to Burning Man,
I've been kicked out of a museum,
I've attempted to board an airplane with it
as checked luggage, I do not recommend doing that.
TSA sees no difference between a Segway
and one of those hoverboards that catches fire.
I even ordered a second one and a Pelican case,
so that I can now FedEx Ground ship it
and I still have one at home, just in case my work overlaps.
So is it worth it?
You will fall, you will break your camera equipment,
you will hurt yourself, people will look at you funny.
But in the end, they will fucking marvel
at how you got that shot.
So yeah, it's worth it. (upbeat pop music)
You guys wanna see the commercial?
I left a link in the description below,
you can go to my website, StarvingHeartistFilms.com.
Anyway, this is Josh Yeo saying thank you very much,
stay creative, now go put your cinematography
on some freaking steroids.
(upbeat pop music)