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Now what do all these clips have in common?
It's been a minute, but we're back in it! With the series where we break down and
analyze viral parkour clips and expose some of the secrets as to how they were created.
In this episode we're analyzing some of the most famous parkour videos
that have a dirty little secret, and that secret is crash mats.
Now i'm not saying that using crash mats is bad,
there's a lot of times when you need to use a crash mat for safety.
However in these particular videos, people have specifically and deliberately removed crash mats
from view, to fool the audience into thinking that the movement was real. Some of these are
also extremely famous and important community parkour videos, let's get into the analysis!
So our first video is the cult classic "Storm Origins",
one of the more influential videos of its time, the video shows three parkour athletes
going through one of the gnarliest initiation sequences to a parkour team I've ever seen.
From being hit by a car, being shot, even set on fire by a man with a flamethrower backpack?!
But there's one clip at the very beginning of the video that I want to focus on.
Now you'll notice Blue in the blue t-shirt does a huge diving front flip off this car
park and down to a roof below. Now Blue is one of the most original athletes
he's been training since 2005 and doing some incredible stuff so no discredit to Blue here.
Now if we check the landing on the clip the roll looks a bit strange. Blue's feet seem to
disappear just before he lands and then as he lands he actually kind of compresses into the
ground in a really weird way and the clip cuts pretty quickly to a different shot afterwards.
So there is definitely something happening here, but for this one
i don't actually need to guess as to how they've done it, because i can show you.
I reached out to my friend Claudiu who is the director of this original video
and he actually kindly sent me the raw unedited clips of this shot, and here you can see that both
of the jumps in this sequence, both the front flip and the following roof gap were actually
done to crash mats and then they removed them in post-production. In fact a lot has been done
to this video in post-production you can see that claudiu has also removed these two guys from the
background, changed the time of day completely and added lens flares. But that being said you
can just check the comments of storm origins to see how many people thought this flip was real!
And I actually do think this flip is doable for real! If you don't know there's an australian
parkour beast called Dom Tomato who is renowned for doing these huge front flips
and I think he could probably do this for real without any crash mats at all.
Shut up baby I know it!
And right after the first flip there's a second jump as I mentioned before
and that one was also faked as well. Also there's a funny mistake in this video where if you notice
Phil in the red t-shirt has quite long hair at the start of the race,
however he jumps down this staircase and suddenly his hair is really short.
Phil was way ahead of his time with these illegal covid staircase haircuts!
So this leads us on to our next video and this one is a live action POV video based on
the videogame Mirror's Edge but before we go into that let's talk about today's sponsor Skillshare.
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and masking for when I want to create my own fake parkour videos and fool you all!
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so send me what you make and i'll use them in a video! Thank you Skillshare!
So this leads us on to our next video which was filmed by the same director
as storm origins claudiu, and in this video it's a time trial through the
city and the pov hero he's fighting off guards, he zip lines from roof to roof
and even gets shot by an attack helicopter on the roof of croydon shopping center.
Now this one is obviously more of a stunt video than the last so don't come at me saying
"Oh Scott it's obviously not real! do you think movies are real too?!" because I know that. No
one's going to believe an attack helicopter is actually flying through croydon but there is
one jump in this video that looks 100% real and it's known in the parkour community for being
absolutely massive. In fact the storrors actually went there and did this jump with crash mats
just to prove it was doable, but it's only been done with crash mats or so i thought.
Because in the mirror's edge video we see it done without any mats
and this jump is huge, but claudiu sent me the original clip of that one as well
and what do you know, that's right another crash mat.
I mean you really didn't see it coming did you?!
But the vfx work in this video is actually amazing you can see here he's even sent me
the ungraded raw clip and it's so hard to tell there was a crash mat removed. Claudiu,
well done! Everyone a little round of applause for Claudiu! "Oh yeah well done claudiu
excellent editing work!" You can kind of see it if you compare these two frames back and forward and
look around the edge of the window you can see there's a bit of shifting, and that's because
he's basically replaced the entire patch of the roof to hide these crash mats but to be honest,
with youtube compression on youtube on the original footage you can't tell that they've
been removed and the only real clear evidence that this shot was fake is if you look at the feet on
this shot here they look like they've been kind of stuck on to the environment. There's a weird glow
around them and that's because he's had to blend that shot with the roll he's filmed afterwards.
Oh yeah i forgot to say 90 of you are not subscribed, so whack the button and the bell.
Now our next video is another classic parkour video filmed by Giles who also
helped shoot storm origins and in this one is a brilliant example of a failed removed crash mat.
So in after dark two athletes tear up this london shopping center while it's closed at night we see
Jaydn clark doing this huge front flip down from a second floor balcony onto the marble floor below
but for this one iI don't even need to ask for the raw clip to prove there was a crash mat.
How can you easily tell this jump was done to a crash mat? There is one massive giveaway.
Did you work it out? Look at the reflection of the glass roof!
"Oh look a big blue crash mat, oh i wouldn't have guessed"
From the flip shot from the balcony it's pretty difficult to tell because
you almost don't see the landing anyway, most people would just show the athletes
starting to roll before cutting to another shot to dodge this, it means you have to do
less vfx and hiding crash mats in this way has been a joke in the community for ages
Storrorblog don't use mats!
However in the next video which was shot for Red Bull, we see examples of them either cutting
landings completely or using different landings the ones that should have been used instead.
So i'd suspected this video was fake for a while and I actually reached out to DK
and DK is now going to explain a little bit about the project
which clips were fake and which ones were actually real.
Hey everyone my name is DK and i'm professional free running athlete from greece.
Basically what you will be watching right now is a video clip that i did back in switzerland
i think it was in 2016 with my friend kevin fluri, it was a shooting for red
bull switzerland however there were a few fake clips in this video clip.
One of them is the the huge gainer we did from like a very very high building obviously you will
see that the landing is cut definitely there were some mats there, we did have some huge mats,
it was pretty sketchy to be honest and it was very scary even with the mats.
Then we did another one which which it's very very clear that is a
fake clip, it's me doing a monkey precision to like a small ledge
and then kevin shows up and he pushes me and i do a backflip to concrete and then i back roll.
Then he does a kong gainer off those rails directly to concrete, which is
impossible I can tell you, not impossible directly but it's very very dangerous.
We put the mats again for those for those clips, some of you will ask "why did you use the mats in
the first place?" You never know what's what happens in your life I wanted to do to have
this as my my CV you know? I did this job and there were mats there i used this one etc etc.
There was one thing that I didn't like for this shoot and it was that because of these fake clips,
the real ones are being covered. We put fire on ourselves which was 100% real some,
people thought that it was fake because they saw the fake clips earlier on but no
this one was real. Also i did one of the biggest kong gainers i think in in history,
it was pretty high and it was also on very hard floor. There were like small rocks
and right under there was concrete. Yeah i did this one twice, but that was real.
That's it crazy video, crazy shooting. Thank you AMPISOUND for the opportunity, see you!
And there you have it some of the most famous parkour videos have secret crash mats all along!
Did you know any of these clips were fake? Did you believe the front flips were real?
And more interestingly where do we draw the line between a stunt video
and a real parkour video? For the next video in this series,
i'm thinking about doing something more video gaming. Would you be interested in that?
Let me know! Thanks again to our sponsor Skillshare and i'll see you the next one!