Alright folks, my name is Danny MacAskill I'm a professional street trail rider
/ mountain biker from Scotland. I've been doing this for over a decade and
today I'm gonna take you through some of my top highlights over the last 10 years.
Here we go. The first film we have here is Inspired Bicycles, this is the film
that really kicked off things for me on the Internet
I actually made it with my flatmate when I lived in Edinburgh at the time I was
working in the bike shop and we'd go on our lunch breaks and try to film
different things and one of the tricks we tried to film on a lunch break was
actually riding along the top of a spiky fence, it was a pretty scary, it took me
about 300 goes over four days in winter, lots and lots of crashes it was really
that that kicked everything off for me. I would kind of go out and at
nighttime with headphones in and I just put hours of practice and seeing if I
could maybe make it work before we started rolling the cameras.
The first time I actually tried this trick my fork snapped which wasn't very fun
but I managed to roll away onto the concrete at the bottom okay on my back.
Luckily I landed it third go which is quite cool.
Myself and Dave were actually a little bit bothered that there was too scared of looking over the edge
in hindsight it was one of the main things that people commented on; the idea of people
kind of looking to see I was in one piece or if I just, you know,
had done something a bit silly so it was yeah, a fun little clip
Inspired Bicycles, when it actually went online, was a huge surprise for both myself and Dave that
it started going viral, it was at one time the most watched sports video on YouTube
I started getting all these kind of crazy requests which is quite funny
one of the kind of crazier ones was that Ellen DeGeneres wanted me to go over to Chicago
to dress up as her and do some street riding around the place
but at the time I had no idea who Ellen DeGeneres was, so of course turned it down
and I don't know how to do it today, even.
So, the next clip here is the Way Back Home, so the first clip we're gonna play here
is me doing a front flip off one of the walls in Edinburgh castle then and
grass banking, this has been a kind of dream trick of mine to try
but I'd never done it until this day, it was absolutely horrible weather that day I was
stressing pretty hard because I only had two hours to kind of
do the tricks that I was wanting to do, yeah, all in all, it was a pretty stressful day
a few crashes and probably hurting myself, so I tried a couple of times,
landed in the crash mats on my back, you know four times and then fifth go, managed to get
round on to my wheels which was quite surprised but pretty cool
the next clip we have here is me doing a backflip of a log, I was on beach-combing on the east
coast of Scotland when I was out in the beach I found this amazing log which
happened to be, slightly banana shaped or transition shaped and
it was perfectly split down the middle so it was like a kind of ramp, you know
so as soon as I saw this log, I kind of stashed it in the bushes because I was
scared somebody was something else is gonna steal it because who doesn't want
a transition log that they could do backflips off, tide came and the kids end up
going swimming out to it, jumping on it, start flowing away and then we had about ten
minutes between this tide going out far enough and getting the log back in place
for me to eventually try to do the backflip but a lot of work for 10 seconds of footage.
Next clip we have is a little freeride line that I built
out on an island which is just off the Isle of Skye, this is actually some
foundations of an old railway network for an iron mine that was on Island, if you look
closely you can see a lot of midges, they were so thick that day that we had to
swat them away with a t-shirt so we could actually get the clip. Yeah,
luckily for me, the Way Back Home was again quite successful and, you
know, it was really cool working together with Red Bull on that clip, and kind of
set up our working relationship for the next few years, where they kind of let me
come up with the idea and let me drive the creative side and then they
kind of support with allowing me to film with the filmers I want to film with in the places that I want to film
The next one we're going to talk about is Imaginate.
I thought it'd be nice to kind of go into a studio environment
have controlled lighting, controlled build and see what we could come up with
so the first clip of Imaginate is the ball flip to railway track
I always kind of fancied some kind of trick on a Swiss ball or an exercise ball
because I'd spent so much time doing rehab from a back operation
I'd had about twelve months before this film, we basically started filming this clip
from about 9:00 in the morning and we didn't stop filming until about 5:00 in the
afternoon and about 400 goes later, so that was definitely a very difficult trick
to do, borderline almost impossible, but if you try it enough times
then eventually you'll fluke it, that's what we did
Next clip we have here is me doing an opposite 360 backflip onto the railway platform
that was definitely one of the harder tricks that I did for
Imaginate and the one that I had some of the worst crashes on
one of which, I did a 360 backflip and landed flat on my back on a concrete platform
definitely knocked the wind out of my sails it a bit but tough day at work
here we have the final sequence of Imaginate, this was a line where I come back flipping out of a vent
the loop-de-loop was one of the first things that we built in the hall and
if you go on internet and search for other people trying to ride loop-de-loops
you'll find that they all go horribly wrong and even you know
riders like Matt Hoffman or Tony Hawk or whoever else, it doesn't matter how
you watch, anyone that rides a loop-de-loop they're probably having some kind
of horrible crash out of the side of it, once I started getting the hang of the
loop-the-loop, we kind of moved the airbag further and further out, to the
point where eventually we took it out and the first time I'd try
it without the airbag and went around and realized that it's actually
quite relaxing, there's absolutely zero effort required to go round it, you just go
in at a certain speed, maybe tense your legs a little bit so you don't sit on
the back tyre but it's just like being on the ground, you just get
held in by the central force and then come out the other end, you know like
a champ, so once I kind of got the hang of the loop-de-loop, we had the Red Bull
f1 car delivered, the idea was that I was gonna put at the end of this sequence
we had a big wooden wedge built up that was meant to look like a kid's building block
and I'd never done this trick before again, I've tried it onto mats a little bit
just to avoid unnecessary injury and then once I kind of got the hang of it
we put the car in place and then did the whole sequence, so the next one we
have is a Wee Day Out, the film starts off with me on a steam railway train
I had this dream of trying to do some kind of gap onto the second railway track
it's pretty much all I think about whenever I'm stood on the railway tracks
is how I would jump my bike between the different ones, one of the biggest
challenges was trying to land normally on the railing that it was trying
to look like it was casual and trying to get past the camera, you know I'd land on
the railing, probably one in five goes but then you I'd be coming at the camera
with one leg going all over the shop and that's the same for all the film's
the idea is that we kind of keep going over and over again to try to make it look as
easy as possible. There we have it, there's many more films out there that
you can kind of go and watch and I'm excited to say that I've got loads more
in the pipeline as well, so keep an eye, hopefully in the new year for some new projects
so yeah, catch you soon, Cheers!