Isle of Wight Festival 2009!

Got back last night from 4 days of basking in the glorious sunshine, drinking ridiculous amounts of shant and spending my life savings on shit food. Was such a sick weekend!

Cam and I got needlessly caned on the boat on the way there and after five minutes of arriving at the harbour Cam got pushed in with his brand new BlackBerry in his pocket. With no numbers of people Cam knew, we were left to fend for ourselves all weekend. We then set up our embarrassingly shit £10 ASDA tent amongst loads of expensive, proper 8 man tents, chucked our stuff in and proceeded to catch the last of Pendulum. Basement Jaxx followed, who were amazing, and the night went out with a bang when The Prodigy owned it:

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I can’t remember what we did after this but it wasn’t anything as hectic as the next two nights. We headed back to our tent about 3 and proceeded to chat shit to the people in our neighbouring tents, who described Cam and I as “better than TV”. After waking up we returned to the boat to stock up on drink and after Cam had been in once before, he couldn’t get enough:

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The rest of the day was spent wondering around drinking, soaking up what the festival had to offer. The Strongbow tent was rad; open plan with music & beanbags – ultimate cotch. We watched Calvin Harris, who was sick, and decided we’d rather party than watch Stereophonics after meeting a bloke from Newcastle who had lost all his mates. The three of us then drank a few pints in the Carling bar which was a massive open plan pub with sofas and an open mic, and then progressed into some night club which I didn’t know existed. We then bumped into Ross (skateboarder from some of my videos), who I had no idea was there. Some more stuff happened that I can’t remember but we ended the night sitting on a bench outside a burger van with some French fella who was 23 but looked about 30 and had learned all his English from American TV shows! We chatted to him for about 3 hours and returned to our tent at about 5, where we continued drinking for a bit while making diabolical roach-less fags out of torn up pocket Rizlas.

Sunday was spent doing the same as Saturday and during our daily trip back to the boat for more booze we were surprised with a proper sick air show, it was unbelievable how good the pilots were, especially with the synchronised choreography. We then watched some music for a change – you may recognise this. We were invited to a champagne bar by Simon (the person’s boat we came on) and after rinsing a £35 bottle of champers we met up again with Gwen, the Frenchman, outside the same burger van which I had though thought we had gotten friendly with the owner of, but later events proved me wrong. Long story short, there were about 10 of us sitting around this table, each of us knowing just one of the other people, all drinking our own drinks as well as this French vodka mix that Gwen had prepared us (1 litre vodka, 1 litre orange in a 2 litre water bottle) all singing, chanting and banging on the table. Eventually the owner of the burger van had enough of our constant demand for free food and rowdy behaviour and asked us to leave. So we then picked up the table (which belonged to the burger van) attempted to carry it to another location where we would be more welcome but didn’t even get it a foot when it completely fell apart. Inspired by the Basement Jaxx song that we were all singing five minutes before, we then proceeded to chant “Where’s your table at? Where’s your table at!” I was ridiculously drunk by the time we eventually left and I remember struggling to walk back to the campsite but don’t actually remember reaching it. I woke up laying half out of my tent and half in it, asked Cam what happened and he said “you fell over and wouldn’t wake up, I thought you were dead”.

Tagged with: , | Filed under: Footage, General Chit Chat, Non-Skateboarding, Photos, Travelling

Getting Rad in High Definition

On Tuesday, after being kicked out of the only room where we can actually work due to a class of 14 year-olds coming to visit, our teacher decided that it would be a good idea to give 4 very immature teenagers a £2k HD camera to play with. After showing us the ropes, the four of us were dismissed outside to explore the big bad world of high definition. The word ‘skatepark’ instantly sprung to mind. After marveling at the greatness of this little machine and getting some rather lovely looking footage, we headed back to capture. Capturing went well, and I managed to blag an external hard drive to take the footage home on, blissfully unaware of how incompatible HD video is with everything.  Instead of explaining them, here’s a list of problems I encountered:

- The footage would not play on my computer, in any application, and Google was no help.

-The footage would not play on any other Macs in my college apart from the Mac Pros, which were being used by another class today, so I had to get in there at lunch.

-Took about half an hour to find the right settings to convert the footage  so I could play them at home, without loosing the high definition.

-Took about 2 hours to convert all the clips.

-Logged out of the computer after the render to go to the car to get my iPod to use it as a hard drive, as all the college ones were booked out. Tried to log back in and remembered the footage is on my mate’s account, who had gone home and doesn’t have a phone that works.

-Had to wait half an hour to transfer it all to my iPod after managing to log in, then had to wait this again when I got home to transfer it all to my PC.

-Premiere Pro froze halfway through editing and I hadn’t saved it, had to start again.

-I finished editing at 8.30, and it’s taken me this long to get the right uncompressed HD settings to export out of Premiere, and the right settings for Sorenson Squeeze.

So after all that stress, here’s some HD footage of Mike King (who recently got his new website up) riding Guildford skatepark. Although this compression doesn’t really do the quality justice, HD cameras are definitely NOT overrated; the uncompressed files look amazing.

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Or click here for a smaller version.

I do have some skateboarding footage that I thought I would get up tonight, but evidently not, so bare with me for that.

Tagged with: , , | Filed under: Edits, Footage, Non-Skateboarding

Fight Club

Apparently this is what we do now when we’re not skateboarding. After the boozer at Cam’s house last night things got a little out of hand:

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Skateboarding footage tomorrow!

Tagged with: , | Filed under: Footage, Non-Skateboarding