There are few things nicer than completing a project that you’ve spent months working on and being completely satisfied at the epicness of the final result. This is the feeling I’m lucky enough to experience right now. For the last few months, Patrick and I have been working on a little project – our little video – of him rollerblading down Kloof Nek Road, that eerily steep road cutting between Table Mountain and Lion’s Head and connecting the inner city to luxurious Camps Bay, made famous a short while back by a skateboarder speeding down its gentle curves and setting off the speed camera.
Now, our project deserves a little back story… We both got skateboards a few months ago and, falling in love with the night time stillness, took up night skating. Wanting to stay visible, we had a look around at bicycle lights, and finally found the coolest little skull-shaped LED lights, made by Taiwanese company Skully, with the perfect straps to fit the skateboards.
Joyous at our little find, we bought a bunch of different colours – skulls in white, red, and black, some with white lights, and some with red lights – and strapped them to our boards in-store. Figuring it’d be cool to have them on his rollerblades too, as he’d just taken a liking to trying out various Cape Town hills, Patrick bought a few extra for his blades, strapping the white lights to the front, and the red to the back.
Still joyous and very proud of our little creative endeavour, Patrick took photos of our ‘work’ (i.e. the lights strapped to the boards and the rollerblades), e-mailed Skully in a very conversational manner, and told them that we’d had this pimp idea and were going to send them a video of nighttime skating/rollerblading in Cape Town featuring their very cool product. Not thinking much of it though, and wanting to film a little clip of him skating just for the fun of it, we went ahead in planning our shoot.
Not having any experience in film work (yes, I know, I’m an actress, but my knowledge of behind the scenes isn’t all too great) but very amped to get our little project going, we planned some scenes, hired equipment, and got a videographer to come help us shoot. Luckily, he had great vision of his own and helped us with shot ideas, and then also edited the video for us. Since then, it has undergone a little more editing work by some lovely people and was given a song, for which we got the rights, and was made into the little charm that it now is.
In the meantime, Skully had replied to Patrick’s original e-mail, saying that they thought our idea was just as pimp as we thought it was, and that they’d be willing to give us a little bit of budget in exchange for the rights of the video. Now that’s definitely a cool way for a side project to turn out! Over-ecstatic at the success of our creative endeavour, we signed the agreement, sent the video off, together with the text that now sits at the bottom of it on YouTube, and whoola, it was exhibited at Eurobike2014, is being prepped to appear on Skully’s website plus their Facebook page, and is available on YouTube, ready for the world to see.
We’re happy, Skully’s happy, everyone we’ve showed the video to has loved it, and we’re very excited to share it with as many people as possible. I think it’s a nice little lesson in following your dreams, passions, ambitions, because you never know what’ll come of it. Who knows, maybe there’s a little joyous success story waiting for you too!
Don’t forget to check out Skully – Enjoy the Night.
