For most of us, this project was the first real connection with the Asian, especially Japanese, parkour culture. For others, this was a complete makeover of a piece filmed five years prior, which has yet to be released.
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The first half of the video combines clips from countries like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam where we spent around 1 week each. The rest of the video is dedicated just to Japan, which was the highlight of the whole trip. Spending nearly a month there gave us enough time to film in many different cities and for Mikeš to find his girlfriend.
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With this video, we really tried to up our filming game. We took a lot of inspiration for composition and framing from freeski classics such as The Bunch or Zootspace pieces. We wanted to make the video weird but at the same time we wanted for it to stay authentic to the classic parkour style. This led us to a strange situation where we had a crazy amount of “regular” parkour footage and quite a lot of “artsy” b-roll and specifically filmed clips that we somehow had to fit together whilst not making the final piece an hour long. We completely reedited the whole piece like six times and in the end, we cut the length in about a half. The final product is probably just the thing we wanted, even though it’s something totally different than what we imagined. It is a strange and hectic scrummage of all the places we visited, mixing together the lovely and magical nature with the city’s flashing lights.
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The fact that such a big portion of the clips in the video are night clips is not a coincidence, SMSH was filmed during the summer, which in Asia means unlivable weather during the day and somewhat survivable temperatures during the night. The schedule was rough - filming till late night, missing the last train home, struggling with the way back, going to sleep late, waking up late, South Park, diarrhea and this over and over again. During filming there we had the chance to meet some of the Japanese legends and include them in our video. One of the special filming nights was the one in Tokyo with Sai ( @untitled01.lim ) and Ogi, two special individuals with a great artistic range, even one of the soundtracks in the video is from Sai’s production.
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Whoever gets why it’s called Sexy Move Sledge Hammer is a legend.
