Monday, February 21, 2022

Fully Flared.






Kaboom.

I decided to take a look back at Lakai's Fully Flared video from 2007. I wanted to mark the 15th anniversary of the video before anybody else did. This feature came together rather easily for the most part so I rolled with it. I'm going to be rewatching the video and sharing thoughts on each section to see how well it has aged.

Fully Flared premiered in November of 2007 after being teased for a few years. It was directed by Ty Evans with Spike Jonze handling the movie magic. Federico Vitetta was also heavily involved with the video. Fully Flared was a major production with a huge team, global travel, and special effects.

In some aspects, it was the last of its type of video. Although I think it served as a good example of what not to do for future projects so people avoided some of the pitfalls that plagued Fully Flared going forward. Two important takeaways would be not to drag something out for years and don't run your team into the ground during those years. That being said, the video has a lot of great skateboarding in it.

This article from The Skateboard Magazine provides some interesting details about the process of filming the explosive opening section. The intro is basically a music video for M83 that takes Spike's fascination with slow motion explosions and choreography to the next level. It's amazing everybody was able to land their tricks and nobody got hurt in the process.

Note: I made these scans larger than normal so if they are hard to read, you should be able to download the JPGs.

The article is by Paul Zitzer and photographs are by Atiba Jefferson.

The Skateboard Mag - May 2008 Issue 50

1 comment:

Justin said...

I need to re-scan the second page. The Skateboard Mag is bigger than my scanner and the text on the left side got pinched a bit. I can usually make it work, but not always. It's readable enough as is, but I want to fix it at some point.

If you click one of the pictures and then right click with the mouse over it, you can open the page in a new window that allows you to zoom in for an easier read. I probably explained that oddly.