Must Watch: Lakai Fully Flared Intro

Fully Flared is a street skateboarding video from Torrance, California apparel company, Lakai Limited Footwear, directed by Ty Evans, Spike Jonze and Cory Weincheque. In 2007, it won “Best video of the Year” at the Transworld Skateboarding Awards.

The introduction features skateboarders performing tricks over obstacles, such as blocks and stairs, as they explode. They are actual stunts; practical effects, such as pyrotechnics, were used. Shown in super slow motion, the intro is accompanied by a track from French electronic/dream pop music group M83.

The intro does a good job of making these skaters look like John McClane.

Ty Evans on the wild intro of Fully Flared (process, conception, execution):

Well, the way it came about was throughout the course of the video, obviously, I’d sit down with Spike and Rick. Originally we had the idea of making the intro just really crazy with guys trying tricks with their boards shooting out into the street, like a car swerving, missing it and hitting something [or] causing a crazy wreck to happen and the other guy would be smashing things, punching through walls. Just different stuff that’d be super over-the-top. I think the final version of what we ended up doing was a pretty timid version of what we were first thinking about doing, ya know?

So it kind of got started from there but Spike was, obviously, been really busy finishing his film. So, basically, it started where he said he at least wanted to do something to where the guys would be skating and the spots were exploding and that was pretty much it. So between Rick and I, we had to figure out where could we permit the spot to build this stuff, what stuff do we need to build and who we’d need to help us. Once we had all that stuff kind of figured out another friend of ours a producer named Emma that has helped us on some stuff in the past helped she kinda just lined everything up everything else like handling all the permits and lining us up.

Our friend Marty helped with the pyrotechnics stuff. From there it kind of went on to where we’d go to Marty’s place and explain to him what was going on, what we were trying to do and what we were trying to figure out. It was funny because the whole time Spike was busy and wasn’t really there for a lot of it. He went once to Marty’s and kinda looked at what we were doing and kind of made some changes. Then we ended up building all the stuff at Marty’s. Brent Kronmueller helped us build all the stuff and basically the way it worked we’d build all the obstacles and we’d leave spots inside the obstacles where Marty could figure out where the pyrotechnics would go and he would put explosives inside the spot we left opened then he’d place pyrocell which was like a fake cement on top of that to fill in the square. Finally we’d just spray paint it to make it look as real as possible.

So that worked from there, we’d just built everything at Marty’s place and then loaded everything on to a couple of flatbed trucks and flatbedded the stuff all over there, set everything up in one day, then the next day we shot it, then the day after that, we finished shooting, then the day after that, we processed & telecine’d, the day after that, I made a rough edit, and the day after that, Spike and Rick came by and I showed them the rough edit. We made a couple minor changes but the edit you guys saw in the video was pretty close to the first edit I made the first night. I mean that’s pretty much how it all came about. We had so many ideas that we wanted to do.

Its funny some people are like, “it’s like the Yeah Right intro, you’ve already done that with the super slo-mo.” But, obviously, you want to see all the stuff explode in slo-mo, it really gives a different feel like you’re in a different world. Originally, we tried to rent the Phantom HD camera which can shoot 1000 frames a second. Originally, we were going to do that, but looking back on it now it might of been too slow. We probably would have had to do was a bunch of speed ramps. I think what we ended up using worked out pretty good. We had three 35’s, the first main camera that Spike operated was a Photosonic 35 that shot 300 frames per second, I think it did up to 360 but we shot at 300. The second camera we shot I believe was an Arri 435, our friend that’s, who’s a DP, his name is Mark Williams. He was manning that camera which went up to 150 frames. The third was my camera which is a 35mm Arri 2C and that maxes out at 72 frames per second. So that was, basically, that’s what we had for filming and, obviously, we had a bunch of HVX’s going for the behind the scenes stuff.