More pics from saturday

Saturday training in Manchester

After several days of good weather, our training finally got interrupted by rain this saturday. However, we still found an undercover spot where we could do some strength training (in between eating bananas!).

Saints Row 5.1 Mix

Those of you who own an Xbox 360 console, and have access to Xbox live may be interested to hear that the trailer for the forthcoming 'Saints Row' will be available for download over the next few days. I've just spent the afternoon doing the 5.1 audio mix for the trailer, and it's sounding pretty damn good, even if I do say so myself ;-) The game itself is basically a Grand Theft Auto rip off. Looks good though. I might see if I can blag a free copy. Worth a try!

More photos from today

Some are more blurry than I'd have liked, but here they are anyway.

Today's session

A selection of photos from today's session. Most of these were taken towards the end of the day after the serious training had finished.

New AV amp coming soon

It's been a few years since I last upgraded my home cinema amp. There have been a few developments in the 5 years or so since my last purchase;Dolby Digital EX, DTS ES Matrix & DTS ES Discrete (6.1 channel formats), HDMI, 720p, 1080i & 1080p HD video formats, the HDMI interface, THX Ultra 2. All this points to one thing: an upgrade! After spending a few months trawling the internet, I've found what looks like the right amp for me: The Denon AVC-A1XVA. The only slight drawback of this particular model is its massive 44kg weight, which will mean reinforcing my hifi rack to accomodate it. A small price to pay for hours of high quality audio visual enjoyment!!

HD Update!

Following on from my recent post about HD parkour videos, I've managed to secure an HD camera for this weekend! This will give me a chance to shoot some test footage before making a proper full length video. I will be filming some stuff around Manchester on saturday :-)

A few recent photos

Recently we agreed to be photographed by Holly, a student who needed some shots depicting 'movement' for a project. The photos turned out well. Here are just a few of them:

A rigorous evening training session

I've just arrived home after what started out as a fairly relaxed session, but turned into a navy seal boot camp kind of event. We had a couple of new people out tonight, someone whose name I can't remember (apart from his forum name, which is 'the one with the face'!), and Ollie, who came out for the first time tonight. From 6pm onwards we showed them a few basic vaults and jumps, and concentrated on helping them with some of the fundamental moves of Parkour. As the evening progressed and we moved around various locations around Manchester, the numbers gradually dwindled. Actually, let me rephrase that: everyone apart from Dave and I decided to leave at about 8:30pm. Due partly to the fact that our legs weren't feeling 100% thanks to the weekends numerous hours of PK, we decided to concentrate on upper body stuff more instead. I'm a bit too knackered at the moment to go into much detail, but we spent a considerable amount of time crawling down a set of concrete stairs on our hands & feet, and then back up again backwards. This is a great exercise for abs & triceps, and on what was perhaps one of the hottest days of the year so far, it was also extremely tiring! I lost count of just how many times we did this after about 4 or 5 times up & down the 30 or so stairs, but one thing is for sure: it was a lot!

I'm off to bed now to rest. Fear not though, because I'll be training again on saturday and sunday this weekend :-)

Parkour videos

Somebody commented to me today about how the last Parkour video I cut together was the first he'd seen which was in widescreen. I approach anything like that with the mindset that it has to be as good as it possibly can, both creatively and technically. This means good camera work, good content, good sound & good picture quality. If the subject is worth filming then it's worth doing well. You only get one chance to capture something, and people will be watching it for some time to come, so it needs to be as good as possible. I've seen enough crap quality videos with blocky pictures and low bit rate sound. This is 2006, so we need to be going forward not back! Widescreen has been the standard in television production for at least 6 years now, so why film stuff in 4:3, a standard from yesteryear?! Over the next few months I intend to shoot some test footage and cut together a parkour video in HD. Some people would argue that a good parkour video is good because of the skill of the traceurs. This is true of course, but why watch some 10 frames per second video from a mobile phone, when you could watch a crystal clear high definition image of the same thing? As far as I know, there have been no high definition PK videos yet. I'm going to put that right very soon though. Watch this space :-)

3 day Parkour event

Well, I'm currently relaxing after 3 days of Parkour. Although I've spent around 16 hours training in the last 3 days, I still feel that I could quite easily train tomorrow too. Maybe I'll go out for an hour or two in the afternoon. I booked a day off work to 'recover' from the weekend, but I actually feel surprisingly good! I think that's a testament to the physical conditioning that PK brings.

Of the 3 days, today was certainly the most enjoyable of them all. I arrived at UMIST just before 12pm today, to find 3 traceurs from Bury waiting for everyone. Over the next 40 minutes or so, the group gradually increased to around 30. More than we expected! Unfortunately, the numbers were made up largely of 'trickers'. Whilst much of what they do does require some considerable skill, it's just not Parkour. I'd much rather train with dedicated traceurs who are genuinely interested in training & improving. Enter the Sheffield lot!

As expected, the group from Sheffield was in Manchester today. I have trained with them numerous times before, and it's always a good session because we share a common outlook on Parkour. As the day progresseed, we managed to split off from the large group and concentrate on some real training. Manchester and Sheffield are two closely connected cities when it comes to PK, due mainly to the links which have been forged between traceurs in the two locations. Ben has made the analogy that we train in our own cities, and then 'synchronise' when we meet up and share ideas & techniques. This is a good way of looking at it, and it means that we learn from each other and continue to develop in our abilities & training techniques.

Will (one of at least 3 people at todays jam by that name!!) got really bad sunburn behind his ears due to the extreme sunshine. After that he had to resort to wearing a jacket over his head, making him look like a wandering nomad from the Sahara desert! Danny almost got a pretty big kong to cat today. There's only a very small run-up, but he was getting extremely close. Next time I'm pretty sure he'll get it. Ben managed to repeat his excellent dash vault over the wall at the geological gardens again today. After what must have been 30 or so attempts, he finally nailed it. It's something which he's done before, but it's not the easiest thing to do, especially after 4 days of Parkour! It looked very smooth though, and is almost certainly the most efficient way of getting over that wall. That's Parkour.