So Cal
Alright so the Russia trip got squashed due to lack of snow. Welcome to snowboarding. As an alternative location we decided to hit up a strange and exotic place called mountain high in southern California. I mean if you can’t pull off Russia, SoCal is a pretty close second right? So the foursquare team members booked their 28th flight of the year and rendevouzed at a sushi restaurant in Huntington Beach owned by one of the dudes from that awesome band Korn. With a K. Live Korn shows played on all the flat screens and every 2nd woman in there had plastic tits. I guess that’s just California for ya. Lots of artificial limbs. The sushi was great though and we had plenty of laughs as we discussed plans for the following day. The day of board sports. In order to spice up the concept surrounding a socal spring park shoot it was decided that we were also going to surf and go skateboarding all in one day. Because in socal it’s totally possible to do all three boarding activities in one day, well, as long as you have two helicopters on standby and 2 team managers to wrangle the crew and keep everyone on schedule.
Should I really go through the whole day here? Step by step? Let’s see, dudes wake up, dudes drink coffee, dudes go surfing, dudes go snowboarding, etc… Maybe a better way to do this is to talk about some highlights. First of all the jeeps that 4square rented for the day were pretty fun to drive, no roofs, no doors, no rearview mirrors. Felt like more of a No Fear shoot actually. We fit right in in Huntington Beach though. The surf that morning was a little dicey, not much of a highlight. The waves were pretty sloppy but the guys made the most of it. Eddie caught a few decent waves and then drifted about 2 miles down the beach. I ended up filming some Eddie Wall imposter for about half an hour too long. Got some good shots though! If I couldn’t tell the difference maybe our viewers won’t either. Welch and Pat went in and screwed around on the inside a bit before we wrapped the surf section. From there we drove the jeeps straight to the heli pad.
The Helicopters were definitely the best part of the day. 4square rented 2 choppers to get us to and from the hill. We flew up side by side with the doors off looking down over Orange County. There weren’t many yards down there, just a lot of houses rammed together into cull de sacs and what seemed like 1 pool for every 2 houses. All you could see was rooftops and bluegreen swimming holes beside them. I did notice some empty skateable ones but didn’t get the addresses.
As for the snowboarding, well, it seemed like the park crew scraped every last bit of snow from the entire hill into one area of the snowboard park. There was basically a track of snow going down one run while the rest of the hill was dirt and mud. But on that track were a few good jumps and some boxes to hit so we made the most of it. Pat did some big ollies to fakie on this quarter pipe box thing that they had at the bottom of the run. Eddie handled the doubled jump line and did some moves on the boxes. Welch ollied Peter Line off of a speed bump on flat. Pretty rad.
We winded the day down skating a back yard mini ramp in Costa Mesa with beers and in and out burger. Perfect combo for the end of a long day. I think we went for 18 hours that day nonstop. So that’s about it, a long day of boarders boarding. No funny tour stories here, just a step by step account of one of our shoots for the 4square video. No big deal. Next stop, Dubai.
