PHILLY + BOSTON FOR SHRINERS HOSPITALS

We flew back east a couple weeks ago to film for Shiners Hospitals for Children.

First off we spent a couple days filming at the hospital in Philly.

We were framing up a shot for a guy with a guitar - he did music therapy with the kids - which is why I'm holding the boom like this.

The week was packed - we'd start pretty early each day and covered all parts of the hospital including filming in the Operating Rooms during surgery which was sometimes crazy.

Philly was cool. Ate at a couple nice spots - I'm usually skeptical of East Coast Mexican food but El Vez was good. This place Marathon had like healthy, organic food that was great. Matt actually snapped this photo one night on our way out to Insomnia Cookies.

Then from Philly we flew straight to Boston and filmed 2 additional days at the hospital there.

This hotel was pretty legit - a hundred years ago it was a jail and they've now converted it into a luxury boutique hotel with a charming 'jail' theme.

Hannah, the PR intern, helped make our jobs easier by handling the millions of consent forms we gathered from patients and their families throughout the day.

Didn't eat anywhere special in Boston - the one night we were there we were exhausted from the flight in, the jetlag and the third consecutive day of filming. So we stayed in, napped and watched a Kardashians marathon with some Room Service.

All in all, we filmed a ton of stuff in 4 short days and really we're just getting started. Hitting 3 more hospitals this summer including Portland and Mexico City.

Really interesting places to film and obviously completely different than everything else that we do. Always come away feeling extremely grateful and also just happy that the kids there are getting the best care in the world. The attitudes of everyone in the hospitals really make them special places.

Shout out to Fabiana from HQ for making it all happen and Stephanie and Jeanne for the hospitality.

RECENT WORK: DUCATI MONSTER RIDE VID

Here's the spot we did last month for Ducati.

This was like a 3 day trip where we filmed a group of Ducati Monster owners riding from Newport Beach up the coast to Monterey. It was a fun time, some great views and weather and Ducati took good care of us - lots of nice meals and hotels etc. Shout out to The ID Agency for making it all happen.

(If you check it out, click on the little gear icon and change the quality to '720p') :)

CHILLIN AT LUMI HQ

I recently spent a day hanging out and filming with Lumi founder Jesse Genet.

Lumi Inkodye is a sunlight-sensitive line of colored dyes that you can use to print everything from t-shirts to upholstery.

Long story short: I heard about this stuff on Uncrate about a year and a half ago and bought a kit to test out and play around with. A few months later I got to meet Lumi co-founder Jesse Genet at her company Holiday party. And then about a month ago I was able to get a tour of their company headquarters located in the Brewery Arts Complex in Downtown LA and film Jesse giving a product demo and talking about how far the brand has come.

Jesse and her business partner both dropped out of Art Center to start the business. Last year they raised over a quarter of a million dollars on Kickstarter to continue growing their product line.

Jesse has an amazing story of building this brand and the product itself is pretty revolutionary - it's a low cost, accessible alternative to traditional screen printing. It's always inspiring to see young, hungry people chasing their dreams and creating their own lanes. Jess was super chill and extremely easy to film and work with. Excited to watch where Lumi goes from here.

For more details, check out their site.

RECENT WORK: CYCLE WORLD: HIGH PLAINS DRIFTIN'

Two and a half minutes riding around in the dirt.

Last month I mentioned this project we filmed for our boys at Cycle World. Last week it became the video that everyone in the motorcycle industry was talking about.

We're pretty happy with how it turned out and more importantly everyone over at Cycle World seems genuinely pumped about it. Shout out to Alpinestars and Ducati for throwing it on their Facebook pages and everyone who helped blow it up on Twitter. Cyc World said the vid got some major traffic over the weekend.

This was a pretty epic shoot - Dudek, the rider, actually blew a tire during the shoot which caused some delays while it got patched and then made filming the bike jumping scenes a bit more nerve wrecking. Also Matt and Ryan drove the 4Runner up a mountain to get the one super wide shot and then they almost got it stuck trying to drive back down over some boulders. There happened to be a few random ATVers out at the lakebed in the background while we were filming so Matt had to digitally remove them from a few shots in post-production.

Thanks to Jeff Allen and Dudek for having us out there. Shout out to Scott and Sean from 4120 for the epic aerial shots. It's cool to look around online and see the response to this - in fact Matt and I were chatting at lunch today about possibly putting out a behind-the-scenes vid from this shoot. Could be cool - we'll see...

NEWPORT TO MONTEREY

Took a little trip up the coast with Ducati a couple weeks ago.

We filmed a group of Ducati Monster owners traveling from Newport Beach up to Monterey for the Annual Quail Hill Motorcycle Gathering.

We stopped at Ducati Santa Barbara and grabbed lunch with our boy Carlin Dunne at Enterprise Fish Company. We don't eat a lot of seafood but the Mud Pie was excellent. Thanks Carlin.

The hills of Santa Ynez Valley. #Ducatilife

Random zebras off the side of the road near San Simeon.

Stopped at Nepenthe for lunch near Big Sur and then all the riders got to do a few parade laps at Laguna Seca raceway in Monterey.

It was a good trip, great weather, really nice group of Monster owners who we traveled and hung out with for a few days. Got some cool shots of the group riding through some nice scenery. The Quail Lodge meetup was cool - a ton of really unique vintage bikes. Not a bad way to spend the weekend.

Launching another new bike vid on here in a couple days. NoBizPlan is coming back, no really, I promise...

STAPLE SNEAK PEEK

Started working on a new project last week along with our boy jeffstaple.

Jeff was in LA and we were able to link up and film a few things with him.

We're not really allowed to say too much about it for now but it'll be in the works for the next few months and we're excited that it's underway and all starting to come together.

Nothing makes you feel like you don't own enough sneakers quite like hanging out with jeff for a day. He had some fresh Puma Pigeons on, of course.

Anyway, really need to get back to blogging and distributed bootlegged rap music on here soon. That'll hopefully happen shortly, stay tuned.

In the meantime, thanks to everyone who came by the office last week for our Open House and had pizza and watched the Celtics game with us. More, much bigger and crazier office events to come. Also shout out to everyone over at Imprint lab and InterTrend for throwing a killer event last Friday.

Last but not least, the first 2 series are wrapped and the Leaderboard has been updated. Enjoy your weekend, we're heading up to Monterey in the morning with Ducati for a few days so don't spoil any of the NBA games this weekend for me - I'm recording them :)

2013 NBA BRACKETOLOGY

Like we always do at this time.

This year's NBA bracket is up and running. We've been doing this for a few years now - always fun to see poorly everyone does at predicting future NBA champs.

Decided to go with an In-N-Out gift card for the winner. And of course if you don't live within driving distance of an In-N-Out then you have bigger things to worry about than some online hamburger contest.

The playoffs should be fun this year. Excited to see how James Harden takes his hard feelings out on the Thunder, if the Clips can outlast Memphis again (I think they can), if D.Rose will emerge and take the Bulls to a 2nd Round Heat matchup and of course if the Lakers can pull off a few miracles.

nba2013.nobizplan.com

We'll accept brackets until next Tuesday, spread the word.

DESERT STORM

Went out to the middle of nowhere for a couple days last week.

Shot a cool little spot for our boys at Cycle World.

This was just more of a passion project from Jeff Allen at Cycle World than anything else. No editorial story or client guidelines - just a fun piece that Jeff had a vision for. He asked us to help out and be a part and it was a no-brainer for us.

Brought out Scott and Sean from 4120 to film some RC helicopter aerial stuff for us. Check out those virtual reality goggles - pretty sweet right?

An on-board shot via one of the new GoPro Hero3 Black Editions - we used these out in Austin as well. Footage quality improvement from the Hero2's is huge. We still got love for Contour - excited to see what they come out with next.

Shout out to everyone at Cycle World for bringing us out to the desert for some fun (and adventure). The CW guys are so chill and easy to work with. Also thanks to Ducati for the bikes and Alpinestars and Arai for the gear. Stay tuned for the vid.

DUCATI AUSTIN: I

First half of the recap from our epic week in Texas.

We spent most of the week out at the Circuit of the Americas which is the new F1 racetrack they have down there. The track and the whole facility was amazing - plus Ducati went all out all week branding everything from the paddock at the track to the Audi courtesy cars. They had a full setup at the hotel - Ducati reception desks, a Panigale in the lobby, Ducati room keys - it was legit.

Anyway, Nicky Hayden and Ben Spies were out there for the first couple days and Ducati flew in journalists from all over the globe to come in throughout the week and ride and test and review the new Panigale R.

We crashed here for the week. #toughlife

We had one sort of half day off in Austin and we made the most of it. First off we stopped by Taco Deli and grabbed some food. The tacos were good - they had Mexican Mashed Potatoes - it was a cool spot. All the food in Austin costs a fortune though, but whatevs.

After lunch we stopped by DJI Innovations - they make radio controlled helicopters for flying cameras and capturing aerial footage and their HQ happens to be in Austin. The whole aerial cinematography game is something we've been looking into lately so we just sort of dropped in unannounced and luckily they were cool and chatted with us for awhile about new products and stuff they're working on.

After that we stopped by Nice Kicks and Ryan picked up some sneakers. Then we hit South Congress which is apparently the 'cool' street of shops and food trucks and stuff.

There are a million food trucks all over Austin - it's kind of insane. Grabbed a gourmet grilled cheese from this one called Burro - the branding and truck design was cool. Not sure about the sandwich, Ryan claimed it was good but left half of it rotting back at the hotel the rest of the week.

This vintage shop Uncommon Objects was cool. We stopped in here and bought some used horseshoes and stuff - very well curated. You could spend all day in there.

And finally, us, looking tough, in the 25-story tall observation deck that towers over the track.

Part II coming soon including a full Yelp recap of all the Austin food places that bankrupted us.

Meanwhile we're staying busy - filming the next 2 days in a dry lakebed out the middle of nowhere. Should be fun :)

NEW DUCATI VID

Ducati just released the first video from our filming in Austin this week.

We're down here with The ID Agency at the new F1 track, the Circuit of the Americas, filming the International Launch of Ducati's new superbike the 1199 Panigale R. On Monday, Ducati's MotoGP riders Ben Spies and our boy Nicky Hayden hopped on the new bike and spun some laps. When they came back in the paddock someone asked them how fast they were able to push it - they said they didn't know because the bike's speedometer capped off at 185MPH. Damn.

Anyway we shot all this stuff Monday, uploaded it straight to Ducati HQ in Bologna that night, they edited it Tuesday and posted to the global Ducati Motor Holding YouTube account this morning.

All the behind the scenes pics and stuff to come soon. Stay tuned.

GOOD KID, M.A.A.D. CITY

Down in Austin for the week.

We're here with Ducati but we came in a bit early and got to spend some time at SXSW. Thanks to Victor from ID Agency we got to check out the last show down here at Viceland last night. Trinidad James was, um, interesting. This DJ kid Baauer was pretty amazing - definitely made a fan out of me. Dude never said a word, just walked out on stage in a sweatshirt and snapback and rocked the whole room.

Finally around 1AM Kendrick Lamar came out and set it off. It was a cool, small venue. A bunch of the crowd had waited all day for him so they were all really into it plus it was the last show of SXSW so the vibe was cool.

Alright, gotta go find a food truck for breakfast. More stuff soon...