Once again this year we made the trip out to Denmark to take part in the annual Fredericia Jam hosted by Jakob Jensen, surprisingly enough in the town of Fredericia. Last year was an amazing experience and we we’re so excited to be invited back, so excited that we made the slightly mad decision to drive! When I say “we” I mean Jamie drove whilst I played with the radio. Another benefit of driving meant that we could bring along two other English traceurs, Callum Powell and Alex Potts thus saving Jakob money on flights and meaning we could make a bit of a road trip out of it all!

The main aim of the trip was to produce a short promotional video of the jam to show to the sponsors who kindly helped Jakob put the event together. This essentially just involved filming the guys training and having fun, all pretty simple! Therefore, being pretty free to do what we wanted we set about filming the trip from start to finish with the aim to produce a fun filled road trip video packed with laughs and most importantly amazing Parkour!

I wont go into tons of detail as the general consensus with blog posts is that you guys prefer to read about the technical side of things and then watch the video to actually see what happens which does make sense seeing that at the end of the day we are a video production company…

Filming the road trip there was a fun experience although I have such a hate for bumpy roads! Trying to capture a nice shot of the interior of the car or maybe a sunrise is made so much harder by the car bumping over pot holes. Due to two detours to Bruges and Amsterdam to explore we managed to make the trip take over 24 hours and although we we’re pretty sleep deprived on arrival it meant we captured some amazing footage in both cities and got to shoot in a lovely sunset and sunrise.

Initially we considered a few GoPro timelapses on the outside of the car but we we’re trying to cover large distances with few breaks and stopping every hour to change the position of the camera would have just added hassle to the journey.

After arriving early in the morning and sleeping on Jakob’s floor for a few hours we went for an explore of the area and finally met back up with Jakob etc as they we’re adding a new layer of paint to their home made Parkour Park by the dock. This offered up an awesome opportunity to get some beautiful shots and timelapses as the sun was setting over the sea.

Later that evening we we’re joined by Tim Shieff, Will Sutton, Phil Doyle and Ben Jenkin who had also been flown out to attend the jam. Trying to capture moments like this is never easy and its not something you can really fake by asking the guys to shake hands with everyone again. Annoyingly they arrived in the dark and brought some rain with them which ruined any chance of getting a nice friendly meeting shot.

The rest of the jam went smoothly although occasionally hindered by rain but everyone had a great time and some awesome movement took place! Trips like this are always a pleasure to film as there are no major restraints, you also find yourself surrounded by other camera enthusiasts so its a great place to swap tips and tricks. We had the pleasure of spending some time with Danish Traceurs and videographers Nicholas Bluff and Mathias Andersen who brought with them a nice selection of lenses which we had been dying to play with. Will Sutton is also someone who is always playing around with his camera and its great to see what kind of stuff we comes up with.

When it comes to a Parkour event like this that will purely be shown on the web we tend to shoot at 60fps as it just means we have no restrictions if we shoot something and decide we want to slow it down in post. You never really know when a good slowmo opportunity is going to come along whether its a double backflip from Will or Callum thrusting in the direction of a Danish girl.

On the way back we made good use of the Gopro by visiting German theme park Phantasia land. By conveniently wearing zip up hoodies we could wear the camera on the chest mount and hide it until the ride started to ensure noone stopped us filming. The Gopro and roller coasters is a fantastic combination and your guaranteed to get some awesome shots!

You can view the video we produced for Jakob and his sponsors here:

Music courtesy of Callum Powell

You can view our road trip video here: