Through The Lens
- Updated: October 10, 2005
By Brad Phillips
Here’s yours truly doing a little water skipping at the rock quarry we filmed at in New Jersey.Carpe Diem 2 is finally done! And on time! The last two months have been non-stop traveling and working in order to finish the movie, but still a lot of fun.
After Daniel Boone we took a five day vacation to relax and get some of the basic work done around home. After that it was back to the East Coast. We made plans to go to Unadilla for round 11 of the GNC series. Since it was only about five hours from Kerry Getz’s house we made a stop there for four days before the race. The last time we were out there we had problems with weather. It rained two out of three days and we didn’t get enough done. So this gave us a chance to get the footage that Mother Nature wouldn’t let us get last time. We hit up one of the same spots from the first trip, a rock quarry in New Jersey about ten minutes from Kerry’s place. It has great natural terrain jumps and some nice ponds to water skip through. We spent a day there just riding and screwing around. The next day we headed down the New Jersey turnpike towards Atlantic City. There was another rock quarry that they had just discovered about a week earlier. It offered more natural terrain riding and some sweet jumps. Kerry’s buddy used a shovel to form takeoffs in the hills to jump. I tried to talk Kerry out of doing one of them because it looked a little shaky. It was a four foot wide takeoff into a step-up and onto a rock pile. After a few practices he hit it flawlessly several times, it looked pretty sweet. We were planning on going back to Bam Margera’s house for another day of filming but he was in LA for the week and wouldn’t be back in time. So after a few days at Kerry’s we headed north to Unadilla.
Here Neil Likens airs it out on the huge Unadilla tabletop.
Patrick Flannigan hammers through the whoops.
Nick and I met up with Brock and Skyler near Unadilla on Wednesday night, after finding a vacant lot to park the rigs we piled in my truck and headed up to Utica to have some fun. I dropped Nick and Skyler off by a club while Brock and I parked the truck. By the time we got to the club Skyler had already buddied up to the bartender (mind you – this is not uncommon). We screwed around there until 2:30 a.m. then headed back to the rigs. The gates to the track opened at noon, we pulled in and spent the next two hours setting up camp. It is always a pain parking, we have such long rigs and such limited space to park, we will literally spend two hours just trying to park – it is insane. Unadilla was another one of your basic GNC races with the exception of someone besides Natalie winning it. John was in Oregon filming a Honda commercial the week before the race, he had a nasty crash and bruised his bicep pretty bad. He decided to take it easy to escape further injury. We spent the weekend filming the races and just relaxing. It was so late in the year, and we already had so much GNC footage that we were there to have fun for the most part. Sunday we started what ended up being an interesting drive home, we started listening to BPM, the XM techno channel. We made it a point to listen to that channel for the entire 17 hour drive home, between the techno and the eight or nine Red Bulls in my system I was wired! I was so wired I didn’t notice I was cruising 85 MPH through most of Ohio. Thankfully, around 3:00 a.m., one of Ohio’s finest notified me of that with a ticket, which would make two speeding tickets for the trip. I got one going through Chicago on the way out there. Illinois only lets you travel 55 MPH on the interstate with a trailer because making everyone travel the same speed on the same road just doesn’t make any sense to them. I think Texas suffers from this same misconception.
Keith Little driving the water truck
Brock finds his batteryOne
One week after getting home we took off for Loretta Lynn’s Ranch, for the final round of the GNCs. Of course we might as well kick this trip off with another speeding ticket, after all it’s tradition for us. This time it was in southern Illinois, I hate Illinois. The officer informed me that there was no way my truck (a 2005 Chevy 2500HD Diesel) could possibly pull the 44 foot trailer behind me. I responded with “it pulls it just fine at 85 MPH.” He didn’t like that and responded with a $95 dollar ticket. I still think I won the argument though.
We pulled into Loretta’s around 5:30 a.m. Friday and found a spot next to Brock. Yet again another basic GNC, but with nearly 1,000 riders and the infamous beautiful girls that always seem to show up at this race, I guess I shouldn’t say basic. I still haven’t figured out if it’s the weather, the fact that it’s the last race, the location, or the fame, but it never fails – Loretta’s rocks!
Keith and Patrick relaxing between shots.
After Loretta’s we drove two hours south to Keith Little’s place. We had a film date with Keith, Brock, and Patrick Flannigan, we also couldn’t wait to get our hands on some of the famous “hot slaw” we heard so much about. We started the day with some heavy watering; they hadn’t had rain for a long time. Because of the dust we had to stage our shots, something I hate to do. It takes away from the realism and spontaneity of the film. We methodically watered sections of the track and then filmed on those sections before they dried up, the weather was so weird there, it stormed in town two miles away but didn’t rain a drop on the track, figures. Near the end of the day, Brock had a small malfunction on his quad. Actually the quad was falling apart all day, it was the end of the year and he didn’t feel like fixing all the things that were wearing out. His battery fell out of his battery box, broke off the wires, and flew off his quad. That put him out for the day. He grabbed his pit bike and rode it for about five minutes until it broke as well. Brock desperately needs a mechanic, if anyone out there is interested in wrenching for Brock at all the GNCs next year e-mail him at BrockStar@Premisind.com.
Keith, Brock, and Patrick air this double out during filming.
Keith’s was the last stop on our year long journey to film Carpe Diem 2. It has been an intense, exciting, eventful, and successful year. I can’t wait to get started on Carpe Diem 3 in December. As I write this we have just finished editing Carpe Diem 2, we are currently in the DVD authoring stage, hopefully we will go to print next week and we will make our November 1st deadline.
We have started excepting pre-orders for the film on our website www.premisind.com. This is the best way to ensure you get your copy first! We also included the teaser for Carpe Diem 2 below, I guarantee it will blow you away!
The premiere party for Carpe Diem 2 is October 20th in Iowa City and is open to the public. Click here for details.
For everyone attending the GNC awards banquet this year, keep an eye out for us, we upgraded to a suite this year! Anyone who came to club 235 last year knows what that means!
