SixSibs

We’ve cobbled together ramps for bikes, scooters, and skateboards for as long as I can remember (much to the chagrin of our Mom!), and recently we’ve been building on an even bigger scale. I built a Mini-Mega Ramp for skateboarding, and this afternoon Luke and I began work on a BMX Track, incorporating the gap section of my mini-mega at the beginning of the track. We got it roughed out pretty quickly, and I took a run on it with our GoPro strapped to my helmet.
Eventually I want to make a better video of the course when its finished, and one while skating the mini-mega, too. Stay tuned!

We joined 4-H last year, and when I heard about the 4-H FilmFest, I thought it would be a great idea to enter a movie in it. Rachel and I brainstormed, and wrote a script in about 3 days, and then we went on to filming.

This movie was far and away the hardest movie we’ve ever filmed. It was twice as long as any movie we’d ever made before, which meant we had to shoot a lot more footage (final tally: 49 minutes), and since we didn’t have a tripod it was hard to get steady shots. We had to arrange boxes, books, bins, and camera bags to substitute for a tripod.

The shot in the cave was especially hard. Trying to keep my camera from getting wet and ourselves from getting tremendously muddy and bruised took a ton of effort, and then to add acting and filming just pushed it over the top. We were exhausted by the time we got back home, but we got the shots we needed. In the end, thats all the viewers care about!

Several months ago, I made a large Rube Goldberg machine, and filmed it. Doing it was so much fun, that I decided to make another one. This one is slightly smaller, but, unlike my last Rube Goldberg device, which often used the same parts in different shots, this one could theoretically work (“Theoretically” being the key word!).

I still filmed it in multiple sections though, because I didn’t have the patience to set everything up over and over again because one small section of my machine had malfunctioned. I still ended up having to though, due to wind and faulty construction, so the raw footage for this movie amounted to over 18 minutes!

To those with no sense of imagination, going about he process of tire repair may seem simple, but, if you’re like us, you know that there is always more than one way to do anything. If you were to ask an average person to make a list of the ways you could fix a bike tire, they’d probably be able to come up with only one option- getting a new tube- but Luke came up with a second option-take off the tires altogether and ride on the metal rims!

I finished making a Rube Goldberg machine yesterday, and filmed it from start to finish. I thought that you might enjoy watching it. It never worked as an entire, functioning machine, but that was only because  I didn’t have enough stuff to do it all in one big, continuous machine. (And patience to retake the entire thing over and over and over again!) “Theoretically” it would have worked! (Although it took 5 hours to build a machine that could do what  I could do myself in 15 seconds!)