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September 19, 2014 -
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I know what you’re thinking… It’s about time!!! I’ve been patiently waiting for Episode Ten: Bozeman Montana since April 1st!!!! What took you so long??
Well the wait is finally over, and you can watch the much anticipated Episode Ten here. As to why it took long… it’s difficult to fully explain in words. So, instead, I created a short comic.
The story starts the day after New Years Eve…
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April 1, 2014 -
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The Bozeman Episode will be coming soon, but it will not be by 7pm, and it will not be tonight. I will keep you all posted though, and will give you an amazing episode soon – probably tomorrow. Stay tuned!
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March 25, 2014 -
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So, as some of you may have seen, instead of releasing Episode Nine – Seattle Washington last Tuesday, I had a little surprise for everyone. It was Spring Break for me last week, and since I didn’t have time to edit Episode Nine, I decided to do something different. I decided to put a film crew together and create an episode using no editing equipment.
I’ve done things like this before, and there were some obvious challenges I knew to expect when you can’t actually edit your video, but there were a couple other – unexpected challenges. First off, I needed a film crew, because many of the “special effects” would have to be done live, and although I had many great volunteers helping me out, I did not anticipate how difficult it would be to organize a group of people whose main ambition was to lay on the beach (or trying to keep people not involved in the shot quiet on the set). Secondly, I was using a lapel microphone so I could get good sound, but soon realized that it was only recording on the left channel, and without any editing equipment, was impossible to change. So the sound is, in the end, very quiet, and only playing on the left side of the speakers/headphones when you listen to it. Third, although I say I wasn’t using any editing equipment, truth is I had to string the clips together somehow, and I used Windows Live Movie Maker to do it. Somehow, it was unable to export the video properly, and had a weird error three and a half minutes in. Also, the internet connecting at the house we were staying at was very slow, and I had to take a 1080p video and export it at 480p (about a third of the quality).
And finally, I did not anticipate losing my voice during spring break, and how raspy sounding all the voice overs would be, which was the main content of the episode. I also realized, shortly after starting this episode, that I also wanted to do nothing more than lay on a beach, and that the last thing I wanted to do was walk around with a camera and try to film people.
Regardless, we had a lot of fun with the video. For now, I’m going to take it out of our list of episodes until I can at least fix some of the audio problems, the weird exporting problem, and upload it at a higher resolution.
Episode Nine – Seattle, Washington will be premiering tonight, but I’m not sure I will make the 7pm deadline. Getting back into the swing of things has been slow, especially with the amount of sleep I’ve needed to catch up on, but I promise I will finish and post it by sometime tonight.
Oh – and if you want to check out Episode 8.5 – Freeport Texas, featuring a bunch of people on a beach – here it is – in all its rough glory:
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January 27, 2014 -
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In anticipation of tomorrow night’s premiere, we wanted to share with you two articles that have recently been written about our web-series.
The first was published online by the Apple Valley Patch, where I’m from: Apple Valley Man’s Documentary Features Cool People, Ultimate Frisbee. Long Title, I know.
The second was published by Volume One, who wrote an article about us at the beginning of our trip. This issue also features an article about Schasse’s insane parallel parking skills. We’ll have copies of this article at the premiere tomorrow night as well: Ready For A Big Break.
Remember: Tomorrow (Jan 28) at 7 pm CST in the Woodland Theater in Davies Center. I’ll be there early to make sure the heat is on full blast. If you can’t grace us with your presence in person, we hope you’ll check out the episode online and follow us every Tuesday at 7!
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January 10, 2014 -
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We traveled the western United States, met a lot of awesome people, had a lot of great experiences, and documented a lot of it on this website. But it’s only about 5% of what we still have to show you. We will be recreating the first two episodes we posted earlier, and creating ten (or so) more, and will be releasing one episode every week starting Tuesday, January 28th at 7pm (CST)
I quote myself in an outtake from our trailer when I say, “It’s going to be epic.”
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January 9, 2014 -
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This summer, I learned a lot of great things about James Wagner. He’s very talented at many things, but there’s some things that he just doesn’t do all that well. One of them is parallel parking. I can’t even keep track of how many times we drove around looking for parking spots, while I pointed out dozens of spots that were open between two cars.
So when we got back, like any good friend, I started taking pictures of impressive spots I parked into, and sending them to Wags. It became somewhat of a challenge for me to see how tight of a spot I could get into, and I got pretty good at it.
So I made a website to showcase all my pictures on: http://parallelparking.weebly.com/. The website has gained a lot of popularity over the last month, and Volume One (a local magazine in Eau Claire) did a short article about my parking skills and posting a link on their facebook page.
Many users commented on the thread. Most were impressed by my skills, many were skeptical, but some were downright outraged by how my parking was inconveniencing those around me:
Unfortunately, I moved to a house closer to campus, so I probably won’t be posting anymore photos, but you can expect to see a video once I finish editing The Break Side webseries.
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December 14, 2013 -
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Speaking of facial hair, we are now ready to release the video that many of us, myself including, have been eagerly awaiting.
For those of you that didn’t see our Kickstarter post, this introductory video, or any photo of Chris Schasse at all throughout the summer, let me bring you up to speed. After we reached our initial goal of raising $1000 through Kickstarter, Schasse up the stakes. He promised to shave his head and face at the start of our adventure and let both grow out for the rest of the summer. He took a picture of himself every day of the trip and compiled them into one stunning stop-motion video.
I personally think that the man looks best with medium length hair and a little bit of stubble. However, due to his oddly fast growing facial hair and extremely slow growing head hair, I didn’t get to see my favorite look on him this summer. Other people will tell you that he looks ruggedly handsome with all the facial hair he accumulated throughout the trip. So I’ll let you be the judge…Which Chris Schasse do you like best?
As a final note to our female viewers, I will add this: Schasse is single and willing to take requests with his hair, beard, and mustache styles. Your move, ladies.
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December 8, 2013 -
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For the last three years, I’ve hosted an Ultimate Frisbee party called Six Pack and a Stache. This party takes place after No Shave November, and everyone on the team shaves their beards off… but leaves the mustaches. This year, me and several of my teammates created a video for the event. This video was filmed and edited in 6 hours on Saturday, December 7th, and was shown at the party that night. Most the actors were recruited on the spot, and all the music was recorded on set.
PS – There were a lot of people that helped out with this film, but I do not know their names. So if you helped out with this film leave a comment and I will get my mom to make you fudge!
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December 1, 2013 -
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That’s right, like all good Ultimate players, we’ve ordered discs to help spread the word about The Break Side. Featuring the logo created by Aaron Schasse, our discs are USAU approved, 175 gram, 27 cm diameter flatballs that are guaranteed to make you look good.
If you’d like to order one (or five), we’re selling them for $10 a piece. However, if you order multiple, we might be willing to cut you a deal for being so awesome. That said, if you’re an independent person who wants to order without having to talk to one of us, feel free to order online here. We would be more than willing to ship to any of the 14 states we visited this summer, or any other state for that matter! We’ve got plenty to go around and we don’t want you to be the only ones with a Break Side disc.
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November 26, 2013 -
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Meet Aaron Schasse: The man who created The Break Side logo. Aaron has been a graphic designer in the Los Angeles area for the last 6 years, and has been my brother for even longer (26 years, to be exact). Aaron saw my failed attempts to create a logo for The Break Side myself and, like any good brother, laughed at me, then said “Bro, let me handle this.”
My brother was really the one who got me into filming when I was in 8th grade, showing me how to take pictures of legos with our Dad’s handicam in order to make a stop motion animation. He has really been a huge inspiration for what I am today (for better or for worse). Whether it was filming Josh Rizzo and myself throw punches at eachother in my backyard, or letting me know when something I spent a lot of time and energy on looks awful, my brother was and forever will be a big part of any creative project I’m doing.
Aaron also played a really big role in planning our trip. He gave us names of people we could stay with along the way, and people who could help us take The Break Side to the next level. He let us stay with him in Los Angeles for a little over a week. While we were there, he joined us for a pick up game of Ultimate on Venice Beach, and we introduced him to the game of Spikeball.
Below is a video I made with my brother when I was a Freshman in High School (wayyy back in 2002!)
