School House Explosion

I was never a fan of school. So much so that I didn't care enough to finish it. After graduating to the 10th grade I decided that I didn't need to learn more about number 2 pencils or who was going to be prom queen. I wanted to learn something with real world value that could help me succeed in life. Surprisingly, my mother didn't want me to finish school and the teachers didn't encourage me to stay.  So for me, leaving was easy, especially since I had already been working on the family farm and had a great sense of being self-reliant. To anyone reading this, I highly recommend you check out what James Altucher has to say about college. Basically, I applied his principles to high school. I realized what I needed to learn, who could teach it to me and who couldn't. My thirst for knowledge was much deeper than the surface shit they teach in traditional educational environments.

March 23rd 2014, we are blowing up a mother f*cking school house! Ok, so it's not a giant brick and mortar school and it's not even a real school since it's just a facade built for the AMC TV series "TURN", but it still feels great to watch it go boom. It was the final episode of the first season and the producers wanted something larger than the previous explosions throughout the show. Naturally, the Special FX Coordinator obliged. My stunt team was originally involved in this explosion rather heavily. We had skinned out plans to launch a couple people in the air by way of pneumatic ratchets and rams. Unfortunately, the producers are always quick to cut the fun stunts and instead they opted for the "just have the actor fall on the ground when it explodes" option since it saved a bunch of time and money. Yawn, snore, boring. These producers will dump droves of money into unnecessary overtime due to poor scheduling but when it comes to making fun things happen, they usually clam up. (take note if you're an amatuer film maker looking to avoid mistakes. -better scheduling-) Either way, we had a great time prepping and rehearsing with actor Daniel Henshall.  

The house itself was primarily plywood and pine board facade. It had four walls and a roof. The entire schoolhouse was originally built to film in, then it was weakened for the explosion by cutting through some of the supporting framework. This allows for the force of the explosion to blow out the cut pieces and collapse the building. Otherwise, the explosion would've only sent a big fireball into the air with the schoolhouse remaining intact. 

Trigger time! And BOOOOM! It's hard not to smile when you're watching things blow up with a bunch of other adults as you share a laugh about it. 

Behind the scenes footage of a special effects explosion for AMC's TV series, TURN.

I was Hacked!!!

Ultimately this site came to be because of a few different things. I use to have an awesome site that Daniel Goldman and Morgan Enroughty built for me. It was my professional services site for Richmond Stunts. It saw a lot of traffic, answered a lot of questions for filmmakers and provided a showcase of the work my team and I have done over the years. Then it got hacked. But not like a simple hack. It was a vicious, big dick in the ass, no lube hack. So after months of getting the run-around from my host, mediatemple.net, about how the malware was still in my site after I paid them to remove, twice!

Since I wasn't soliciting stunt services anymore I didn't see the need to put building a site before mountain biking or skiing. Well, the other day I said, you know, I really want a website again. I've got cool shit to show off, neat and interesting stories to tell and I'm tired of facebook, so I start looking into SquareSpace.com  I heard it advertised numerous times on podcast such as The James Altucher Show and Ted Talks and decided to take a look and see what it's all about. I transferred my domains to Google Domains beta thinking it would add an extra layer of security and because Google Domains beta has one click services that tie my domain directly to my squarespace account, getting setup was a breeze. 

So there you go, had a cool site that showed me blowing up cars and now I'm in the process of adding content from me blowing up cars and doing a bit of personal writing and this is my first entry. Stay tuned, cool stuff to come. 

Here's a super grainy photo of Morgan and I on set after I smashed a bunch of cars up. Yeah, the iPhone couldn't capture twilight shots in 2011 either.