Red Bull: Get It On Record, 1st Place Winners

So this is the promised update on the first of the two exciting contests I have recently won. In short, this contest, put on by Red Bull, in its third year overall and first year in Chicago, was a design competition for college students. I applied with three images and a short statement about why I thought I would be good for the contest. I was accepted as a photographer and put on a team with a filmmaker, Jordan Gzesh, a designer, Katie Swanson, and we, group 10, were assigned a client. Our client was a breakdancer named Torsion. Our assignment was to create a marketing package for our client, however we interpreted that, utilizing all four of our respective talents.
In the 30 days we had to complete the project we met many times, bounced ideas off eachother, always building on what everyone else came up with, and just collaborating in every sense of the word. While almost every tangible part of the final project materialized in the last 10 days, the prior 20 were what made the project what it would become.
I was super lucky to be grouped with 3 talented individuals, and without further description, here is the finished product (click for larger):

Photography: Phil Blair
Video (Shot and edited): Jordan Gzesh
Design (Graphic work as well as book construction): Katie Swanson
Dancer: Tori "Torsion" Howard









Those are the shots of the finished product. The book, handmade by Katie Swanson was held shut magnetically, and when opened contained a tri-fold pullout featuring large images, a DVD with Jordan's video, and a digital picture frame that cycled through a slideshow of Torsion.
Also contained are Torsion's business cards, which feature his logo and contact info on the front and back, and in between is a flipbook of Torsion breaking. The flipbook sequence is featured at the end of Jordan's video, which is here (I recommend going HD and full screen!):



Also, Click here to be taken to the Flickr set of all the images featured in the project:



Thanks so much to Red Bull for sponsoring this contest, and Katie, Jordan and Tori for being so awesome to work with! The experience was worth it, but having the win on my resume and the gift card for an Apple Macbook are nice perks!
1st Place!

Updates / Get Hyped!

It has been a crazy month, and an even crazier week, culminating in two huge announcements worthy of this blog. Each probably deserves its own in-depth post, so I will do that when I have a minute, but before weeks go by without mention I'll do a little brief updating here.

As I mentioned a few weeks back, I qualified to shoot photos as part of a team for Red Bull's student design competition, Get It On Record. My team, Jordan Gzesh on video, Katie Swanson designing, Tori "Torsion" Howard as our dancer, and I, worked super hard for 30 days and came up with something we were really proud of. What's more, we won! 1st place!

I will update soon with the pictures I made for that and our finished product.

A few days after that excitement, I got a call from Mark Waters at eS telling me I have been chosen to hit the road with the eS Game Of Skate as the Photographer! I am beyond psyched on this opportunity and everything in store for me. I feel like my years (over 5 now!) of shooting skate photos, working hard (as hard of work as one can consider this), and traveling have really paid off in this.

Again, I'll get more in depth with what each of these wins means and how I got there, but I wanted to let anyone who reads this blog know what's up!