The first video is from this year’s Flytec race in Florida, and the second one is from 2009′s race (on a day off from racing). There are more photos from this year’s trip at my tumblr blog. Oh, and the music I made in Garage Band.

Around 1:15 in the above video, I was freaking out. Or, I guess I should say, I had just been freaking out and was now relieved. Before gaining this much altitude, there was no good place to land, it was all swamp, and the high winds were pushing me into them and I was only at about 1,400′.

Then I saw a bird turning and raced to it and caught the thermal he was in and saved it!

That thermal drifted with the wind, and me, over this unlandable terrain, but luckily I was safely in a thermal. I was not about to loose track of it and fall out of the thermal over this area.

I looked below me and was happy I wasn’t in these person’s shoes (see the photo). They had drifted over this area fairly low. The day before a pilot had landed in a swamp and gotten chased by an alligator, at least that’s what the story was. So I was happy to be up in a thermal climbing, and not down low sweating.

Luckily, the pilot in the photo made it out of that area, but that’s the risk they chose to take, that’s competition flying.

Below is a video from the previous year’s competition in Florida. The winds were to strong to compete so we went off to find some fun. The day before I shot this short video, we had been on another windy day off and were soaring an abandoned hotel on the beach, see that video here.

I also just made a playlist on YouTube so all my hang gliding videos can be grouped, viewed, and shared all together. Here’s the link to the playlist:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=1B350C54D54B3C57

Also, below is another interview I did for a website I use a lot called films4prizes.com. It’s a site that collects a lot of video contests going on at the moment so you don’t have to search for them. They do a pretty good job, but sometimes they’ll be a little late in posting a contest or might miss a few completely, but it is much easier to just go to their site than do all that grunt work yourself of finding these contests.

Also, a while back I posted extra interview footage from A Soaring Life of Andre Wolf and Dustin Martin (click their names to go to the interviews).

Right now I’m working on a 60 second short film, not hang gliding related, that has a few visual effects shots in it that I’m not sure if I can pull off yet or not. Stay tuned, because if I can make these effects work then I’ll be done with the video in about a week or so. I’m using a bunch of green poster board from walmart to make my green screen – it’s a pretty good option compared to what a real one costs, and gets the job done almost as well.

Also don’t forget about my 365 day photoblog over at my tumblr site, my tumblr posts also show up as tweets in the right side bar as ‘My Tweets.’

This was my entry into the Stella Artois Short Film contest. While I didn’t win that one I did place in the TOP 10 which was a huge accomplishment. Among the judges who viewed my work in this video was Kevin Spacey, Sacha Baron Cohen, Lawrence Fishburne, and Judy Dench!

This was an amazing opportunity that I came very close to winning. I enjoyed the entire process and it was a great learning experience for me.

Thanks to Eric Donaldson for letting me film him and John Heitzenrater for doing the music.