I recently made the trip from Vancouver to San Francisco and I stopped at two flying sites to hang glide, Dog Mountain and Mattole. Both were incredible. Check out the video above to see what these sites look like.

I finally bought a GoPro and am very happy with how convenient it is and all the hang gliding shots in the video were shot with it. Below the photos were taken with my trusty 7D.

Dog Mountain

Oregon coast

Lost Coast

Mattole

Redwoods

Mount Rainier from the road

Well, I finally did it – I bought a GoPro! Because of my hang gliding videos many people assume I’ve always had one, but not until this week!

So far I’m enjoying it. It’s definitely convenient and compact. I bought the extra LCD screen for the back too and I’m glad I did! It allows me to frame my shots, no guessing!

First day into the road trip I met up with some great pilots who fly Dog Mountain, WA and had a nice little flight. Thanks to Aaron for helping me coordinate the visit. I hope to pass back through and fly with everyone again! It wasn’t a bad place to camp out either.

It was about 11 years ago I was traveling down the same road to go climb Mount Rainier, but this week I was in the area to hang glide instead of mountaineering. Recognizing the same road snuck up on me like deja vu with memories from 11 years ago resurfacing.

I actually tried out twice to be a guide for RMI and made the final cut both times, but it was some tough competition and I didn’t get the job. I think there were around 40 of us trying to get 2 jobs shoveling frozen crap at camp Muir. It was a fun experience nonetheless and enjoyable to remember. It was quite an intimidating job interview to sit at a round table, being 17 years old, and answer questions from some of the most accomplished mountain guides in the world.

Dog Mountain Launch

Dog Mountain from the air. Launch is clearing on the peak in the top right and the LZ is in front of the cars in the bottom right.

Facing away from Dog Mountain.

The moon rose right behind launch

Once into Oregon the plan was to run on the infamous Hayward Field track that Steve Prefontaine ran on and has been the venue for many incredible track meets, not to mention the 2012 Olympic Trials will be there! But I was denied! So I went to Pre’s Trail not too far away and had a great little run.

This trail was created after Pre traveled to Europe to compete every summer and saw all the amazing, soft trails in the European cities and he wanted to have that in Eugene.

Now it’s off to the Redwoods and a hang gliding site on the northern California coast!

Hayward Field

Pre's Rock

Isaiah Saxon (left), Sean Hellfritsch and Daren Rabinovitch began collaborating on films in San Francisco in 2003. Their digital animation company, Encyclopedia Pictura, combines live action, stop-motion and CGI components into a unique visual style.

I first heard of Encyclopedia Pictura from a friend who sent me a link to a story that NPR did on them this past year. My friend thought I’d be interested in them because I received my undergraduate degree in forestry and I recently finished film school as well, so my interests share common ground with theirs.

Esquire magazine called them “the directors of the future” and they have been doing some very interesting work over the last couple of years and are beginning work on their first feature film which you can read a very brief description of it here on their website.

I’ll be working with them for at least one month on some ambitious animation and am very excited about it. I will also be moving to San Francisco, where I’ve always wanted to spend more time after I filmed for a friend’s wine label there over a year ago.

EP is probably best known for their award-winning and unique music video for Bjork, Wanderlust. It has a beautiful visual style and is quite epic in scope as the song is almost 8 minutes long:

I plan to take my time driving down there from Vancouver and hope to fly my hang glider at a couple sites along the way. One of which, Mattole, in Northern Cali was just flown by one of my ex-neighbors from when I lived at the hang gliding flight park in Georgia. It’s been a while since I’ve flown so I hope the weather cooperates and if I’m feeling up to it, I may get the camera out too. Sunday I should be flying with this guy . . . um, yea . . . and here’s another but filmed at the site we’ll be flying.

Looking back on these couple of paragraphs . . . I just realized I referenced several friends all about different things and just wanted to get sentimental for a second and say I have some awesome friends! Especially since I’m going to be living with another one I’ve yet to mention in this post while I’m in SF. Nothing but love for you all!

I took this the last time I was flying which was this fall and just haven't gotten around to sharing any photos from this flight. It had some incredible views! Near Pemberton, B.C.

On a related note about animation: Moonbot studios, a studio in Shreveport, Louisiana, beat out Pixar for the Oscar of best animated short film! I saw Pixar director, Enrico Casarosa, speak about their short ‘La Luna’ at SIGGRAPH this year and it is incredible, but Moonbot’s short is very captivating as well. If you’d like to learn more about the animation in this Academy award-winning short, one of their supervising animators is sharing some behind-the-scenes work on his blog you should check out.

You can vote by going to the contest’s YouTube page HERE. Then click the “Vote” tab, and look for my video in the “Vote for these Videos” window to the right of the current video that’s playing.

I created this short mainly between the hours of midnight and 3am for about a week and a half since I am a full time student at Vancouver Film School. I just couldn’t pass up this opportunity with the skills I’m learning here.

I always find it interesting to see how far I can push myself and see what quality I can produce in a short amount of time, especially when others are given the same task and I can compare what I’ve done with what is possible. Maybe it’s me living out some subconscious desire to be like MacGyver, but in a film contest: okay, you have 30 seconds to create something with the theme of escape, go.

I chose this story because I could get the animation done in the amount of time given. They are simple shapes, easy to model, rig and animate, relatively, but the relationships implied create a deeper story. So even though they’re simple, the story doesn’t have to be sacrificed.

There are three rounds to the competition, with only one winner that gets flown to Sydney for their short to be screened at a festival and also awarded $20,000. The top 10 winners for the first round will be announced July 25th.

I also just cranked out a short hang gliding video from a recent flight. I was going to hold onto the footage to use later, but decided it might get lost in the shuffle of school work so I just needed to cut it together and get it out. Hope you enjoy, that day was a great flight, although I’m a little rusty on the wingovers they’re always fun:

I love this affect of seeing trees from overhead, how everything splays out from the center.

Here are some of the images I took from my two hour flight today at Mount Woodside. It was a great little flight. Mainly ridge soaring.

The highlights were playing in the clouds, watching a family of eagles fly around, flying around with them, seeing two eagles grab their talons and tumble together, and meeting new pilots and flying a new site. I love any site that lets you see or fly over some water and this one has a gorgeous view of a river convergence.

Since my car wasn’t able to make it up the mountain I had to leave all my expensive camera gear behind and I just used my old trusty Canon PowerShot SD870 for these shots. I used this same camera to win my first YouTube contest back in the day too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nZfJjRrEb4

Launch is to the right in the photo.

A Bald Eagle going into the clouds.

My favorite moment from today, even though I felt like the ugly duckling trying to keep up with them.

My second favorite moment.

The scenery from this site is terrific.

Always enjoy finding terrain like this while flying. It's like looking at a painting . . . while flying a hang glider.

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

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You can find and download a copy of these photos at flickr: HERE.

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Steve’s picture deserves to stand alone because, after hearing about Dan Lyons from my blog a few days ago, he cut and donated his hair to Locks for Love.

Steve cut his hair for Locks of Love.

I’m really enjoying my experience with the new lens. I’ve never had a telephoto zoom so I am learning where I need to position myself (usually pretty far away) to the subject to get the shots I’m looking for. It is pretty heavy but I also have a Manfrotto monopod that I’ll use for it on any wedding jobs, etc. to take the weight off of my arms.

The flight from yesterday was incredible. My best climb was at 6:30pm! Everyone launched after about 5pm. It’s crazy how late in the day it was. I was cruising at cloud base (6,000′) towards Chattanooga for several miles before I turned back and did some aerobatics. It was enough that I could hardly lift my head up when I landed, my neck was so tired from holding my head up during the aerobatics because of the G’s I was pulling. I did wingovers all the way down from about 4,500′.

This is a quick little video I threw together of the couple of flights that I actually set up my camera on over the last few months. It’s typically such a pain to set a camera up on my glider, in addition to the stress of usually when I do want to set one up it’s because I’m doing something a bit over the line like a speed run or aerobatics, so then I don’t want to throw another factor into that mix. So for these couple of clips I’ve taken over the last few months I’ve had many more similar flights to these that I didn’t capture.

I’ve started to spin my glider, get a little more over the top on wingovers, and am really enjoying early morning speed runs very close to the treetops (watch my shadow in the video).

The video was made using my gorillapod on my keel with my Canon 7D, and another mount that I set up using a fisheye on my Canon HF100, see a picture of that mount on my other blog. I’m not too keen on fisheyes because they distort the image so much it makes trees that I’m inches away from look like they’re many feet away, so it’s hard to get a grasp on what is really happening when you watch things through a fisheye.

I will be moving soon so this may be my last hang gliding-related video for a while, hope you enjoy.

I just rotated this image from the video so you can see what it looks like if the horizon is oriented properly to my position.

I’ll go ahead and apologize for no in-flight pictures, my wife took our little camera on a relief trip to Haiti (good excuse huh).

We launched a little late, about 3pm, I landed around 6pm and had a great flight overall. Below is a screen shot of FlyChart which comes with a 6030 vario and lets you get all nerdy with your flight – you can see speed, altitude, and vario all plotted and aligned together.

Oh and I titled this with the “Milk Run” because that’s what Ollie calls flying this route, I think he stole milk as a child or something . . .

Click it to make bigger

I used my Canon 7D to film the launches at 60fps and then conformed it to 24fps to slow it down. You can do so in Cinema Tools and go to ‘Batch Conform’ and select the folder with all the video files, but make a backup first because it doesn’t keep the originals.

I also helped get Eric in the air when the sun was setting and picked up my newly delivered Glidetrack which is how I got a couple of those dolly shots at the end. I will post a video talking about my tripod and Glidetrack set up soon.