Freerunning

This Week In Freerunning: SUPER MARIO BROTHERS PARKOUR And FINDING LUIGI

Remember your favorite classic Nintendo characters Mario and Luigi? Yeah, I played it obsessively too, and pathetically I never beat the first game until I was in college and a member of a genre game-comic book-anime fanclub. Yep, we had almost everything, even the classic Nintendo unit, and I played that sucker until I finally beat it! Ah, memories. LOL! Anyway, here’s a little nostalgia for you this week in what I might possibly start as weekly entries of “This Week In Freerunning” (I was inspired, what can I say? Lol). Today’s videos come courtesy of the official Youtube channels Warialasky and Nintendo. The first one features professional traceurs Christian Russell and Ronnie Shalvis who cosplay as the title characters in fine freerunning fashion throughout the Mushroom Kingdom (by way of Salt Lake City, Utah) in Super Mario Brothers Parkour. The second one comes courtesy of the Nintendo channel showcasing […]

THE TAKEOVER Has Begun!

Lee B. Golden III

Director Victor Lopez is behind the latest pilot of a new slate projects featuring freerunners from all over the world. The short film is called The Takeover , which features a unique collaboration of 14 freerunning teams/40 professional athletes showing off highly coordinated feats of gynmastics, tumbling and parkour through an airplane junkyard. This installment is the first of a dynamic new campaign launch to promote freerunning as a sport, through the creation of illustrious and visionary shortfilms, roundtable discussions and seminars delving into freerunning’s real-world impact, and live public jam sessions featuring music, photo ops, autograph signings and more. To learn about the Pro Takeover and upcoming events, visit the official website. Click HERE if the embed fails to load. THE TAKEOVER

Tempest Academy To TAKEOVER This Sunday

Lee B. Golden III

The Tempest Freerunning Academy is an athletic recreational school in California headlined by a team of athletes and instructors that some of the most talented athletes in today’s TV and film stunt industry, including Narayana Cabral, Rich King, and Lucy Romberg who will be performing stunts in the upcoming 2014 film, Ten starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Joe Manganiello and Sam Worthington. On Sunday, Feb 24th, Tempest Freerunning Academy will host the TEMPEST TAKEOVER PRO JAM, a live event tomorrow at 12:00pm featuring performances in parkour and freerunning, as well as exclusive interviews from professional athletes gathered from around the world. Follow Team Tempest using the hashtag #TempestProTakeover to get in on the action. If you wish to contact the team, you can email them here. ADDRESS/TELEPHONE: Tempest Freerunning Academy 19821 Nordhoff Place. #115 Los Angeles, CA 91311 Phone #: (818) 717-0525 Be sure to subscribe to their official Youtube channel where […]

NARAYANA CABRAL: Driven To Soar

Lee B. Golden III

Narayana Cabral is a natural-born athlete, multifaceted in martial arts, freerunning, gymnastics, aerial body manipulation, and skateboarding. Growing up in Southern California, he has since applied himself from a very young age, working to illustrate his abilities on both sides of the camera, performing stuntwork and comprehensive stunt coordination and fight choreography, teaching, editing, direction and cinematography. With lifelong dreams of becoming a martial arts action star, inspired by such contemporary action hits such as Ong Bak, The Forbidden Kingdom, The Raid: Redemption, Ip Man 2 and Undisputed 3, his years of incorporating his physical prowess with years of independent filmmaking experience has led him to train and work with numerous people, from Micah Brock, Shaun Charney and Chancler Hayes, to martial arts cinema greats like Erik Betts and Art Camacho. (You can view some of Narayana’s training footage with Art Camacho here and here.) Narayana also attributes the pursuit […]

Cordelia Storm Sets Fire To The Rain In GIRL IN FLAMES

Lee B. Golden III

(This article was originally shared on 1/30/13) Say hello to Cordelia Storm. She is a four-year parkour veteran and a two-year coach at a Seattle-based freerunning school called Parkour Visions. And she’s also pretty gorgeous in my opinion. ^_^ In the years prior to her newfound love for performing amazing feats of freerunning that would make David Belle proud, she was a theater technician, played Dungeons and Dragons and studied at Vancouver Film School. She into such films as Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, Tomb Raider and the Star Wars movies. Other than that, parkour has been her first and foremost her primary profession. I recently had the good fortune of seeing her in a facebook group I’m in dedicated to action films. She posted her video in the group, and being that I run a page dedicated to sharing this kind of stuff, I took the liberty of watching just […]

Relativity Media To Co-Finance "BRICK MANSIONS" Starring Paul Walker & David Belle

Lee B. Golden III

Deadline is reporting that Relativity Media will co-finance the upcoming film, Brick Mansions with a script by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen with Besson-protegè Camille Delamare set to direct. The film will be an American revision of Pierre Morrel’s orginal French-language 2004 international parkour hit, Banlieue 13 (a.k.a. District B13) and Patrick Alessandrin’s 2009 follow-up, Banlieue 13: Ultimatum and will star Paul Walker and Parkour founder, David Belle who co-starred with actor, freerunner and fight choreographer Cyril Raffaelli in the previous films. Walker will play an undercover cop who enlists the help of a street smart freerunner to recover a weapon of mass destruction from a major drug pusher within the ghetto known as “Brick Mansions”. The last known release date for the film included a 2013 release. Walker is soon set to star in the upcoming reboot of Xavier Gens’s 2007 videogame-based action spy thriller, Hitman in […]

FREERUNNER ALEXANDR GISYCH IN “ZLATOUST”

Lee B. Golden III

(Originally posted 2/8/13) Alexandr Gisych, (a.k.a. Shade) recently uploaded a new 17-minute short film titled, Zlatoust, based on the name of his home town in Russia. In the following film, he takes us on a journey, narrating his story while touring his beloved town with his younger brother, Alexey. Together, they film the vast and unique structures that set up an epic stage for Alexandr’s amazing stuntwork and parkour performance, running leaps and bounds between parks, graveyards, staircases, rocks, building rooftops, gaps, narrow platforms, and even living rooms. Through it all, Alexandr’s skills as a freerunner serve a much deeper narrative, illustrating how Zlatoust plays major role in defining the relationship between the city’s architectural and cultural past, and individual freedom.Through the film’s music and Alexandr’s athleticism, this short film is a beauty to see and listen to on his YouTube channel below, ShadeZlat. *Be advised, while the film is […]