In 2010, I pretty much decided overnight to pack all of my stuff and move to Florida. I was 20 years old, had a good amount of cash in my bank, and had been thinking about moving to Florida for a while. The thought of being able to pogo year round in warm weather was incredibly exciting to me, and that was the reason why I made the move.
After I got all settled into an apartment in Bradenton, home of Team Hyper Pogo, I began pogoing every single day. It was like paradise. After living in Chicago my entire life, I only had a few months a year where it was good pogo weather, and i’ve always HATED the cold. Not only that, but now I had people to pogo with, which also drove up my desire to constantly jump and influenced me to step up my game.
I began filming Blue Lips in Fall 2011. Filming started out like pretty much all of my solo videos, I didn’t really have a solid plan for what the video would look like, I was just stacking clips here and there. A fun fact about Blue Lips is during the filming of the video I was doing alot of big air, almost primarily. Most of the time when I went out to pogo in 2011 I was riding a Vurtego. I consider this year to be my prime pogo year, my big air was at its peak, I had just learned to full frontflip, stickflip, etc, and I had a ton of control. Because of how much I was riding a Vurtego, when I would go to film a clip for Blue Lips, I would have to take some time to re-calibrate myself back to tech because I wasn’t doing a whole lot of tech for fun. That being said, although I consider 2011 to be my prime overall pogo year, I DO NOT consider 2011 my prime tech pogo year. In 2011 I was extremely well rounded, but my tech was not at its peak yet.
I realized Blue Lips (although at the time it was unnamed) was turning into something special when I transferred some clips I had filmed off of my camera to my computer and put them on editing software. This inspired me to continue filming more tech and find cool looking spots to film at. When I was getting close to finishing filming, I stumbled across a freestyle unicycle video that used the song “Blue Lips” by Regina Spektor, I was instantly hooked by it and had to use the song for my video. After I edited the video with the song, I knew it was an instant classic. There weren’t any solid “modern” tech edits before this and no one really knew what I was doing on a tech stick at the time, so I was very excited to release it and knew I would get great feedback.
10 years after its release, I’m proud to say Blue Lips has stood the test of time. Although the tricks in it now aren’t nearly as impressive as they were ten years ago, I think the overall look and feel of the video is perfect. When I was filming it, one of my main goals was I wanted every single clip to be something new thats never been done before, and I definitely delivered that. I had something to prove – Tech wasn’t dead, and in fact, it was being reborn. Since then I have released multiple tech edits that definitely blow Blue Lips out of the water as far as trick difficuly go, but it will always be my #1 favorite video of mine and I believe it will carry on my legacy for years to come.
I’d like to give a huge shoutout to Edrei Moncada for surprising me with an enhanced version of Blue Lips for its tenth anniversary. Edrei said the video was “truly an inspiration” for him when it came out. To be honest, I completely forgot it was turning 10 this year. So again, thank you Edrei!
