Daytona Week Day 4: “Timmy Two Stroke”

A video made on a whim becomes more than we hoped…

The Longest Cut

Wedensday night Matthes went to bed way early, I don’t think he even made it all the way through American Idol, which is blasphemy in the Ferry household. Timmy, Evie and I were up till about 12 then called it a night. Or so I thought. I had just begun exporting the final cut of the Reed video before I headed up to my room. When I got in bed I glanced at the export and it was about 1/3 of the way done. I wanted to have the video wrapped and shipped by morning so I set the alarm on my iPhone to wake me up in 45 minutes to begin the upload to RXi. Upon viewing the “final cut” I noticed two issues I couldn’t ignore. This forced me to make corrections and re-export before uploading. In the end I finally went to bed at 4am.

Thursday morning I decided I was going to forfeit the Timmy dogtag, I had bogarted it long enough. I sat it on the counter and wiped a tear from my eye. The eyes dried fast though because I knew we were going to Timmy’s track to film the 2 stroke video. Timmy was gone with the fam so Matthes and I loaded up his 450 and the tiddler in the back of his truck, which by the way is very badass. See for yourself.

Red Dog’s wheels.

Timmy got home and he, Matthes and I got in the truck and– hold up a minute, I went to get in the truck and upon opening the door I hear a Transformers type of sound and see a step board appear out of nowhere. Sick. I proceeded to open and close the door about 5 times stoked on this thing. I tweeted it and come to find out Dave Castillo’s buddies dad, Horst Leitner, invented the deal. Small world. Here’s that clip.

Play to blow mind.

We headed to a local italian place for lunch with the family and started brainstorming what type of video we wanted to do. The two stroke video of just flat out ripping has been done, the Jimmy Decotis video being the most recent example. We weren’t sure if it would be a RXI delivery or Pulp and this decision wouldn’t be made till the end of the editing process. We started getting very excited over the concept of a parody Ferry comeback video. The twist and where we felt the video’s main source of interest and humor would be is Timmy would be coming back on a 125 in the 450 class. Obviously it’s a joke, even though Timmy was ripping and the bike sounded awesome, its still preposterous and we hoped everyone would be in on the joke but of course, there were some people who didn’t get it. (Insert slapping palm on forehead)

The Scripting

During the hour long drive to Timmy’s track we continued to fine tune the concept and giggle like school girls at the thoughts of what it could be if we did it right. Timmy wanted to do a straight riding a 125 video and had some of the ideas which sold the concept. Matthes took Timmy’s spitball ideas and molded them into a comedy skit which just had to work. The picture we had in our mindseye was a unified sparkling diamond. It had to work, it was like one plus on equals two. Timmy told us that the guy who live’s at his house where we would be riding is a French Canadian man named Carl and that he was sure Carl would be all about helping the video be all it could be. This really excited us. Matthes was instantly building the “crazy French Canadian trainer” scenes aloud as we got closer to the track. We couldn’t wait to get there and do it. Matthes said JT$ would be stopping by as well so we could even do some comparison shots with Timmy on the 125 vs JT on the 450. The first concept was Ferry coming back and ridiculously smoking the 450’s but Matthes thought that getting smoked by a 450 and Ferry being deluisonal was funnier.

We finally arrived at the track and met Carl, this guy was gold, it was obvious he was going to be the highlight of the film. Very animated, energetic and he spoke French. It was almost building itself. Carls dogs are insane, two giant Great Danes. One was 6 years old and weighed 186lbs and the other was 9 months old and weighed 135lbs but is expected to get over 200lbs! You know Matthes is a dog guy and he was rubbing the pups belly and when he would stop the pup would stand up and jump off its back feet toward Matthes, it was crazy, the thing must be about 6’8″ when standing on its back feet.

Carls “puppy”

Timmy was of course running the Scott gear for the first time in the video, everyone thought it was pretty cool except JT who was pretty much like, “whatever, gear is gear, unless its Fly of course”. I was shocked to see Timmy working in his own bike but he actually re-jetted the tiddler all by himself. I even took photos to prove it.

He didn’t even ask for help, just got after it.

We stood around and talked to Carl for a bit about his 2006 Rinaldi YZ125, that bike is pretty incredible. The Rinaldi kit is only available from Yamaha and retails around $3k. Carl scrounged up a Labbats Blue cup from in the garage somewhere, it was just one little prop to help drive home the crazy French trainer idea.

I shot some of the ambience shots and we headed out to the track to decide where we would shoot our scenes and how the script was going to flow. We set up the 450 so Matthes and Timmy could stand by it for the intro, then when Timmy walked away it would reveal the 125 and set the stage for the parody. Our only instruction to Carl was, he was a crazy, animated French trainer, who would later be pissed off and swear at Timmy in French. Working with an actor of Carls caliber is really easy, just give him some general guidance and his natural ability takes care of the rest.

During the first few shots of filming Timmy was just getting a feel for the bike on the track and shorted a triple a couple times which got JT cracking on him for not down siding it. Red got excited and bet JT he couldn’t do it with four tries. Much like Marty McFly, JT doesn’t back down when called Chicken and he dismounted his 450 and saddled up the 125 to get to work. Check out the footage of that scenario below. We had a good laugh at that then got back to work riding and filming.

Play to watch the shenanigans.

Pulp Product

At this point we had pretty much decided that it was going to be a RacerX film hence the RXi flag on the handheld mic and Matthes’ intro wording mentioning RacerX films. That all went down the drain though during JT’s cameo interview. Its a good thing Matthes had the wired mic because the moment JT stated that “you have to do all the jumps because you will get landed on”, I started laughing while filming and decided during editing I was going to include JT’s incident of being landed on. I knew that was a bit controversial for RacerX to post so a Pulp product it became.

*A little side note regarding PulpMX which I found pretty funny from I believe day one I forgot to mention. Timmy asked the oft asked question of “what does PulpMX mean?” Matthes explained one of a few theories, Pulp being the raw product of a particular resource. Red Dog likened Pulp in this instance to orange juice pulp, which Red is not a fan of, in fact he likened orange juice pulp to “crap”, hence the affectionately modified name, “CrapMX”. Very funny. Then Matthes went with his other inspiration which was underground comic books in the 40’s and 50’s which were titled ‘Pulp Fiction’ and were edgy and controversial back then. Timmy didn’t seem to like this explanation either.

We wrapped up filming, JT took off and Timmy was doing a quick audio interview with LeBig who stopped by as he had just left Reed’s who lives close by. Matthes and I played a little table tennis during the riding break and though we didn’t keep score we were both much worse than we had claimed we would be during the pre-match crap talk.

I started snapping pics of Timmy, Carl, a buddy of Carls and Timmy’s little brother Travis who really blew me away with his skills, little bro can ride, and fast. The sun was disappearing and the track was really dry and dusty with all the bikes out there so the riding wrapped up and we headed to the garage.

We talked to Carl and his wife for a bit. Carl is making a 3D movie, I don’t know what it entails but its coming out in IMAX and the dude’s got loot, he’s a really cool guy. Steve gave him one of the new PulpMX tee’s and he was stoked on it, said it was a perfect balance of quality and comfort, I agree, that’s why we chose them. He was a fan of the artwork as well which was a “Pookie-stamped” design. We left the track and headed to drop Timmy off at a restaurant where he was meeting Evie and some friends. Matthes said he knew the people and wondered why we weren’t invited, I said obviously they don’t really like me and that was just the proof. Matthes agreed, that must be it.

We drove back to Timmy’s and I got started importing video and photos to get the video done and give Matthes some pics for the Ferry Day photo report on Pulpmx. When Timmy got home he was very eager to check out the clips and see if it was looking as good as we had planned. I think I may have awaken something in him he didn’t know was there, he’s very excited to make another video already but now he wants to get his hands on the editing controls as well.

Of course, what better way to wrap up the Timmy Two Stroke Day than to present you with the video one more time?