Kevin Dowling and the Olympus Madness

I just spent the last 24 hrs with Kevin Dowling as he finished up his Olympus Your Story entry and dammit did he deliver.

You need to immediately watch this video (in HD) and like it on Youtube and post it on your facebooks, skate blogs and everything because it is damn well deserving.

Wow, what a day. I'm just going to start from the beginning because honestly this is just stupid.

Ok for those you who don't know, Kevin Dowling was a finalist for the Olympus Your story Challenge and was given $5k and a brand new Olympus PL-1 to basically show the world what was up in his life. With the money, he took Montre and Rob G to film and skate the rawest parts of New York and show the world our lifestyle thru the eyes of real life rollerblader. Well 8 days in, his camera gets stolen. (click here for that full story) and he has to head back to NY to refinish filming so he can finish this thing up...

Well on his way back (the 1st) he calls me and tells me his deadline is Aug 2 @ 11:59 PM and that he is much in need of the Motion GFX I had yet to create for him. So I decided to take a personal day and that we would just post up in a coffee shop and edit all day long. No problem right?

Well he’s editing all night on the ride home from NY, and gets to Spartanburg at about 12:00 PM and we head to a coffee shop to do some work. We get to the coffee shop, say our hellos and begin to work, no more than 2 hours in, he gets a phone call from his sister saying “If you want to tell your grandma goodbye you need to come home now, because she’s in bad shape and isn’t going to last another day” devastating.

So Kevin looks at me and says “Dude…I have to go, its my grandma.” At this point, he doesn’t have 2 hours to use driving, like we can not get this thing done if uses 2 hours to drive. So I look at him and say alright man, let’s go.

So Kevin is editing the whole way there, nonstop, cranking things out. We get to ATL to the hospital his grandma is at and its just crazy, Kevin basically he spends the next 5 or so hours running back and forth between editing and talking to his grandma...just crazy. All the while I’m sitting outside in the car working on motion graphics trying to get all this in order so we'll be good to go when we get to that point.

So I get finished, go grab my Subway and just pass out in the car. Kevin wakes me up at like 9, still has to edit the intro, but it was time to head home so me and Kevin pack up and get out that way.

So on the 30 mins to his house he gets the intro nice and done, and we make final adjustments render it out and slam it online...just crazy.

I wound up actually staying in ATL that night because we didn't get to bed until like 3, and to top things off, the next morning I had to be to work at 11...just a crazy day but I'd do it again in a heartbeat. This Olympus challenge could be a really sick thing for the industry as a whole. So please don't let this video fizzle out, go to Youtube and like this video, the whole rollerblading community has pulled together for this one, so don't stop now.