Thread by @Casey

four years ago 🎅

some untold details about this video. for starters it cost *several million dollars to produce (million)

initially we had licensed Mariah Carey's 'All I Want For Christmas' as the soundtrack and it was funny, ironic and all around fucking great BUT at the very very very last minute the song was pulled (literally hours bfore publishing).

the drone took nearly a year to build, the propellers were custom made in Switzerland, the batteries had to be kept warm and to do this we rented the largest heated box truck allowed on the road to transport and store when not flying

the batteries only afforded about 4-6 minutes of actual flight time so we had to choose our shots carefully. we had 2 or 3 sets of batteries meaning we could only shoot 15-20 minutes total per day

we had an enormous production crew including a 3 or 4 person stunt safety team. this is the safety harness which was attached to a cable which was attached to the drone, it catch me if i lost my grip.

daylight was a huge issue. we were near the arctic circle in Finland and had a total of 2 hours a day of light. very very little margins for filming a video. was pitch black until 11:30 am and the sun set around 1pm

originally the idea was to drone surf dressed as santa and to jump over a tropical island on my surfboard but no island (literally no country that was has tropical island) would give us permission. Finland said yes for some reason

we had two officials with us from the Finnish government to make sure we were following protocol. this town i flew through had to be shut down, all of the people were extras (most of them anyway). the police that closed off the area wore snow suits to fit in

this shot (which makes up about 10 seconds of the video) was done on an actual ski mountain. we closed the mountain to get the shot. all the other snowboarders in the shot were hired, paid, professionals

we were limited to flying me 20-25 feet off the ground, per the Finnish government officials. on our last day of shooting i told my drone pilot to fly me off the edge of this mountain and keep flying me higher until the drone couldnt go any higher, i got about 200 feet up.

i had on a headset to communicate with the drone pilot and we saved the audio. for this last dramatic (extremely dangerous and against-the-rules shot) you can hear me screaming HIGHER, HIGHER

credit to @pwleys for making it all happen (risking his job in the process) and @DroneworksUSA for building and flying the drone and the other almost 100 people involved. and ❤️ to @Jessewelle who got so many of the best shots used in the final video - washingtonpost.com/news/early-lea…