Underdog Stories

I LOVE underdog stories!! And I just came across this one!! Totally worth watching all the way through! Makes you love people who pursue there dreams despite all opposition!! Make sure to watch it all the way through, I promise it's worth it!

From Tahiti with Love

As I start writing this blog, I feel completely inadequate to even begin to convey/share what this trip meant to me... With that in mind, here is an attempt at it.

To start off this entry, here is the video I made on the experience, hopefully it will help paint a better picture of the experience, even though I really don't believe it still does the people of Tahiti justice.



In just the two weeks I was in Tahiti, my entire perception of people changed. COMPLETELY! I will always look at those two weeks as a very strong turning point in my life/career when "the bigger picture" came much more into play.

I think generally when people think of Tahiti, or any island for that matter, they assume that it is just a vacation on the beach... HOWEVER, if this is what you go there for, you have completely missed something SO MUCH STRONGER of an experience, and that is the people!

The people of Tahiti, I will forever love. They have left a permanent imprint on my heart, and knowing what I know now about the love they had towards me... my life will never be the same. And of coarse, for the better!

As we were leaving Tahiti, one of the people I was with, Nikki Mozo, we were talking about the whole experience, and she said something to me that I had never had someone put into words. And as simple as it sounds... It is 100 percent TRUE!!!

As we were talking about what made the people of Tahiti different then anyone else we had met, it kept on coming up about how genuine these people were. Nikki shared the idea that the only true way that someone shows love is when they do things out of complete inconvenience, and with no motivation but to help the person in which they drop everything for. It doesn't sound very profound the way I wrote it, but the way Nikki worded it, it was for sure one of the most profound things I've ever heard :)

For me this summed up completely the love I had personally felt by the people in Tahiti.

For example, when we were leaving at the airport, the family we had stayed with the first week, the Tautu family.. they lived on the complete opposite side of the island... And not only did they not have a car, but they didn't have access to borrow a car to wave us goodbye. So what they did was use the little money that they did have, and get a rental car. They did all of this just to wave goodbye to us at the airport, and hug us goodbye.

PLEASE keep in mind that neither of us spoke a common language, we spoke English and they spoke French and Tahitian. So everything we did was based off of body language.

At the end of every day staying with the Tautu family, the father would come sit next to me as I uploaded all my photos/videos to my laptop. He would just sit there with the biggest smile on his face, and observe me. Even though we didn't speak once again a universal language, by his body language alone I could sense something much great. A sincere love, a love that I really have never felt by just meeting someone for a couple days.

I'll never forget the gentle smile of the father, of there family, whenever I saw them.

I think we as humans generally want to be loved, and with the people of Tahiti, that is something I felt by everyone I came in contact with... Out of all the places in the world I have been, I HAVE NEVER FELT/SENSED that sincere love before. Almost to the point that it even brings you to tears.

There is much more I can say about my experience in Tahiti... I could actually go on and on... but for now, I just wanted to do a blog on the people of Tahiti, and the love I felt from them! They will forever be in my heart! And they will always be considered my Utuafare (family).

The Dirty Dash! Muddiest youtube vid yet!

Here's our latest youtube video I shot with my friends last week.



For the filming of this, I actually had 12 other friends/camera people help film with there DSLR/GoPro HD cameras.

We shot this all with Canon DSLR cameras, using Canon 5D Mark II's, Canon 7D's, Canon T2i's, and a couple GoPro HD cameras.

We filmed the video June 4th, and we then released it June 8th. I wanted to release the video ASAP because the race itself was fresh on everyones mind, and by doing that, it makes the video itself get much more exposure. So that was the thought process with the quick turn around. Generally speaking, a video like this takes about a month of editing.

So right after we were done filming, I had my computer process the video footage all day, changing it to a format that we could edit it in, and then we spent the next three days editing non stop.

And when I say "non stop", I mean waking up at 7am every morning, and stopping at 3am, only to do it again the next day. Where I was editing the video as well, made sure there were no distractions, so I could pump through the video edit.

Another one of my friends, Jordan, helped a great deal as well, going through a bunch of the footage, to make sure we could reach our deadline.

With 12 cameras, we had a ton of footage to search through, in very little time.

If you want to find out more info on the race itself that the video features, check the link right below.

http://www.thedirtydash.com/