Lucky Isle

About three months after I arrived in Japan I got a call from one of my friends who works at the Fukushima International Association. He had apparently received a call from one of the local news stations who had seen a foreigner riding a big unicycle around, and they wanted to do a news story on whoever that guy was.

That guy was, of course, me.

If you’re below the video, I assumed you’ve already watched it, so here’s some background information on it.

First off, this was done about a year and a half ago, and at that time was Japanese was still pretty crappy. That is to say, that where I’m at now is much better than where I was then. Because of that, Billy, my aforementioned friend and interpreter, helped us out with the language aspect of the shot.

When Billy and I arrived at the predetermined park, which is quite close to my apartment, we ended up coming across the news crew from the back. Apparently they had been waiting, camera ready, thinking that we were going to come from the other direction. Because they wanted an initial approach, they had us enact an arrival from the front… about three times. That arrival was pretty rehearsed.

Next up, notice how I’m grinning like an idiot throughout the whole piece. This was because the lady was AMAZINGLY energetic, much more so than shows on camera. A lot of that wore off on me, leading me to continually grin through the whole thing.

After shooting the arrival footage, they said they wanted to do a reenactment of when the news lady first saw me riding around the city. However, due to them not being sure about the legalities of riding a unicycle on the road or sidewalk (as was the actual case when she saw me–I was riding on an actual street going somewhere), they told me to just walk it and not ride. The riding would come later, at an area they knew was OK to ride.

Once we were finished with that reenactment stuff, we headed to the outskirts of the city, to where Azuma Sports Park is situated. I didn’t know it at the time because I had only recently moved to Fukushima, but Azuma Sports Park has a cycling park (pdf) where you can ride おもしろ自転車 (funny bikes), BMX bikes, unicycles, and other cycling stuff. This particular day happened to be 体育の日 (Sports Day), so the use of the cycling park was free.

We unloaded from the van, and as I walked up to the unicycling area, many of the kids’, all elementary school-aged, eyes widened. While elementary school kids unicycling is commonplace here, mine was by far the biggest unicycle they had ever seen.

Once the crew had everything set up and cleared, I hopped on my unicycle… then promptly fell on my hip. Hard. My hip hurt for the rest of the day, and I had a big bruise for the next week or two.

Thanks to a nice rain a few hours earlier, the practice area was wet wet wet, and the material that they had unfortunately chosen as the surface for the practice area lost most all semblance of friction between it and a rubber tire. Throughout the shoot I fell many times, to the point where I eventually stopped trying to do smooth turns and instead just did twitchy kind of turns. Also, a lot of tricks went out the window. I also wasn’t the only one falling due to the wet pavement–many of the other kids did also.

Moving on, they said that to get on the unicycle I “jump”. While that’s true that that’s what I said, to illustrate this point they showed a take where I did a suicide mount, which is not exactly the normal way it’s mounted.

Once they had everything they wanted from Azuma, we went to the studio, where we shot the rest of the “How I Found the Unicycle Guy” reenactment of the news lady and Billy talking on the phone. After that wrapped up, they showed us around the studio and let us screw around with the equipment a bit.

While I have plenty of experience with video stuff (it was my major, after all), they had some nifty equipment in the studio. Case in point, all of the cameras were robotic–they don’t actually use any cameramen in the studio itself. I thought that was kinda nifty.

We finished up, Billyzilla destroyed Fukushima, we went home, waited a few days, it aired, waited a few more days, got the DVD, waited a year and a half, uploaded it to YouTube and finally posted on it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 8:53 pm and is filed under Unicycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.