My friend Brad Watanabe (owner of Berad Studio) and I teamed up again to produce another video for Hawaiian Skies, the video magazine of Hawaiian Airlines.

Starting today, and for the next four months, it will be shown on Hawaiian Airlines flights to and from the mainland. You can also press play in the video above and watch it online via the Hawaiian Skies YouTube channel.

The video features the three Hawaii hiking bloggers that have had the greatest influence on me. Kaleo Lancaster’s blog Island Trails opened my eyes to what hiking in Hawaii could be. Shortly after discovering Island Trails, I stumbled across Nate Yuen’s blog Hawaiian Forest and Joshua Serrano’s blog 808 Goonies. For some time I used those three blogs as my main resource for discovering new trails.

It was a pleasure to interview those guys and get to know them a little bit better by making this video. I have also, by the way, shamelessly featured myself in the video. And, the trail we are on is the Poamoho Trail.

I hope you enjoy it. Read on to learn a bit more about the making of this piece. It was a pretty long process.

See more »

The video we’ve been working on has just been released.

We shot at five locations and spent many late nights editing.

At the beginning of February, it began playing on all Hawaiian Airlines flights to and from the mainland.

You can also watch it online.

The project started with a conversation between me and my friend Brad Watanabe. He runs a video production company here in Hawaii called Berad Studio and was interested in producing a video about rock climbing for Hawaiian Skies, the in-flight video magazine for Hawaiian Airlines. The goal of the video would be to introduce bouldering to a non-climber audience and to showcase the beauty of Hawaii through this niche sport.

Brad pitched the project and got the green light. Now, all we had to do was figure out how to get this thing done. It would be the first real video project I’ve ever worked on and Brad’s first video about rock climbing. My role was to help produce the video (meaning getting all the climbers together and coordinating shoot dates) and serve as the creative director (which meant I helped developed the look of the piece, the flow of content, and feel of the video). The budget for this video was super tight so I didn’t get paid for any of this. But, I figured it would be a fun project to work on.

We learned a lot during the production of this piece and there are a ton of things that we wish we could have done differently. But overall, we’re happy with the video.

If you’re interested how the video was made, I’ve posted photos from the different shoots with notes on how the project came together.

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Kaleo Lancaster, owner of the popular hiking blog Island Trails, just released his 2011 video summary. And once again, he kills it. (You can watch the 2010 video summary here.) I’m amazed at what he’s able to do with a GoPro.

I hope you find this video is as inspiring as I did.

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See also:

• Watch video in HD on Vimeo (it deserves a second viewing).
• Visit Kaleo’s blog Island Trails (in my opinion, the best resource for info on hiking in Hawaii).
• “Like” Island Trails on Facebook.

By David,
Unreal Hawaii

By Kaleo,
Island Trails

By Justin,
Justin U. on Vimeo

By Ryan,
Ryan Chang on Vimeo

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We came back from Waimanu with a lot of footage. For a couple of weeks after the trip, you would see videos come out one by one. Each person captured the trip in a different way.

We produced four videos in total, all with a different vibe.

The Waimanu Series

This is the final post in a five-part series on Waimanu. See more:

• PART 1: Waimanu Valley via the Muliwai Trail
• PART 2: Waimanu Valley Waterfalls
• PART 3: Waimanu Valley Camping
  
• PART 4: Waimanu Valley to Waipio Valley
  

We went out to the Town Boulders one night last week. Justin (Volcanic Rock Gym), Hiro and Nick sent three different lines on the same boulder. It turns out my camera battery was dead so I decided to just take some video. I shot, processed and cut the video entirely on my iPhone. Pretty amazing what you can do on an phone nowadays …

See also

• More info on the Town Boulders.

Yeah, people do this in Hawaii. This is a compilation of some 2010 BASE (buildings, antennae, spans, and earth) jumping night raids. These fellas are local Hawaii BASE jumpers/skydivers/ground launchers/speed flyers. I asked if I could share this video on my blog and the Ghost said it was all good so, here it is. It would be unreal to be walking through Waikiki and see these guys fall from the sky.

See also:

• TheBASEGhost’s Channel on YouTube.
• See some Hawaii speed flying.
• Skydive with Skydive Hawaii.
• Pictures from my first skydiving experience: Skydiving at Hawaii’s North Shore.