Locals
Wiz and Gavin’s video “Locals” captures their time together causing a ruckus down in Puerto Rico. Egg sat down with them to chat about the project, their relationship, and perspective on training.
Egg: Congrats on the project! I was lucky enough to see it a good minute ago when you first sent it to David. I’m stoked it’s finally out.
Wiz: I think it was literally, like a year after we were there that I finally got around to doing it.
Egg: It doesn’t feel dated to me though.
Wiz: I appreciate that. I think it’s the best shit we’ve ever done.
Egg: Beyond just the movement, I feel like the filming and editing was really top notch.
Wiz: Yeah, I don’t know. We were on some try hard shit I guess.
Egg: Before we talk too much about the edit itself, I wanted to start by just asking how long the two of you have known each other and how you met?
Gavin: Bro I don’t know. I think it was because I met the other toasty kids. I met this kid Ben when I was 16 so that would have been like six years ago. I probably didn’t meet anyone else from toasty until a couple years later, so I would have been like, 18 probably. Like I met y’all but I didn’t really ever interact with any of you, other than like Ben and sometimes Josh and Jake.
Wiz: Yeah I don’t know, you kind of just showed up at some point.
Egg: I mean, were y’all just both training at Forge?
Wiz: Pretty much. Well, Gavin was training at Beaverton, but he would show up at Forge every once in a while and we’d also train outside every once in a while.
Gavin: Yeah, I feel like we’d all get together at least once a month.
Egg: So around, when would you say that the two of you became, like, closer homies, not just being around the same group.
Gavin: Dude I hate this guy I’m still not his homie.
Wiz: Yeah I don’t know about being friends, we’ve got beef.
Gavin: Like, honestly, probably number one enemy right here.
Wiz: We did definitely train together a decent amount, but then, I don’t know, like, a lot of our other homies are really, really good at parkour.
Gavin: (Laughs)
Wiz: Me and Gavin kinda trained in a different way than a lot of the other people on Toasty, because, like, Ezzy, josh, and Jake are all real good homies of ours, but they’re definitely on a different kind of tier of movement that… I don’t know how to put this without sounding like a bummer, but—
Gavin: We’re really bad and they’re really good.
Wiz: Yeah yeah thats sort of it. So we just start training together a bunch more. We went to Antarctica together for work three years ago, and we definitely started training a lot more together after that.
Egg: You brought up Antarctica, which leads me to something I was really curious about. Y’all have done jobs together for a little bit, was that why you guys were in Puerto Rico?
Wiz: Yeah, we both work in demolition for a company called Northwest. Gavin’s their number one golden boy, the company favorite. We’ve ended up traveling for work a bit and then we’ll kind of just end up wherever. But yeah whenever we end up in same place it makes it a lot easier to train, because most of the time there’s nothing else to do there except for Parkour.
Egg: For sure. So under these circumstances, you’re spending a lot of time together, not just training. I know Gavin said that you got beef, and that you hate each other, but clearly you spend a lot of time together, not just doing parkour.
Wiz: We were in Antarctica for like two and a half months straight, that was insane. Every single day was terrible.
Gavin: Don’t forget, New Zealand for like two weeks before that.
Wiz: I know!
Egg: On the note of demolition, I wanted to ask a bit about what it’s like doing a manual labor job and trying to juggle training with something that is physically depleting your body.
Gavin: Okay, forget the manual labor job, just imagine being fat and out of shape. So, like, anytime you do anything physical, it fucking sucks and you can do it for like five minutes. So, yeah, I don’t know.
Wiz: We got a real different way of doing parkour. The ender that I did for Antarctica, we’d literally just go to the spot and I would try it like five times no warm up and then we’d just go back home because I couldn’t land it. That’s kind of how we train, I don’t know. We’ll, like, get a goal in mind especially when we’re working on a video, and then we’ll just go to the spot and try it and then we just won’t be able to do it.
Gavin: Usually, we probably have about an hour of training a day, and we switch off. One person will get clipped up one day or like a couple days in a row, and then the other person will go and we’ll have the rest. Because, dude, I can’t train multiple days in a row.
Wiz: Yeah, we kind of just figure out a way to make it work. I mean, you’re kind of just tired all the time doing labor stuff. It kind of doesn’t really make a difference after a certain point.
Egg: I’m kind of interested in something you said there. I definitely meet some people in parkour that feel very goal oriented, where it’s like they train to accomplish. And I’m curious, if you know, you go out, you don’t warm up, you try the thing, you fail. Whether that is still like a source of joy, where your enjoyment isn’t contingent on your success. Wether just rallying to go out and try is gratifying within itself.
Gavin: Honestly, I really like slam clips more than getting good landed clips. I’m not gonna go out and try to slam, but if I come out the end of the day with a clip where I absolutely eat shit, I think that’s more satisfying than getting a good hard clip where I just stomp the fuck out of it. I’d rather stomp the shit out of my face.
Wiz: That sounds really terrible.
Gavin: (Laughs)
Wiz: Yeah, I don’t know we can get really obsessive. I mean, for these last two videos, we really just wanted to get it done. You know what I mean? Like it’s fun, but it also just really sucks sometimes. But it doesn’t even matter, because we just want to get the trick, you know.
Egg: For sure. Would you say, wanting to get it done is maybe sometimes more about being stoked about the idea of a project than a trick in particular?
Wiz: Oh definitely.
Gavin: Yeah. I think neither of us are at a level of parkour where its about pushing the movement or the sport, or doing something that no one else has done because we’re not good enough. It’s more about the edit itself. The project is cooler.
Wiz: I mean, nothing we did in the Puerto Rico video was especially that hard. It was more just that we went out and filmed it how we wanted to film it, and took as many tries as we could to make things actually look really cool. A lot of the things that we did we went back to a couple of those spots three or four times just to film the same thing even though we already got the clip. Just to get it a little bit better, film it just a tiny bit better.
Egg: For me that was super felt watching it. Every clip had weight to it, and I could feel thought being put behind everything.
Wiz: We had such limited time too. While we both spent a couple of months in Puerto Rico, we were only there at the same time for about two weeks. So we had to be pretty intentional for each day of filming, planning to go to one specific spot. There weren’t a lot of spots on the island though so that made it kind of easy. There’s probably only two spots that we found that we didn’t use.
Gavin: They’re also so close together. It’s really easy to find them.
Egg: I was gonna ask a bit about that scouting process. I’m curious what your process was like being in a new place with nobody to guide you.
Wiz: Gavin was in Puerto Rico for a few months before I went down there and he had kind of already wandered around enough that he found stuff. The island that we we’re on is in Puerto Rico, but it’s a smaller island thats a part of it called Vieques. There’s only like two roads on it. So you kind of just end up finding all of the spots just going out and getting groceries or whatever.
Gavin: “I’m gonna go get a sandwich, oh damn look at that rock, thats a nice rock.” I also think our spot selection changed a bit, because we started picking spots for the specific tricks that we can do.
Wiz: Which is usually just a really high ledge to sand.
Gavin: Yeah if its a a high ledge with some soft ground, that’s a great spot.
Egg: This is like a really specific question, but in the intro, there’s the clip where you’re running with the beer and you trip and it all shatters. Was that scripted or did that just happen?
Wiz: It was completely scripted. We had a whole kind of skit that we were gonna do with it but it didn’t really flow very well with the whole video. So I was like, fuck it, I’ll just put this in because it’s kind of funny. I thought it worked better than our original plan.
Egg: I just had to ask, I really love how it came out. Touching on the movement more specifically, I have to ask you Gavin what happened on that one bail clip. What exactly was the plan?
Gavin: In my head, I was just thinking half in back out, but pull the back out like a cork three. But I bailed and that’s what made the extra twist.
Wiz: Yeah, it was kind of just like running forward 540 dive roll.
Gavin: Yeahhhh. I’ve never done a half in back out either, not even in a gym. So I don’t know why I thought I could do that. I was just like “oh yeah, that makes sense in my head. I could totally do that.”
Egg: So ya’ll had just made a kicker for that spot with a pallet?
Wiz: Yeah, that came from the spot that I did the kong front dash out. We just dragged it down the street.
Gavin: Screamed at some tourists, and smashed a bottle in front of them.
Wiz: Yeah. It was pretty bad. We were there a long time too, it was a really long session. Gavin was yelling the whole time. We were right by where people get off the ferry onto the island. So there’s a whole bunch of tourists who just got there, and that was their first impression of Vieques. Gavin double fronting to his face while we blasted 100 Gecs or something.
Egg: What you just said got me wondering about the title “locals” and wether being there for so long and being there for work and not for a vacation made you feel some contrast with the other people visiting the island.
Wiz: Yeah I mean, we’re definitely still tourists there. We kind of just picked the name because it sounds cool. But it was a little weird because we were both there for such a long amount of time.
Gavin: When you work someplace instead of just visiting it, it definitely feels different. When you’re working with all local guys, you feel a little bit connected. Like you’re kind of part of the community, rather than just visiting someone else’s space.
Egg: I’d love to hear more about what it was like at some of these locations, in particular the warehouse type space.
Wiz: That spot was disgusting, We probably got some disease from being in there. There was a lot of bird shit.
Gavin: Which one are you talking about? The Wizz clip, where he pres to the down ledge?
Egg: Yeah, were those two different spots? That one and where you did the dive roll to the pallets?
Wiz: Yeah those were two different spots actually.
Gavin: Ones a gym and the others an abandoned mall that never got finished.
Wiz: That was a community center, but they’re both kind of like remnants of Maria. Gavin, I don’t know if you heard the whole story behind the community center thing, It’s actually kind of nuts. Some guy was building a community center for the island, and he ran out of money. He asked the Puerto Rican government for more money to finish the project and when they gave him it, he just took the check and bounced and they never saw him again.
So yeah there was just a giant abandoned community center in the middle of the jungle. It was, super weird. All of the pallets in there people have been using as an airsoft or paintball kind of thing. We actually didn’t get much time at that spot. There was way more to do there, because it wasn’t just that one room.
Gavin: That spot is nuts. Honestly we have to do a Puerto Rico jam there, and Egg’s gotta pull up and throw some fuck shit there.
Wiz: Vieques has some crazy spots, and they’re all super close together. Its just so unique.
Egg: Were either of those abandoned spots on the list for you to demolish?
Wiz: It was completely unrelated. Our job that we do down there is kind of dumb actually. We go onto the end of the island and we dig for bombs. They used to use the island as a bombing range, which is you know, definitely not great. It’s just left over from World War Two I think. It was like a navy bombing range that was there for a real long time. But yeah we didn’t really do any demolition work there. We kind of just like, mowed grass and then other people looked for explosives.
Egg: Gavin I’d love to hear about the dive roll you did to the pallets. Did you start with it closer and then bring it out farther?
Gavin: I think that’s just like how far I thought I could do it without it hurting and ending up like that gorilla man clip where he knocked himself out. Yeah, I don’t know. Wizz, do you remember what the reasoning for putting those there was?
Wiz: You kind of just went and stood up on the top, and then you were like “yeah, I think there.” There was kind of a half stack of pallets already, and then we just made it a lot taller. It was pretty funny too, we got kind of sussed out right before he was gonna go, because we heard a car pull in. I don’t know, sometimes there’s kind of an eerie vibe on that island and we didn’t know if we were gonna just get axe murdered.
Gavin: There’s some pretty sketch shit there. One time when I went out we got called off of work that day because we were driving down the road and jungle swat pops out of the jungle. Like homeland security jungle swat with M 16s. We have a guide that leads us into the site every day, and so they stop our guide, and we can hear shots on their coms. They were telling our guide that they chased this boat to the north side of the island, and that they were having a shootout with the guy. So they made our guide guy, like, give them a ride so they could flank the guy. They just told us to go home.
Wiz: There’s some weird stuff that goes on there every once in a while. But yeah we thought we were gonna get murdered, so Gav kind of just went right away, and we didn’t really get time to prep the spot very well. It actually ended up just being two random people who were just, checking the place out. They’re kind of in the background of one of the clips. We really should have spent more time at that spot, though.
Egg: Are you two planning on going back there for work in the future?
Wiz: Yeah, Gavin probably not so much, but I’ll probably be back there again later this year. I don’t know. We never really know with our work schedule, they kind of just call us out to wherever.
Egg: Antarctica video coming when?
Gavin: It’s gonna be a much much less quality video.
Wiz: Yeah, that one will be way worse. They’re all phone clips, so I’m even less motivated to do anything with it, because they all look like shit.
Egg: But also you have to! It’s probably the first parkour video from Antarctica. And I don’t know if they’ll ever be another one.
Gavin: Also the ender clip is actually fucking sick, and I don’t know if anyone’s ever done that trick in that way. Other people have done a variation of that trick, but the way Wizz did it was kind of stupid.
Wiz: I don’t know. I think we’ll just put something together, just to get it out. I’ve definitely been looking at the footage for way too long to really feel that inspired about it. It’ll be out at some point. I feel like it’s gonna bum everybody out. “Man, these guys went to Antarctica and this is all they got?”
Gavin: It was so hard to train there though.
Egg: I was about to say, I feel like getting anything there is a feat.
Wiz: It was stupid. It was so hard to do anything. It was so dumb and so windy. I’ve never even thought about that before, but doing parkour in really, really strong winds is just the worst.
Egg: Yeah, sounds awful.
Wiz: Yeah it’s not fun.
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