Danny McAskill of breaking the mould

From a chat a while back with Danny MacAskill.

ST; How did that first Inspired Bikes video come about, and what was the aim in making it?

DMC; No, not at all. I’d moved down to Edinburgh and into a flat full of BMX’ers. One of the guys in the flat was Dave Sowerby, who was an amazing MBX’er and BMX filmer.

One winter he got injured and offered to do a bit of filming with me, over winter 2008-9. Till this day he’s a legendary filmer, and I saw it as an opportunity to try hard to put down the best riding I could do. It wasn’t for anybody in particular, it was just for us – there was no budget involved. I would buy Dave some tape for his video camera (it was just pre-digital) and we started filming in Edinburgh and got a good baseline going over a few days. We managed to film a few tricks that I was doing day to day in trials, and I could then use that as an aspirational way to do things I always wanted to = like riding along a spiky fence, flaring off a tree and jumping into a big gap at the end of the film.

We worked on my lunch breaks and days off over 6 month to make it.

ST: It was still the early days of YouTube back then, did you have any idea that it would go viral and change your life?
DMC; Oh no, not at all. It was just made as a passion project. I had actually, previously, had a small video filmed of some stuff up in Aviemore, which kind of seeded my name on the internet, and in 2005-6 it had kind of gone viral, when YouTube was really new, and I basically made that to be seen by the trials world, that was my main audience, they were my piers – and, of course the mountainbike world would also see it.

But, the Inspired Bikes video, I had no idea that it would become so big, and change my life, I suppose.

ST; How fast did life change after that film?

DMC; It was pretty much the day after it went online, you’re waking up and newspapers were wring about it, and it even made the BBC News – this bicycle video that I’d make in Edinburgh started making the news in America, in New Zealand – they had a big thing about in a bakery in New Zealand, which as kind of weird. These days it’s a big beast (YouTube) but that was kind the early days of viral online videos.