March 20, 2024 • 49 mins
Professional Freefall Cinematographer & Aerial Stunt Coordinator, Joe Jennings holds numerous 1st place titles as a Competitive Camera Flyer. Joe’s work has appeared in feature films, television shows and numerous television commercials including, Pepsi, Lexus, Ford, Shell, Chevy, Pontiac, Samsung, Verizon, Hewlett Packard, Firestone, Honda, Sony, Visa, Dominos, Budweiser, Apple, and dozens more. Joe shares the exciting high's and lows of his profession.
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Outdoors People is broadcast live Wednesdays at 6PM ET.
Outdoors People TV Show is viewed on Talk 4 TV (www.talk4tv.com).
Outdoors People Radio Show is broadcast on W4CY Radio (www.w4cy.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com).
Outdoors People Podcast is also available on Talk 4 Podcasting (www.talk4podcasting.com), iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, Audible, and over 100 other podcast outlets.
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Radio. Welcome to outdoors people withme. Cw Getz and her Maya mar
Zaki. Good evening. It's Wednesday, March twentieth, twenty twenty four.
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Hey, we've got a forty twodegree five that is forty two degree fahrenheit
five degrees celsius temperature here in northcentral Illinois, Chicago land kind of suburbs
like little Chili. You know,we had some really nice like seventies,
and I think we got close toeighty a couple of times here, and
now we're down to forty two.It feels chilly. I have to tell
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you. It feels it's always windyhere now, so springtime win one.
Maya is on safari this week somewherein Brazil, she told me, But
I forgot, so I apologize.But hoi ya, Maya. If you
if you're able to watch out thereright now, I doubt that you are,
but just in case one, you'regonna be my sidekick tonight. Here.
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What temperature you have down there ina lovely state of Florida. Well,
so right now we are at seventysix, but two days ago we
had pretty much the coldest day ofthe year. Oh yeah, we went
down to a whole sixty nine degrees. Can you believe that? Well,
you know, I think that,Yeah, you're probably in the winter code.
With sixty nine degrees in Florida.You're like those in Brazil right now
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dips below eighty. They're like,I'm cold, man. I get it.
I totally get it. It's onlythe second day of spring, so
we can't really be we can't reallybe ditching too much. It's still pretty
nice. I know April, whenI was operating a snowplow, I remember
beating out there in April and blizzardand it happens, you know, So
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let's just hope that doesn't happen thisyear anyway, Well, let's meet tonight's
guest, Saint Louis. Native professionalfree fall cinematographer and aerial stunt coordinator Joe
Jennings holds numerous first place titles asa competitive camera flyer, including World Skysurfing
Championships, Boards Over Switzerland and ESPNand more. Joe's work has appeared in
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feature films like Charlie's Angels, AirForce, One Point Break, Jackass Forever,
and others. His work can behas also be seen in television shows
like MTV Sports, Dateline, NBCBaywatch, Blossom mcgiver in National Geographic Adventure,
to name a few, and thelist of commercials which Joe's work has
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been featured in is massive. Thelist includes Pepsi, Lexis, Ford,
Shell, Chevy, Pontiac, Samsung, Verizon, Doctor Pepper, Budweiser,
Hewlett Packard, Firestone, Blue Cross, Blue Shield, Honda, Wrigley's Gum,
Sony, Visa, Domino's, BudLight, Apple, and on and
on. They have waited a longtime for this moment. The defending world
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champions, the favorites in our competition, Rob Harris and Joe Jennings of the
United States to get their competition underway. You're going to see a big difference
here, not only in the skysurfing, but in the camera flying as well.
Joe Jennings does this for a living, and he's absolutely dead on on
holding the angles. And you mayfind yourself living in a shut gun shot,
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and you may find yourself you donot know the part of the hook.
And you may find yourself behind thewheel of a large automobile. You
may find yourself with a beautiful help, with a beautiful wife, and you
may ask yourself, well, howdid I get here? It's a good
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job. And with that, Welcometo the show, Joe, Hello,
good to be here. Hey whatI'll tell you what? What an amazing
video? And I'm gonna ask youthis what I should know this? Where
are you coming to us live fromthis evening? I'm in Los Angeles now,
Okay, So I didn't know that. I didn't know that. That
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would not have been my first guest. This is this is where I live,
you know. I it's kind ofthe last place I expected to live,
just just a big city, youknow, just the whole environment was
not you know. I lived upin Santa Cruz and I love that kind
of nature. But this is wherethe industry is and you know, yeah,
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absolutely well, and you know what, here's the thing, all the
actions in California, So it wouldbe natural for you to be there and
that's where everything was happening. AndI would assume anyway, right right,
right right. You know, wewere talking about your co host being over
in Brazil. Yeah, and itbrought to mind a project that I did
there not too long ago. Itwas a couple of years ago where we
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went to the middle of the Amazonjungle. Took about twenty seven hours of
flying in twenty four hours on aboat. We ended up in the middle
of the jungle and we were filminga project and I got my first about
of COVID and just knocked me entirelyon my back and I basically had to
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just sleep through everything until it wastime to jump, and then I would
just rouse myself up, go filmand go back to bed. And Jesus
a wild project. You know.I was just thinking watching it, when
you have a bad day, Iwonder what that looks like, because that's
a pretty serious stuff. I mean, you're jumping out of airplanes, you're
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filming things, and I can imaginewhen something goes wrong. It's not just
a little thing. It's usually abig thing. Am I right? Or
no? Yeah? You know,I mean we joke around often when when
we put together a stunt. Oneof the things we say is, you
know, well what can possibly gowrong? And the fact is, you
know, a lot can go wrong. Yeah, a bad day might be
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as simple as a you know,a parachute opening, a very fast parachute
opening when you have a lot ofweight on your head with the cameras and
everything, that can hurt. Yeah. It could also be you know,
I've I've been in you know,I was in an airplane that crashed into
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trees. We lost an engine ontakeoff and ended up in trees and that
was terrifying. So that wasn't agood day. And then another time I
was on a project. We wereactually filming for a show called Ripley's Believe
It or Not. And I rememberthat show. Yeah, the helicopter flew
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straight into wires. Oh wow.And it just tore the helicopter entirely apart
from front to back. And wewalked we walked away from it. You
are very very fortunate that. Yeah, my gosh, you got some stories
I'm sure you've gotten I'm sure that'sjust a tip of the iceberg. Man.
Let me ask you, Joe,what came first, the chicken or
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the egg? Did you were youa skydiver first? Or were you a
cinematographer first? And then at whatpoint did you begin to get combined the
two. You know, I thinkcamera work in general, and cinematography has
that's always been in my life.My father was a great cameraman. He
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filmed in nature. He was astill photographer, but you know, I
used to hike out in the woodswith them, and he would go find
things and and photographed them and hadhis photographs featured in magazines and on the
Missouri Botanical Gardens calendars. That wasall of his photos. And that's I
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believe it's the largest botanical garden inthe US. Beautiful place anyway. You
know, when I first picked upa camera, and I think it was
in high school and in the lateseventies, I picked one up and it
just it just it was. Itwas an old video camera and I remember,
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you know, holding it and therewas a big deck attached to it,
and you know, and I wasplaying around with it, and something
about it just felt like, man, I really liked this, you know,
this cool piece of yeah, coolpiece of fun, right there,
man. Tools. Yeah, Andthen you know, when I got in
the skydiving, you know already youknow, I was, you know,
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pretty much an avid cameraman, andwhen I was skydaving, you know,
I really wanted to share the experience. And before I even graduated off student
status, I used to take alittle cassette tape recorder and tape it to
my wrist and just scream into itso that I could like relive, Oh
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wow, it's free fall. Soit's almost a natural progression that when when
I went further into skydiving and whenI was qualified to carry cameras, I
carried them as soon as I could. Well, so, how has your
rig changed over the years? Imean, you know, in one of
those which I would you know,I can easily imagine this, but a
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nice big red camera. You know, I'm sure you didn't start with that,
but when you started, you werein what kind of gear? And
how is that? How's that change? Yeah? So when I started flying
camera, I was lucky enough thatthe eight millimeter cameras were beginning to become
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a thing, and they were smallerthan the VHS cameras that people were carrying,
you know, those those were bigmillimeter kind of shrunk it up.
They were still a little bit big, but it was manageable. So that
was my first camera. And thenyou know, I would jump with video
and still photographs to film people doingtheir first jumps as tandems and whatnot,
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and so that was, you know, that was my early rig. And
then as I got more into shootingfilm, I bumped up to sixteen millimeter,
a sixteen millimeter camera, which isnot too much bigger, but heavier,
you know, it was more solidpiece of gear, and I got
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used to that. And then prettysoon as opportunities began to open up,
I needed to start jumping with thirtyfive millimeter, which was much bigger,
much heavier. And thirty five millimeterfilm though, was the standard for filming
commercials and TV and motion pictures andthings like that. So it was a
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big camera, big helmet with videoassist and you know, just a very
heavy, complicated system. Serious stuff. Yeah, I mean it was,
you know, and I considered myselfa film purist, Like I expected I'd
be jumping film cameras for my entirecareer. But then, of course,
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you know, the digital cinema justbecame so good and it was so much
more affordable and reliable, and sothe size of incomplexity in my helmet is
actually come out a little bit sincereally really so things are actually a lot
smaller than what they really were atone time. And yeah, no,
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it's amazing. I mean, youknow, go Pros used to tick me
off, you know, because they'reso good if you were, like,
you've ever used a go pros inanything you've done? Have you done?
I mean, I love them.They're I mean, it's an amazing camera.
I use them for I use themfor all kinds of things. I
mean, they don't work for youknow, really high end stuff. You
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need the raw digital cinema files sothat the colors can all be mixed to
kind of matching whatever you're making.But go pros are fully smokes. Yeah,
that's so cool. Right now,let me ask you a little shift
gears here a little bit. Whereare some of the places that your work
has taken you? And uh,and which of those places would be would
you call your favorite? So mycareer has taken me to pretty much every
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continent on the planet. Everywhere,a lot of traveling, you know,
wonderful and some really really beautiful places. I haven't been though, to the
Arctic Circle, which I believe isa continent, so I haven't been there.
But but yeah, you like thecold stuff or do you like the
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warm stuff? Which would be yourfavorite? I mean, would you say
I really like the cold stuff?Because man, the scenery is just killer.
What do you like the nice tropicalyou know sort of thing, you
know, when we're in the air. I like the tropical of course,
it's gorgeous. It's beautiful. Youknow, the problem is when you're on
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the ground, you're just sweltering.But you get the best clouds in the
world when you're you know, yougo to a place like like Florida and
the summer, for example, youknow, the ground is entirely wet,
and in the afternoon, almost invariably, you get these cumulus clouds to just
build all the way up to fifteentwenty thousand feet or higher. You can
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go up and fly wingsuits and justkind of zip around them, you know.
And so yeah, I mean thesky there is extraordinary and it's beautiful.
But really, my my favorite placeof all places, believe it or
not? Is is Arizona? Ohwow? Really? Yeah? Yeah,
what he was saying, you know, yeah, you know why. I
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mean, it's it's brown, it'shot, it's you know. But in
Arizona we're able to there are thereare drop test areas where you can push
objects out of an airplane and legally, you know, crash it into the
ground. Because like saw some ofthat that's like wow, what the hell?
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Yeah, and so you know they'rethey're that's the kind of thing that
to this day and a big partof why I'm still in this racket is
you know, because I just Ireally love taking different objects like a car
for example, Right, how canwe make this thing fall wheels to earth?
How fast does it need to leavethe airplane? And how do we
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set up the balance and the weightand the shape of the bottom of the
car to get it to literally staywheels to earth with people riding and that
kind of thing. I mean,that's one out of many objects. But
in order to test those things,even if it's even if it's a laptop,
if you're going to let it crashinto the ground at one hundred and
fifty miles an hour, you needto do that in the middle of nowhere.
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There's a lot of math going onthere. Job. I mean,
my god, oh wow, youknow. And I don't consider myself,
you know, I don't consider myselfvery technical. A lot of it is
kind of intuitive, but I relyheavily on people who you know, they're
wired for that. They they cancrunch the numbers, and they helped me
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out a lot. Tell us aboutyour competitive competition skydiating that is, and
and maybe the effect it's had onyour career. I think I think competition
skydiving is is a big part ofwhy I'm still here, you know,
of why I'm still skydiving overall.I was, I was, I was
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burnt out on filming just skydiving,and it just became too easy. You
could just pull up to a targetand film it right. And then I
met, uh the guy who becamemy partner and skysurf World champion, a
guy named Rob Harris, and heinvited me to film him doing freestyle.
And I had heard that freestyle wasvery difficult because it zips all over the
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sky, you know, wow,and as a camera flyer you have to
chase after it. And my firstout chasing after him doing freestyle. You
know, I really felt like ahuman jet, Like I was flying my
body harder than I had ever flownit before. And so, you know,
I became addicted to that. Andthen as we trained and got better
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and better at skysurfing and me asa camera flyer being able to fly more
dynamically and everything, and then winningsome championships, including you know, the
X Games in ninety five, itjust began to open doors into Hollywood.
So it's almost like one thing ledto another and the opportunities kind of came
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because we were prepared to take himon. Yeah, Oh that's so cool.
What's the most unusual project you've beeninvolved with? Man? You know,
I thought about I thought about that. I have been in a lot
of them. To say, there'sa lot you've ever seen some unusual things
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like holy smokes. But yeah,I mean there's there's some things we just
you know, I mean something,all kinds of requests come across the table,
and we can't do all of them. Sure, somebody wanted me to
run a horse out of the backof an airplane, you know, a
horse. Yeah, and the ownerof the parachute center where you know,
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I was skydiving at the time,and where we were doing those kinds of
things. You know, they areyou know, they love horses, they
love animals, and I just Ijust knew, Okay, well, this
is never gonna happen. How isthat going to work? I mean,
yeah, when he lands, andhow is the horse gonna never mind?
Yeah, just you know, therewere just so many, so many variables.
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And a horse can't consent, youknow, Okay, yeah, I
want to a horse can't consent.And it's like, without the horse's consent,
we're not going to drive it outof an airport. Yeah, Eddie
would be down there in no time, wouldn't they. Yeah? Yeah,
But I mean I've done I've donea lot of unusual stuff. You know.
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On one commercial, we had aa laptop that was basically set up
to save its own, you know, to save itself, and the idea
was to show that it could bootup and trigger. At the time,
there was a sliding DVD door thatwould come in and out, you know,
and it could boot up and triggerthe door and open its own little
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small parachute before it hit the ground. And that was a pretty cool you
know, it's a pretty cool project. We had to figure out how to
make a laptop fall and then howto save itself. That's bizarre. Hey,
So okay, then and now here'sa then and now question for you.
Has age at any point had anyeffect on your specific type of work?
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You know, I can say thislike a couple of things, like
having kids. You know, beforeI had kids, the risk was worth
it, Like we would do thingson the cutting edge and there were a
lot of unanswered questions. We woulddo new things that nobody else had done,
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and the risk, you know,was worth it, you know.
And then after having kids, Ifelt myself throttling back a bit. Like
changes there when you have kids,done it right, it does big time.
You know. It's something that wasfun before becomes like unpleasant, you
know what I mean. Yeah,And so you know, then it became
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a matter of learning how to staywithin the parameters of my abilities and my
understanding of the equipment and whatnot.So it was kind of like pulling back
a little bit. And now asI'm getting older, I expected, you
know, it's a very athletic kindof a pursuit, you know, And
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and your body does take a beating. Yeah, I'm sure you don't expect
to last very long, you know. Yeah, I kind of wondered that,
Like I mean, I mean,I asked you, how old are
you right now? I'm sixty one, sixty one, okay, so I'm
going to be sixty here next month. And look at all that hair you
have. Oh my god, thatstuff falling out. This is a this
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is what do you call little planting? You know they put that on before
the shop. Oh nice, welldone, good crop. You know,
honestly, even from five years agoor ten years ago, I feel the
difference. I mean, I noticethe difference. And I'm not jumping out
of airplanes like you are. Yeah, and I can only imagine that.
Man, your your body's probably takinga pretty good beat in over the years.
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How long do you continue to youdon't want to continue this, keep
this up? So I expected,you know, by now, I thought
for sure that I would have retired. You know, as much as I
love doing it, I thought,you know, I'll be done, you
know, by the time I'm inmy fifties or sixty. But I think
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one of the things that has reallyhelped me stay aligned and healthy and strong
is swimming. I get in thepool and zero gravity workout and you know,
I'll swim a mile three or fourtimes a week. Nice. Nice,
yeah, yeah, And I thinkthat that's kind of been the key
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to my longevity because here I am, I feel good, I still feel
good, I'm strong, My reflexesare are still there. I'm not gonna
I'm not going to say that theyare you know what they were when I
was thirty. Sure, but Iknow what I'm doing enough to be able
to go up and safely, youknow, and safely do my job and
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mature. He has something to dowith that too. That's probably an aspect
of that, you know what,Like you said, you know your limits
and you're not going to go doingsomething you know that you shouldn't be doing,
maybe especially at six y one,right pretty much, I mean you
do begin to think of things differently, you know. And I know that
when whenever we have a project,you know, I'll I'll bring in the
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the best guide evers because I knowthat their flying abilities are going to help
me my my work will look betterbecause of the way that they're able to
to fly, you know. ButI'm also really careful to tell everybody that
you know most of what we're doing, we're you know, we're not trying
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to negotiate the end of the war. We're not trying to you know,
do a policy or anything you know, really important. We're selling you know,
carbonated sugar water or whatever we're selling. Like it's not important, you
know. And and what happens is, you know, production will show up
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and sometimes there's all this energy aroundit, and people will push themselves a
little past oh that they should bedoing. And I remind everybody on set
that, like it's not important.What's important is that you know, we
do this thing, we do asgood of a job as we can.
And then you know, let's allgo home health because you know, the
work you do is inherently dangerous.I mean, tell us about the highs,
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the type of highs and those thatyou experienced it within all that,
you know, like one of thethings that that or the this is you
know, kind of philosophical in away for me because you know, in
my career and in my experience inthis sky having community, it's kind of
this remarkable subculture, you know,with people who are are you know,
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just extraordinary people, and and soyou have these experiences that are that are
kind of higher than normal, justjust beautiful kind of adrenaline filled refreshing moments
and things that you go and dotogether and share and it's beautiful. And
then you also have experiences where somebody, you know, when you're close to
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just everything's going fine and then somethinggoes wrong and they're no longer alive,
right, and and so you experiencethese these highs and lows, and in
the big picture, I kind ofthink that maybe it gives you a little
bit more of a broad understanding ofof what life is. Right. You
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get, you get the good,and the bad kind of keeps you ground
a little bit, I imagine too. Right at times it does. I
mean it's retainly, it's it's humbling, you know, if you don't respect
it. What's the scariest thing youever appened in the air? Well,
you know, I think that thethe the helicopter crash kind of Yeah,
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at this point, we were flyingalong filming this vehicle for Ripley's and the
pilot he wasn't looking you know,he wasn't looking at he was literally looking
back at the camera that the cameraoperator. You know, at the shot
we were flying low and I sawthe wire and you know, it was
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just while he was flying towards thewire. He was flying incredibly, you
know, wrong, negligently, youknow, but at the moment he saw
the wire, rather than panicking andtrying to pull up, he literally pushed
the collective down underneath the wire andso the cabin and us didn't get hit.
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But yeah, I went through therotors above us and then tore the
helicopter apart. So he made theright move, but you know, still,
it was just it was so violentand it was just so it was
one of those It was one ofthose things where you just you know,
you open your eyes and you youdon't really think you're in the same life.
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You kind of think I didn't makeit. I just lived, yeah,
right, right, right, right, yeah, I think you know,
accidents like that are kind of likeI suppose you know, you could
pe PTSD from stuff like that,am I Right, yeah, yeah,
And after that accident, I startedto do breathing exercises and just really try
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to dial myself in. When whenI was in the airplane crash years earlier,
like a decade earlier, I wassitting in the co pilots seat.
We at onboard oxygen twenty two peopleon this plane Boston engine on takeoff flew
into trees and my view in thecockpit was it was ominous. You know,
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these trees are just coming toward usand the pilot. You know,
luckily for us, he was ahe was a test pilot, and he
was just really good at handling situationsthat that are dire, and he managed
to put the nose of the aircraftright between two eucalyptus trees and just tear
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the wings. Oh for Benda Mac, you know right right right? I
uh for years, you know Iwould white knuckle the seat on every takeoff.
Yeah, I can imagine you would. Well, Okay, hey,
listen, let's raise the altitude.Let's climb a little bit real quick before
we go look at some photos.What's the funnest job that you had,
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What's the funnest show, commercial,anything, What's the funnest one you've done?
Man, I'll tell you what wedid one for I'm working on a
on with some producers on the documentaryabout my work, and they asked what
I wanted to do. And we'vebeen able to make cars flywheels to earth
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really nice. But I but theyalways tend to rock because aerodynamics the wind
has to escape, so the carsrock, right, So what we wanted
to do was figure out how tomake a car fly perfectly stable. And
these producers, you know, askingme, well, what's your dream project?
That that was my dream project.And it was a challenge. And
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for a little while there we thoughtwe're not going to be able to make
this happen. We're not going tobe able to pull this off. But
but ultimately we were, and uh, and it was. It was beautiful.
And now we're beginning to think abouthow to literally build other control surfaces
into a car so it could befalling through the sky but literally driving around.
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Well, that's weird. That's funny, but it's I mean, it's
just that would be so weird.Yeah, I mean it was beautiful and
that that's the kind of thing thatI really love doing. You know,
if we stay up all night andwe're wrenching away on something, for me,
that's that's paradise. That's so cool. You're you're you're a sky engineer.
Man. I love it. Ilove it. You know, because
I'm thinking you have to put somesort of a foil underneath that car so
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that the wind goes both ways,you know, or all four ways or
whatever that is that right? DidI get that? I mean you did?
So you you you round the bottomof the car a little bit,
yeah, right, and then andthen you build some little fairings to direct
airflow so you control it then okay, yeah, yeah, on the front
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and black and back so that theair rolls off and then is hits another
control surface. And the other ideais, you know, you have to
get it out of the plane atthe right speed so that because a car
is very heavy and if it beginsto tumble, it's going to keep tumbling,
right, Yeah, But if youget it out at the right speed
and it catches the air at theright speed and then you get these control
(32:17):
surfaces sorted out, that's so cool. There's a lot of math there,
Joe. There's a lot of maththere is, you know, and it's
it's really exciting when something like thiscomes together and I'm I'm in free fall
next to it filming it. Youknow, those are kind of those are
(32:38):
the moments that I think of aslike those those right spots that'd be very
exciting. Yeah. Absolutely, Well, we have got and typically I do
about ten photos here for a show, but I've done a few more than
that because I couldn't. I justcouldn't, Joe, I couldn't limit it
to ten. So we've got afew extra minutes right now as we speak.
(32:59):
So I say that we'll run behindtime. But let's take a look
at those photos. Let's have oneput those up there and tell you tell
us a little bit about each oneof these, because I'm sure, yeah,
go for it. Here we go. So if you look around,
we're in Arizona, right So Arizona'swhere we're able to do things like this.
(33:20):
We right here were this was aworld record. Basically, what we
did was we flew two planes sideby side, and then one of the
planes, the one that you seein this photograph, goes into a dive
and gets its you know, airspeedunder control, and the pilot, you
(33:42):
know, just just an extraordinarily goodpilot, sorts everything out so the plane
is going the right speed. Andthen we literally had three skydivers fly up
to and climb inside the plane andthen they were able to land landing their
parachutes. My god, there's whatare you five? Are you there?
(34:05):
Two? Three, five, five, five of us? So there's the
three guys closest to the plane.Those are those are the ones who are
getting ready to enter into the plane. Yeah, and if you think about
it, right, so we hadto build a Lexan interior to keep them
from falling into the pilot, rightbecause is in the front of the plane.
(34:27):
So we build this sort of Lexaninterior box. And these three jumpers
got in, and then the othertwo jumpers. I'm the one with the
yellow and black jumpsuit and a camerain my head, and then another camera
flyer is following along with me.Wow, it's crazy. I love that.
(34:49):
What are we good here? Oh, red Ball? There we go.
Yeah. So so same concept,only red Bull took it up twenty
notches. Basically, they designed anairplane with you know, you can see
the surface area that that's sort ofan air dam on the front of it.
I'm not sure what they call it, but the aircraft is built to
(35:17):
literally, these airplanes are built tofly themselves, so that a pilot two
of these planes diving together, thepilot could get out of one of them
and fly over to the other andget in. Meanwhile, the other pilot
did the same thing. So theyare exchanging airplanes in free fall. What
(35:38):
Wow, yeah, incredible stunt,you know, just yeah, I mean
the guy, the guys from RedBull are they're they're an impressive bunch and
they're doing incredible things. A littlebit crazy but cool, right yeah,
I mean just this kind of thing. I could film this all day,
you know, I love it.It's beautiful. Well, okay, this
(36:02):
is the one to I said,wait, I had is this really?
Are they really doing this? Andyou really are aren't you? Yeah?
Yeah? Yeah. In fact,this is one of our early cars and
we got it to come out ofthe airplane at the right speed. You
can see the guy behind them kindof flipping over on his back. He
pushed it out and then got flippedover, you know, so he was
(36:25):
coming out. But of course everybody'swearing parachutes, right, but we have
more, We have four guys inthe car. The bottom surface area of
the cars rounded off. It actuallyflew really nice, but of course it
rocked back and forth until it finallyflipped. But this is one of our
early cars, and man it wasa beauty. Yeah, that's interesting.
(36:47):
And of course you don't see thebottom here, but that that round that
maybe dome or or sort of afoil, sort of thing that that works.
That's cool more or less. Youknow, we we sort of thought
of like what does a boat do, right, it's sort of the bottom
surface areas built to cut through waterand air, you know, at terminal
(37:08):
velocity, it's just the same thing. It's fluid dynamics, right, Yeah,
this is the laptop I thought thiswas cool. Yeah, you know,
this is the laptop that's trying tosave its own life. This was
you know, how can we howcan we bring a laptop up and play
(37:29):
around with it in free fall?And there's a picture on the screen.
This is not just like you know, yeah, we just grab a laptop.
It's actually looked like it's functioning upthere, right, yes you are,
but I have to admit that thatis a print out of a screen.
Okay, okay, okay, butit's still on, it's still operational,
(37:51):
it's still functioning. Yeah, exactly. That's so cool though. Yeah.
Yeah, is that strapped to hisarm? There's raised so if you
look close at the photo, he'sgot like over his left hand, he's
got a little strap that you canbarely see. Yeah, so that's how
he's holding onto it. Okay,Yeah, and then when it's time to
(38:12):
pull his parachute. He just tucksthe whole thing into his chest and deploys
his paras That's cool. I wonderedabout that. Sorry one go ahead,
Sorry, oh, there we go. Yeah. So Chevy, when they
early on, when they were promotingthere, the Chevy Sonic, they wanted
to show it as a car thatgoes on different adventures with no variety of
(38:37):
people in the sky. Having wasone of those adventures. Yeah, and
so out we went with the ChevySonic. And it's it's not a big
car, but we couldn't, youknow, we couldn't push it out of
the small planes we normally use.So that this airplane is it's called the
C one thirty and it's it's big, you know. And we drove that
(39:00):
thing out of the back of itand filmed it in free fall and it
was beautiful. I was just goingto ask you, see, did you
dry you drove the car out ofthe plane? Well, we pushed it.
You pushed it. Okay, there'sno way in the car though,
right, Nope, not this okay. I wondered if you ever tried that,
you know, drive the car onthe plane and stay in the driver's
seat until you hit the ground.Yeah, we've done it with things like
(39:24):
golf carts and things like that,but we haven't driven a working car out
of an airplane. But it's somethingwe might explore, you know, because
we're learning more and more about howto make cars fly. So who knows
that's true? Yeah, that's cool. Now, okay, how did this
(39:45):
work out? What is this?What are we looking at? Chevy was
promoting this model of suv is calledit chet No Jeep Commander, Jeep Commander,
and they basically dropped it from aheavy lift helicopter on you know,
(40:08):
under a cluster of big cargo parachutesthat are are not shown in this picture
obviously, and this truck. Theythey did a live event where they dropped
this vehicle. It landed, andthen the skydivers that jumped out with it
(40:32):
and around it, unstrapped it,got into it, and then drove it
up onto a stage for the unveilingof this new model. So it's just
you know, really really a coolproject. Yeah, wow, what are
we looking at? So we've gotthis was for a show called McGuire.
(41:00):
Oh okay, okay, And inthe show, good guy jumps out of
a plane and and the bad guysshoot his parachute down, and so we
set this parachute up. Ah,it was soaking in fuel on the way
up. The jumper comes out andtorch is it? How is it?
(41:22):
Yeah? My gosh, yeah,that's just that's wow. Yeah. There
and there are different ways to tortureparachute. You know, you can shoot
a flower gun up into it.There there are also little switches that will
you know, ignite okay, youknow technic Yeah, yeah, wow that
looks awesome, though, Now isthis really what we're looking at? Is
(41:45):
this real? Did that goose inthat that skyboarder? You know? Okay?
You know that the the Pepsi commerceThere was a commercial called Pepsi Goose.
Oh I don't remember that, okay, way back in the day.
It was actually voted in ninety eight. I believe it was voted the number
one Super Bowl ad that year andit's one of the top I don't know
(42:07):
ten or fifteen of all time.But anyway, no, I mean the
goose is is not really Okay,that's that's cool. Yeah, there we
go. There you go, anotheranother vehicle falling wheels to earth. But
(42:28):
I don't see a shoot. Butthere is a shoot, right, Well,
there's no shoot. We most ofthe time, okay, if skydevers
are going to be in a vehicle, it's much safer to just let the
vehicle crash to the ground than itis to set up a parachute. So
this vehicle had no parachute, butthe story has you know, the guys
(42:50):
jump out and the parachute opens.So we did a separate keep like this
and opened a parachute, and andand that's how we told the story.
But yeah, the beauty of thisis, you know, we figured out
how to how to make the bottomsurface area of this jeep. You could
barely see it on the back.You see a little bit of a bent
(43:12):
firing on the back of it.Yeah, and then underneath it we built
a bunch of stuff, you know, and it it flew really well,
I mean, it rocked, butit was nice. It's barely noticeable,
but I can't see a little bitof But that's cool though. You made
it to Okay, now there's anothercar and yet another car. Yes,
yeah, this is this is astation wagon for a Canadian show. I
(43:38):
forget the name of the show.I'm riding out on the hood. So
oh wow, you could you couldyou could see four riders inside the car
and then me on the hood.And this is a pretty good example of
a car that did not come outof the back of the plane fast enough.
So by the time it came out, we were already beginning to flip
(44:00):
over. And the car, youknow, just it came out and just
tumbled. And okay, we wereokay with that. You know, the
folks from the show just wanted tocrash their mascot car, and so that's
what we did. And you andwhat's holding you onto that car, nothing
other than just you gripping on justme gripping on it. And then and
(44:22):
then really a couple seconds later whenit started to flip, by just let
go. Okay, okay, andboy, you know what you let go
in that car keeps tumbling, youcould be uh yeah, that could be
a little dangerous, right, yeah, I mean there're you know, these
cars weigh you know, two orthree thousand pounds, so if you have
(44:43):
a collision with it, you knowit's gonna win, just just like you
know, a car on the groundor anything else. So yeah, we
have to be we have to bemindful. And they move around a lot.
I mean, the air pushes carsall over the place. You'd be
surprised, I think would just fallstraight down, But they push all over
the place, and you have towork pretty hard to stay with them and
(45:07):
to stay out of their way.Okay, this this was a beauty.
I mean this this okay. Sowhat you're looking at here is a frame.
The black frame on the bottom isbuilt entirely out of steel I beams
and it weighs about three thousand pounds. We shoved this thing out of a
(45:34):
C one thirty. The entire livingroom is bolted to the top of this
frame. And if you look atthe you know they're a little there are
fairings built onto it on the frontand back. If you look, oh,
okay, you know behind the jumperyou can see there's it looks like
(45:57):
a shelf, and then underneath thatyou see the firing where were actually directing
some of the airflow. But thesame things behind the TV too, I'm
seeing a little bits that right sorry, behind the TV the same way,
right yeah, yeah, same samething, same thing. And man,
I mean this was this was abeautiful project and it was for Nvidia and
(46:19):
they were promoting a whole you knowsystem and the theme was rule of the
living Room and that's what this guywas doing. I will tell you a
story though. You see the straparound his waist, yeah we know,
white one. Yeah yeah, yeah. He'd let go of the strap and
it stayed tangled on his lap andwouldn't let him get up. He had
(46:42):
to reach down and this is onlyabout maybe fifteen seconds above ground. Wow.
And he literally had to look downand untwist it and jump out.
And I was like, there yougo. That's absolutely sir. You earned
your money on that one. Yeah. Yeah, we're we're down and we're
down. Oh we we have togo fast now, okay, So well
(47:07):
yeah, yeah, no worries.So you what you're looking at is Shamanee,
France. Oh yeah, at thebase of the uh some of the
French Alps. You know, youtalk about beautiful locations, and I'm filming
a skysurfer next to the mountains andit was extraordinary. That's so cool.
(47:27):
That's my partner and me. Afterwe won the first World Championship in ninety
four, we went up and andand did some poses for photographer for Parachutist
magazine. So cool. Yeah,you know that was me flying camera and
then of course Rob skysurfing. Okay, this is another picture of the Chevy
(47:51):
Sonic. It goes. You cansee it really nice. Yeah, that's
so cool. The first time Isaw I've never seen a cargo through there.
If didn't that, I probably livinga shoe box. But that's the
first time. Your photos are thefirst time I've ever seen anything like some
I'm like, wow. And it'snot just one. You know, you've
done a number of these, likegeez, yeah, yeah, yeah,
(48:12):
we've done a bunch, but itis relatively new and not a lot of
people have seen it. You know. I hope we can do a bunch
more and it becomes something that peopleknow more about. Well, I'll tell
you what. That's some fascinating stuff. And I and these pictures are amazing.
That's what. I couldn't limit itto ten. And I know I'm
overdue here in my time, butJoe, thank you. I love those
(48:32):
pictures. Fantastic. Hey, realquickly, where can people find you online?
Let's let them know that before youwell, so you can go.
You could just go to Joe Jenningsdot com. That's one of my websites.
And then my other side is Skydivedot TV. So either way,
you're gonna find me. Okay,okay, sounds good. That's perfect.
(48:55):
Well, Joe, thank you somuch. Listen. I want to thank
you for being a guest on theshow here tonight. It was a pleasure
having you with us really was atreat. I enjoyed it. Yeah,
thanks for having me on. Iappreciate it, I really appreciate. I
hope we get to do it againsomeday. That sounds like a great plan.
Man, I'm in well, listen. We also want to thank our
audience for tuning into tonight's show.Be sure to tune in for next week's
(49:17):
episode. She learned to ski beforeshe could walk with our guest Isabelle Venturini.
This is cw GET saying thanks fortuning in to Outdoors People. See
you next week.
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comments should be directed to those showhosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY
(00:21):
Radio. Welcome to outdoors people withme. Cw Getz and her Maya mar
Zaki. Good evening. It's Wednesday, March twentieth, twenty twenty four.
(00:53):
Hey, we've got a forty twodegree five that is forty two degree fahrenheit
five degrees celsius temperature here in northcentral Illinois, Chicago land kind of suburbs
like little Chili. You know,we had some really nice like seventies,
and I think we got close toeighty a couple of times here, and
now we're down to forty two.It feels chilly. I have to tell
(01:15):
you. It feels it's always windyhere now, so springtime win one.
Maya is on safari this week somewherein Brazil, she told me, But
I forgot, so I apologize.But hoi ya, Maya. If you
if you're able to watch out thereright now, I doubt that you are,
but just in case one, you'regonna be my sidekick tonight. Here.
(01:38):
What temperature you have down there ina lovely state of Florida. Well,
so right now we are at seventysix, but two days ago we
had pretty much the coldest day ofthe year. Oh yeah, we went
down to a whole sixty nine degrees. Can you believe that? Well,
you know, I think that,Yeah, you're probably in the winter code.
With sixty nine degrees in Florida.You're like those in Brazil right now
(02:01):
dips below eighty. They're like,I'm cold, man. I get it.
I totally get it. It's onlythe second day of spring, so
we can't really be we can't reallybe ditching too much. It's still pretty
nice. I know April, whenI was operating a snowplow, I remember
beating out there in April and blizzardand it happens, you know, So
(02:22):
let's just hope that doesn't happen thisyear anyway, Well, let's meet tonight's
guest, Saint Louis. Native professionalfree fall cinematographer and aerial stunt coordinator Joe
Jennings holds numerous first place titles asa competitive camera flyer, including World Skysurfing
Championships, Boards Over Switzerland and ESPNand more. Joe's work has appeared in
(02:46):
feature films like Charlie's Angels, AirForce, One Point Break, Jackass Forever,
and others. His work can behas also be seen in television shows
like MTV Sports, Dateline, NBCBaywatch, Blossom mcgiver in National Geographic Adventure,
to name a few, and thelist of commercials which Joe's work has
(03:07):
been featured in is massive. Thelist includes Pepsi, Lexis, Ford,
Shell, Chevy, Pontiac, Samsung, Verizon, Doctor Pepper, Budweiser,
Hewlett Packard, Firestone, Blue Cross, Blue Shield, Honda, Wrigley's Gum,
Sony, Visa, Domino's, BudLight, Apple, and on and
on. They have waited a longtime for this moment. The defending world
(03:46):
champions, the favorites in our competition, Rob Harris and Joe Jennings of the
United States to get their competition underway. You're going to see a big difference
here, not only in the skysurfing, but in the camera flying as well.
Joe Jennings does this for a living, and he's absolutely dead on on
holding the angles. And you mayfind yourself living in a shut gun shot,
(04:31):
and you may find yourself you donot know the part of the hook.
And you may find yourself behind thewheel of a large automobile. You
may find yourself with a beautiful help, with a beautiful wife, and you
may ask yourself, well, howdid I get here? It's a good
(05:14):
job. And with that, Welcometo the show, Joe, Hello,
good to be here. Hey whatI'll tell you what? What an amazing
video? And I'm gonna ask youthis what I should know this? Where
are you coming to us live fromthis evening? I'm in Los Angeles now,
Okay, So I didn't know that. I didn't know that. That
(05:35):
would not have been my first guest. This is this is where I live,
you know. I it's kind ofthe last place I expected to live,
just just a big city, youknow, just the whole environment was
not you know. I lived upin Santa Cruz and I love that kind
of nature. But this is wherethe industry is and you know, yeah,
(05:57):
absolutely well, and you know what, here's the thing, all the
actions in California, So it wouldbe natural for you to be there and
that's where everything was happening. AndI would assume anyway, right right,
right right. You know, wewere talking about your co host being over
in Brazil. Yeah, and itbrought to mind a project that I did
there not too long ago. Itwas a couple of years ago where we
(06:23):
went to the middle of the Amazonjungle. Took about twenty seven hours of
flying in twenty four hours on aboat. We ended up in the middle
of the jungle and we were filminga project and I got my first about
of COVID and just knocked me entirelyon my back and I basically had to
(06:46):
just sleep through everything until it wastime to jump, and then I would
just rouse myself up, go filmand go back to bed. And Jesus
a wild project. You know.I was just thinking watching it, when
you have a bad day, Iwonder what that looks like, because that's
a pretty serious stuff. I mean, you're jumping out of airplanes, you're
(07:08):
filming things, and I can imaginewhen something goes wrong. It's not just
a little thing. It's usually abig thing. Am I right? Or
no? Yeah? You know,I mean we joke around often when when
we put together a stunt. Oneof the things we say is, you
know, well what can possibly gowrong? And the fact is, you
know, a lot can go wrong. Yeah, a bad day might be
(07:30):
as simple as a you know,a parachute opening, a very fast parachute
opening when you have a lot ofweight on your head with the cameras and
everything, that can hurt. Yeah. It could also be you know,
I've I've been in you know,I was in an airplane that crashed into
(07:51):
trees. We lost an engine ontakeoff and ended up in trees and that
was terrifying. So that wasn't agood day. And then another time I
was on a project. We wereactually filming for a show called Ripley's Believe
It or Not. And I rememberthat show. Yeah, the helicopter flew
(08:13):
straight into wires. Oh wow.And it just tore the helicopter entirely apart
from front to back. And wewalked we walked away from it. You
are very very fortunate that. Yeah, my gosh, you got some stories
I'm sure you've gotten I'm sure that'sjust a tip of the iceberg. Man.
Let me ask you, Joe,what came first, the chicken or
(08:35):
the egg? Did you were youa skydiver first? Or were you a
cinematographer first? And then at whatpoint did you begin to get combined the
two. You know, I thinkcamera work in general, and cinematography has
that's always been in my life.My father was a great cameraman. He
(09:01):
filmed in nature. He was astill photographer, but you know, I
used to hike out in the woodswith them, and he would go find
things and and photographed them and hadhis photographs featured in magazines and on the
Missouri Botanical Gardens calendars. That wasall of his photos. And that's I
(09:22):
believe it's the largest botanical garden inthe US. Beautiful place anyway. You
know, when I first picked upa camera, and I think it was
in high school and in the lateseventies, I picked one up and it
just it just it was. Itwas an old video camera and I remember,
(09:43):
you know, holding it and therewas a big deck attached to it,
and you know, and I wasplaying around with it, and something
about it just felt like, man, I really liked this, you know,
this cool piece of yeah, coolpiece of fun, right there,
man. Tools. Yeah, Andthen you know, when I got in
the skydiving, you know already youknow, I was, you know,
(10:05):
pretty much an avid cameraman, andwhen I was skydaving, you know,
I really wanted to share the experience. And before I even graduated off student
status, I used to take alittle cassette tape recorder and tape it to
my wrist and just scream into itso that I could like relive, Oh
(10:28):
wow, it's free fall. Soit's almost a natural progression that when when
I went further into skydiving and whenI was qualified to carry cameras, I
carried them as soon as I could. Well, so, how has your
rig changed over the years? Imean, you know, in one of
those which I would you know,I can easily imagine this, but a
(10:50):
nice big red camera. You know, I'm sure you didn't start with that,
but when you started, you werein what kind of gear? And
how is that? How's that change? Yeah? So when I started flying
camera, I was lucky enough thatthe eight millimeter cameras were beginning to become
(11:11):
a thing, and they were smallerthan the VHS cameras that people were carrying,
you know, those those were bigmillimeter kind of shrunk it up.
They were still a little bit big, but it was manageable. So that
was my first camera. And thenyou know, I would jump with video
and still photographs to film people doingtheir first jumps as tandems and whatnot,
(11:37):
and so that was, you know, that was my early rig. And
then as I got more into shootingfilm, I bumped up to sixteen millimeter,
a sixteen millimeter camera, which isnot too much bigger, but heavier,
you know, it was more solidpiece of gear, and I got
(12:00):
used to that. And then prettysoon as opportunities began to open up,
I needed to start jumping with thirtyfive millimeter, which was much bigger,
much heavier. And thirty five millimeterfilm though, was the standard for filming
commercials and TV and motion pictures andthings like that. So it was a
(12:24):
big camera, big helmet with videoassist and you know, just a very
heavy, complicated system. Serious stuff. Yeah, I mean it was,
you know, and I considered myselfa film purist, Like I expected I'd
be jumping film cameras for my entirecareer. But then, of course,
(12:46):
you know, the digital cinema justbecame so good and it was so much
more affordable and reliable, and sothe size of incomplexity in my helmet is
actually come out a little bit sincereally really so things are actually a lot
smaller than what they really were atone time. And yeah, no,
(13:07):
it's amazing. I mean, youknow, go Pros used to tick me
off, you know, because they'reso good if you were, like,
you've ever used a go pros inanything you've done? Have you done?
I mean, I love them.They're I mean, it's an amazing camera.
I use them for I use themfor all kinds of things. I
mean, they don't work for youknow, really high end stuff. You
(13:31):
need the raw digital cinema files sothat the colors can all be mixed to
kind of matching whatever you're making.But go pros are fully smokes. Yeah,
that's so cool. Right now,let me ask you a little shift
gears here a little bit. Whereare some of the places that your work
has taken you? And uh,and which of those places would be would
you call your favorite? So mycareer has taken me to pretty much every
(14:01):
continent on the planet. Everywhere,a lot of traveling, you know,
wonderful and some really really beautiful places. I haven't been though, to the
Arctic Circle, which I believe isa continent, so I haven't been there.
But but yeah, you like thecold stuff or do you like the
(14:24):
warm stuff? Which would be yourfavorite? I mean, would you say
I really like the cold stuff?Because man, the scenery is just killer.
What do you like the nice tropicalyou know sort of thing, you
know, when we're in the air. I like the tropical of course,
it's gorgeous. It's beautiful. Youknow, the problem is when you're on
(14:45):
the ground, you're just sweltering.But you get the best clouds in the
world when you're you know, yougo to a place like like Florida and
the summer, for example, youknow, the ground is entirely wet,
and in the afternoon, almost invariably, you get these cumulus clouds to just
build all the way up to fifteentwenty thousand feet or higher. You can
(15:09):
go up and fly wingsuits and justkind of zip around them, you know.
And so yeah, I mean thesky there is extraordinary and it's beautiful.
But really, my my favorite placeof all places, believe it or
not? Is is Arizona? Ohwow? Really? Yeah? Yeah,
what he was saying, you know, yeah, you know why. I
(15:31):
mean, it's it's brown, it'shot, it's you know. But in
Arizona we're able to there are thereare drop test areas where you can push
objects out of an airplane and legally, you know, crash it into the
ground. Because like saw some ofthat that's like wow, what the hell?
(15:56):
Yeah, and so you know they'rethey're that's the kind of thing that
to this day and a big partof why I'm still in this racket is
you know, because I just Ireally love taking different objects like a car
for example, Right, how canwe make this thing fall wheels to earth?
How fast does it need to leavethe airplane? And how do we
(16:18):
set up the balance and the weightand the shape of the bottom of the
car to get it to literally staywheels to earth with people riding and that
kind of thing. I mean,that's one out of many objects. But
in order to test those things,even if it's even if it's a laptop,
if you're going to let it crashinto the ground at one hundred and
fifty miles an hour, you needto do that in the middle of nowhere.
(16:40):
There's a lot of math going onthere. Job. I mean,
my god, oh wow, youknow. And I don't consider myself,
you know, I don't consider myselfvery technical. A lot of it is
kind of intuitive, but I relyheavily on people who you know, they're
wired for that. They they cancrunch the numbers, and they helped me
(17:02):
out a lot. Tell us aboutyour competitive competition skydiating that is, and
and maybe the effect it's had onyour career. I think I think competition
skydiving is is a big part ofwhy I'm still here, you know,
of why I'm still skydiving overall.I was, I was, I was
(17:29):
burnt out on filming just skydiving,and it just became too easy. You
could just pull up to a targetand film it right. And then I
met, uh the guy who becamemy partner and skysurf World champion, a
guy named Rob Harris, and heinvited me to film him doing freestyle.
And I had heard that freestyle wasvery difficult because it zips all over the
(17:53):
sky, you know, wow,and as a camera flyer you have to
chase after it. And my firstout chasing after him doing freestyle. You
know, I really felt like ahuman jet, Like I was flying my
body harder than I had ever flownit before. And so, you know,
I became addicted to that. Andthen as we trained and got better
(18:17):
and better at skysurfing and me asa camera flyer being able to fly more
dynamically and everything, and then winningsome championships, including you know, the
X Games in ninety five, itjust began to open doors into Hollywood.
So it's almost like one thing ledto another and the opportunities kind of came
(18:41):
because we were prepared to take himon. Yeah, Oh that's so cool.
What's the most unusual project you've beeninvolved with? Man? You know,
I thought about I thought about that. I have been in a lot
of them. To say, there'sa lot you've ever seen some unusual things
(19:02):
like holy smokes. But yeah,I mean there's there's some things we just
you know, I mean something,all kinds of requests come across the table,
and we can't do all of them. Sure, somebody wanted me to
run a horse out of the backof an airplane, you know, a
horse. Yeah, and the ownerof the parachute center where you know,
(19:23):
I was skydiving at the time,and where we were doing those kinds of
things. You know, they areyou know, they love horses, they
love animals, and I just Ijust knew, Okay, well, this
is never gonna happen. How isthat going to work? I mean,
yeah, when he lands, andhow is the horse gonna never mind?
Yeah, just you know, therewere just so many, so many variables.
(19:45):
And a horse can't consent, youknow, Okay, yeah, I
want to a horse can't consent.And it's like, without the horse's consent,
we're not going to drive it outof an airport. Yeah, Eddie
would be down there in no time, wouldn't they. Yeah? Yeah,
But I mean I've done I've donea lot of unusual stuff. You know.
(20:06):
On one commercial, we had aa laptop that was basically set up
to save its own, you know, to save itself, and the idea
was to show that it could bootup and trigger. At the time,
there was a sliding DVD door thatwould come in and out, you know,
and it could boot up and triggerthe door and open its own little
(20:30):
small parachute before it hit the ground. And that was a pretty cool you
know, it's a pretty cool project. We had to figure out how to
make a laptop fall and then howto save itself. That's bizarre. Hey,
So okay, then and now here'sa then and now question for you.
Has age at any point had anyeffect on your specific type of work?
(20:56):
You know, I can say thislike a couple of things, like
having kids. You know, beforeI had kids, the risk was worth
it, Like we would do thingson the cutting edge and there were a
lot of unanswered questions. We woulddo new things that nobody else had done,
(21:18):
and the risk, you know,was worth it, you know.
And then after having kids, Ifelt myself throttling back a bit. Like
changes there when you have kids,done it right, it does big time.
You know. It's something that wasfun before becomes like unpleasant, you
know what I mean. Yeah,And so you know, then it became
(21:42):
a matter of learning how to staywithin the parameters of my abilities and my
understanding of the equipment and whatnot.So it was kind of like pulling back
a little bit. And now asI'm getting older, I expected, you
know, it's a very athletic kindof a pursuit, you know, And
(22:03):
and your body does take a beating. Yeah, I'm sure you don't expect
to last very long, you know. Yeah, I kind of wondered that,
Like I mean, I mean,I asked you, how old are
you right now? I'm sixty one, sixty one, okay, so I'm
going to be sixty here next month. And look at all that hair you
have. Oh my god, thatstuff falling out. This is a this
(22:26):
is what do you call little planting? You know they put that on before
the shop. Oh nice, welldone, good crop. You know,
honestly, even from five years agoor ten years ago, I feel the
difference. I mean, I noticethe difference. And I'm not jumping out
of airplanes like you are. Yeah, and I can only imagine that.
Man, your your body's probably takinga pretty good beat in over the years.
(22:48):
How long do you continue to youdon't want to continue this, keep
this up? So I expected,you know, by now, I thought
for sure that I would have retired. You know, as much as I
love doing it, I thought,you know, I'll be done, you
know, by the time I'm inmy fifties or sixty. But I think
(23:11):
one of the things that has reallyhelped me stay aligned and healthy and strong
is swimming. I get in thepool and zero gravity workout and you know,
I'll swim a mile three or fourtimes a week. Nice. Nice,
yeah, yeah, And I thinkthat that's kind of been the key
(23:33):
to my longevity because here I am, I feel good, I still feel
good, I'm strong, My reflexesare are still there. I'm not gonna
I'm not going to say that theyare you know what they were when I
was thirty. Sure, but Iknow what I'm doing enough to be able
to go up and safely, youknow, and safely do my job and
(23:59):
mature. He has something to dowith that too. That's probably an aspect
of that, you know what,Like you said, you know your limits
and you're not going to go doingsomething you know that you shouldn't be doing,
maybe especially at six y one,right pretty much, I mean you
do begin to think of things differently, you know. And I know that
when whenever we have a project,you know, I'll I'll bring in the
(24:22):
the best guide evers because I knowthat their flying abilities are going to help
me my my work will look betterbecause of the way that they're able to
to fly, you know. ButI'm also really careful to tell everybody that
you know most of what we're doing, we're you know, we're not trying
(24:45):
to negotiate the end of the war. We're not trying to you know,
do a policy or anything you know, really important. We're selling you know,
carbonated sugar water or whatever we're selling. Like it's not important, you
know. And and what happens is, you know, production will show up
(25:06):
and sometimes there's all this energy aroundit, and people will push themselves a
little past oh that they should bedoing. And I remind everybody on set
that, like it's not important.What's important is that you know, we
do this thing, we do asgood of a job as we can.
And then you know, let's allgo home health because you know, the
work you do is inherently dangerous.I mean, tell us about the highs,
(25:30):
the type of highs and those thatyou experienced it within all that,
you know, like one of thethings that that or the this is you
know, kind of philosophical in away for me because you know, in
my career and in my experience inthis sky having community, it's kind of
this remarkable subculture, you know,with people who are are you know,
(25:57):
just extraordinary people, and and soyou have these experiences that are that are
kind of higher than normal, justjust beautiful kind of adrenaline filled refreshing moments
and things that you go and dotogether and share and it's beautiful. And
then you also have experiences where somebody, you know, when you're close to
(26:23):
just everything's going fine and then somethinggoes wrong and they're no longer alive,
right, and and so you experiencethese these highs and lows, and in
the big picture, I kind ofthink that maybe it gives you a little
bit more of a broad understanding ofof what life is. Right. You
(26:45):
get, you get the good,and the bad kind of keeps you ground
a little bit, I imagine too. Right at times it does. I
mean it's retainly, it's it's humbling, you know, if you don't respect
it. What's the scariest thing youever appened in the air? Well,
you know, I think that thethe the helicopter crash kind of Yeah,
(27:10):
at this point, we were flyingalong filming this vehicle for Ripley's and the
pilot he wasn't looking you know,he wasn't looking at he was literally looking
back at the camera that the cameraoperator. You know, at the shot
we were flying low and I sawthe wire and you know, it was
(27:34):
just while he was flying towards thewire. He was flying incredibly, you
know, wrong, negligently, youknow, but at the moment he saw
the wire, rather than panicking andtrying to pull up, he literally pushed
the collective down underneath the wire andso the cabin and us didn't get hit.
(28:00):
But yeah, I went through therotors above us and then tore the
helicopter apart. So he made theright move, but you know, still,
it was just it was so violentand it was just so it was
one of those It was one ofthose things where you just you know,
you open your eyes and you youdon't really think you're in the same life.
(28:23):
You kind of think I didn't makeit. I just lived, yeah,
right, right, right, right, yeah, I think you know,
accidents like that are kind of likeI suppose you know, you could
pe PTSD from stuff like that,am I Right, yeah, yeah,
And after that accident, I startedto do breathing exercises and just really try
(28:48):
to dial myself in. When whenI was in the airplane crash years earlier,
like a decade earlier, I wassitting in the co pilots seat.
We at onboard oxygen twenty two peopleon this plane Boston engine on takeoff flew
into trees and my view in thecockpit was it was ominous. You know,
(29:11):
these trees are just coming toward usand the pilot. You know,
luckily for us, he was ahe was a test pilot, and he
was just really good at handling situationsthat that are dire, and he managed
to put the nose of the aircraftright between two eucalyptus trees and just tear
(29:33):
the wings. Oh for Benda Mac, you know right right right? I
uh for years, you know Iwould white knuckle the seat on every takeoff.
Yeah, I can imagine you would. Well, Okay, hey,
listen, let's raise the altitude.Let's climb a little bit real quick before
we go look at some photos.What's the funnest job that you had,
(29:57):
What's the funnest show, commercial,anything, What's the funnest one you've done?
Man, I'll tell you what wedid one for I'm working on a
on with some producers on the documentaryabout my work, and they asked what
I wanted to do. And we'vebeen able to make cars flywheels to earth
(30:21):
really nice. But I but theyalways tend to rock because aerodynamics the wind
has to escape, so the carsrock, right, So what we wanted
to do was figure out how tomake a car fly perfectly stable. And
these producers, you know, askingme, well, what's your dream project?
That that was my dream project.And it was a challenge. And
(30:45):
for a little while there we thoughtwe're not going to be able to make
this happen. We're not going tobe able to pull this off. But
but ultimately we were, and uh, and it was. It was beautiful.
And now we're beginning to think abouthow to literally build other control surfaces
into a car so it could befalling through the sky but literally driving around.
(31:10):
Well, that's weird. That's funny, but it's I mean, it's
just that would be so weird.Yeah, I mean it was beautiful and
that that's the kind of thing thatI really love doing. You know,
if we stay up all night andwe're wrenching away on something, for me,
that's that's paradise. That's so cool. You're you're you're a sky engineer.
Man. I love it. Ilove it. You know, because
I'm thinking you have to put somesort of a foil underneath that car so
(31:33):
that the wind goes both ways,you know, or all four ways or
whatever that is that right? DidI get that? I mean you did?
So you you you round the bottomof the car a little bit,
yeah, right, and then andthen you build some little fairings to direct
airflow so you control it then okay, yeah, yeah, on the front
(31:55):
and black and back so that theair rolls off and then is hits another
control surface. And the other ideais, you know, you have to
get it out of the plane atthe right speed so that because a car
is very heavy and if it beginsto tumble, it's going to keep tumbling,
right, Yeah, But if youget it out at the right speed
and it catches the air at theright speed and then you get these control
(32:17):
surfaces sorted out, that's so cool. There's a lot of math there,
Joe. There's a lot of maththere is, you know, and it's
it's really exciting when something like thiscomes together and I'm I'm in free fall
next to it filming it. Youknow, those are kind of those are
(32:38):
the moments that I think of aslike those those right spots that'd be very
exciting. Yeah. Absolutely, Well, we have got and typically I do
about ten photos here for a show, but I've done a few more than
that because I couldn't. I justcouldn't, Joe, I couldn't limit it
to ten. So we've got afew extra minutes right now as we speak.
(32:59):
So I say that we'll run behindtime. But let's take a look
at those photos. Let's have oneput those up there and tell you tell
us a little bit about each oneof these, because I'm sure, yeah,
go for it. Here we go. So if you look around,
we're in Arizona, right So Arizona'swhere we're able to do things like this.
(33:20):
We right here were this was aworld record. Basically, what we
did was we flew two planes sideby side, and then one of the
planes, the one that you seein this photograph, goes into a dive
and gets its you know, airspeedunder control, and the pilot, you
(33:42):
know, just just an extraordinarily goodpilot, sorts everything out so the plane
is going the right speed. Andthen we literally had three skydivers fly up
to and climb inside the plane andthen they were able to land landing their
parachutes. My god, there's whatare you five? Are you there?
(34:05):
Two? Three, five, five, five of us? So there's the
three guys closest to the plane.Those are those are the ones who are
getting ready to enter into the plane. Yeah, and if you think about
it, right, so we hadto build a Lexan interior to keep them
from falling into the pilot, rightbecause is in the front of the plane.
(34:27):
So we build this sort of Lexaninterior box. And these three jumpers
got in, and then the othertwo jumpers. I'm the one with the
yellow and black jumpsuit and a camerain my head, and then another camera
flyer is following along with me.Wow, it's crazy. I love that.
(34:49):
What are we good here? Oh, red Ball? There we go.
Yeah. So so same concept,only red Bull took it up twenty
notches. Basically, they designed anairplane with you know, you can see
the surface area that that's sort ofan air dam on the front of it.
I'm not sure what they call it, but the aircraft is built to
(35:17):
literally, these airplanes are built tofly themselves, so that a pilot two
of these planes diving together, thepilot could get out of one of them
and fly over to the other andget in. Meanwhile, the other pilot
did the same thing. So theyare exchanging airplanes in free fall. What
(35:38):
Wow, yeah, incredible stunt,you know, just yeah, I mean
the guy, the guys from RedBull are they're they're an impressive bunch and
they're doing incredible things. A littlebit crazy but cool, right yeah,
I mean just this kind of thing. I could film this all day,
you know, I love it.It's beautiful. Well, okay, this
(36:02):
is the one to I said,wait, I had is this really?
Are they really doing this? Andyou really are aren't you? Yeah?
Yeah? Yeah. In fact,this is one of our early cars and
we got it to come out ofthe airplane at the right speed. You
can see the guy behind them kindof flipping over on his back. He
pushed it out and then got flippedover, you know, so he was
(36:25):
coming out. But of course everybody'swearing parachutes, right, but we have
more, We have four guys inthe car. The bottom surface area of
the cars rounded off. It actuallyflew really nice, but of course it
rocked back and forth until it finallyflipped. But this is one of our
early cars, and man it wasa beauty. Yeah, that's interesting.
(36:47):
And of course you don't see thebottom here, but that that round that
maybe dome or or sort of afoil, sort of thing that that works.
That's cool more or less. Youknow, we we sort of thought
of like what does a boat do, right, it's sort of the bottom
surface areas built to cut through waterand air, you know, at terminal
(37:08):
velocity, it's just the same thing. It's fluid dynamics, right, Yeah,
this is the laptop I thought thiswas cool. Yeah, you know,
this is the laptop that's trying tosave its own life. This was
you know, how can we howcan we bring a laptop up and play
(37:29):
around with it in free fall?And there's a picture on the screen.
This is not just like you know, yeah, we just grab a laptop.
It's actually looked like it's functioning upthere, right, yes you are,
but I have to admit that thatis a print out of a screen.
Okay, okay, okay, butit's still on, it's still operational,
(37:51):
it's still functioning. Yeah, exactly. That's so cool though. Yeah.
Yeah, is that strapped to hisarm? There's raised so if you
look close at the photo, he'sgot like over his left hand, he's
got a little strap that you canbarely see. Yeah, so that's how
he's holding onto it. Okay,Yeah, and then when it's time to
(38:12):
pull his parachute. He just tucksthe whole thing into his chest and deploys
his paras That's cool. I wonderedabout that. Sorry one go ahead,
Sorry, oh, there we go. Yeah. So Chevy, when they
early on, when they were promotingthere, the Chevy Sonic, they wanted
to show it as a car thatgoes on different adventures with no variety of
(38:37):
people in the sky. Having wasone of those adventures. Yeah, and
so out we went with the ChevySonic. And it's it's not a big
car, but we couldn't, youknow, we couldn't push it out of
the small planes we normally use.So that this airplane is it's called the
C one thirty and it's it's big, you know. And we drove that
(39:00):
thing out of the back of itand filmed it in free fall and it
was beautiful. I was just goingto ask you, see, did you
dry you drove the car out ofthe plane? Well, we pushed it.
You pushed it. Okay, there'sno way in the car though,
right, Nope, not this okay. I wondered if you ever tried that,
you know, drive the car onthe plane and stay in the driver's
seat until you hit the ground.Yeah, we've done it with things like
(39:24):
golf carts and things like that,but we haven't driven a working car out
of an airplane. But it's somethingwe might explore, you know, because
we're learning more and more about howto make cars fly. So who knows
that's true? Yeah, that's cool. Now, okay, how did this
(39:45):
work out? What is this?What are we looking at? Chevy was
promoting this model of suv is calledit chet No Jeep Commander, Jeep Commander,
and they basically dropped it from aheavy lift helicopter on you know,
(40:08):
under a cluster of big cargo parachutesthat are are not shown in this picture
obviously, and this truck. Theythey did a live event where they dropped
this vehicle. It landed, andthen the skydivers that jumped out with it
(40:32):
and around it, unstrapped it,got into it, and then drove it
up onto a stage for the unveilingof this new model. So it's just
you know, really really a coolproject. Yeah, wow, what are
we looking at? So we've gotthis was for a show called McGuire.
(41:00):
Oh okay, okay, And inthe show, good guy jumps out of
a plane and and the bad guysshoot his parachute down, and so we
set this parachute up. Ah,it was soaking in fuel on the way
up. The jumper comes out andtorch is it? How is it?
(41:22):
Yeah? My gosh, yeah,that's just that's wow. Yeah. There
and there are different ways to tortureparachute. You know, you can shoot
a flower gun up into it.There there are also little switches that will
you know, ignite okay, youknow technic Yeah, yeah, wow that
looks awesome, though, Now isthis really what we're looking at? Is
(41:45):
this real? Did that goose inthat that skyboarder? You know? Okay?
You know that the the Pepsi commerceThere was a commercial called Pepsi Goose.
Oh I don't remember that, okay, way back in the day.
It was actually voted in ninety eight. I believe it was voted the number
one Super Bowl ad that year andit's one of the top I don't know
(42:07):
ten or fifteen of all time.But anyway, no, I mean the
goose is is not really Okay,that's that's cool. Yeah, there we
go. There you go, anotheranother vehicle falling wheels to earth. But
(42:28):
I don't see a shoot. Butthere is a shoot, right, Well,
there's no shoot. We most ofthe time, okay, if skydevers
are going to be in a vehicle, it's much safer to just let the
vehicle crash to the ground than itis to set up a parachute. So
this vehicle had no parachute, butthe story has you know, the guys
(42:50):
jump out and the parachute opens.So we did a separate keep like this
and opened a parachute, and andand that's how we told the story.
But yeah, the beauty of thisis, you know, we figured out
how to how to make the bottomsurface area of this jeep. You could
barely see it on the back.You see a little bit of a bent
(43:12):
firing on the back of it.Yeah, and then underneath it we built
a bunch of stuff, you know, and it it flew really well,
I mean, it rocked, butit was nice. It's barely noticeable,
but I can't see a little bitof But that's cool though. You made
it to Okay, now there's anothercar and yet another car. Yes,
yeah, this is this is astation wagon for a Canadian show. I
(43:38):
forget the name of the show.I'm riding out on the hood. So
oh wow, you could you couldyou could see four riders inside the car
and then me on the hood.And this is a pretty good example of
a car that did not come outof the back of the plane fast enough.
So by the time it came out, we were already beginning to flip
(44:00):
over. And the car, youknow, just it came out and just
tumbled. And okay, we wereokay with that. You know, the
folks from the show just wanted tocrash their mascot car, and so that's
what we did. And you andwhat's holding you onto that car, nothing
other than just you gripping on justme gripping on it. And then and
(44:22):
then really a couple seconds later whenit started to flip, by just let
go. Okay, okay, andboy, you know what you let go
in that car keeps tumbling, youcould be uh yeah, that could be
a little dangerous, right, yeah, I mean there're you know, these
cars weigh you know, two orthree thousand pounds, so if you have
(44:43):
a collision with it, you knowit's gonna win, just just like you
know, a car on the groundor anything else. So yeah, we
have to be we have to bemindful. And they move around a lot.
I mean, the air pushes carsall over the place. You'd be
surprised, I think would just fallstraight down, But they push all over
the place, and you have towork pretty hard to stay with them and
(45:07):
to stay out of their way.Okay, this this was a beauty.
I mean this this okay. Sowhat you're looking at here is a frame.
The black frame on the bottom isbuilt entirely out of steel I beams
and it weighs about three thousand pounds. We shoved this thing out of a
(45:34):
C one thirty. The entire livingroom is bolted to the top of this
frame. And if you look atthe you know they're a little there are
fairings built onto it on the frontand back. If you look, oh,
okay, you know behind the jumperyou can see there's it looks like
(45:57):
a shelf, and then underneath thatyou see the firing where were actually directing
some of the airflow. But thesame things behind the TV too, I'm
seeing a little bits that right sorry, behind the TV the same way,
right yeah, yeah, same samething, same thing. And man,
I mean this was this was abeautiful project and it was for Nvidia and
(46:19):
they were promoting a whole you knowsystem and the theme was rule of the
living Room and that's what this guywas doing. I will tell you a
story though. You see the straparound his waist, yeah we know,
white one. Yeah yeah, yeah. He'd let go of the strap and
it stayed tangled on his lap andwouldn't let him get up. He had
(46:42):
to reach down and this is onlyabout maybe fifteen seconds above ground. Wow.
And he literally had to look downand untwist it and jump out.
And I was like, there yougo. That's absolutely sir. You earned
your money on that one. Yeah. Yeah, we're we're down and we're
down. Oh we we have togo fast now, okay, So well
(47:07):
yeah, yeah, no worries.So you what you're looking at is Shamanee,
France. Oh yeah, at thebase of the uh some of the
French Alps. You know, youtalk about beautiful locations, and I'm filming
a skysurfer next to the mountains andit was extraordinary. That's so cool.
(47:27):
That's my partner and me. Afterwe won the first World Championship in ninety
four, we went up and andand did some poses for photographer for Parachutist
magazine. So cool. Yeah,you know that was me flying camera and
then of course Rob skysurfing. Okay, this is another picture of the Chevy
(47:51):
Sonic. It goes. You cansee it really nice. Yeah, that's
so cool. The first time Isaw I've never seen a cargo through there.
If didn't that, I probably livinga shoe box. But that's the
first time. Your photos are thefirst time I've ever seen anything like some
I'm like, wow. And it'snot just one. You know, you've
done a number of these, likegeez, yeah, yeah, yeah,
(48:12):
we've done a bunch, but itis relatively new and not a lot of
people have seen it. You know. I hope we can do a bunch
more and it becomes something that peopleknow more about. Well, I'll tell
you what. That's some fascinating stuff. And I and these pictures are amazing.
That's what. I couldn't limit itto ten. And I know I'm
overdue here in my time, butJoe, thank you. I love those
(48:32):
pictures. Fantastic. Hey, realquickly, where can people find you online?
Let's let them know that before youwell, so you can go.
You could just go to Joe Jenningsdot com. That's one of my websites.
And then my other side is Skydivedot TV. So either way,
you're gonna find me. Okay,okay, sounds good. That's perfect.
(48:55):
Well, Joe, thank you somuch. Listen. I want to thank
you for being a guest on theshow here tonight. It was a pleasure
having you with us really was atreat. I enjoyed it. Yeah,
thanks for having me on. Iappreciate it, I really appreciate. I
hope we get to do it againsomeday. That sounds like a great plan.
Man, I'm in well, listen. We also want to thank our
audience for tuning into tonight's show.Be sure to tune in for next week's
(49:17):
episode. She learned to ski beforeshe could walk with our guest Isabelle Venturini.
This is cw GET saying thanks fortuning in to Outdoors People. See
you next week.
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Cardiac Cowboys
The heart was always off-limits to surgeons. Cutting into it spelled instant death for the patient. That is, until a ragtag group of doctors scattered across the Midwest and Texas decided to throw out the rule book. Working in makeshift laboratories and home garages, using medical devices made from scavenged machine parts and beer tubes, these men and women invented the field of open heart surgery. Odds are, someone you know is alive because of them. So why has history left them behind? Presented by Chris Pine, CARDIAC COWBOYS tells the gripping true story behind the birth of heart surgery, and the young, Greatest Generation doctors who made it happen. For years, they competed and feuded, racing to be the first, the best, and the most prolific. Some appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, operated on kings and advised presidents. Others ended up disgraced, penniless, and convicted of felonies. Together, they ignited a revolution in medicine, and changed the world.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.