If you really want to understand Pasha Petkuns’ Human Pinball, the latest project from the Latvian freerunner, you’ve got to get into the minds of the people that made it a reality. Click to the next page to get the lights flashing – and the ball rolling.
HUMAN PINBALL
Writer: Josh Sampiero
ENTER THE MACHINE
THE PLAYGROUND
ANGLE OF ATTACK
A MASSIVE MISSION
AN EXERCISE IN ENGINEERING
A WORLD OF FUN
LET THE GAME BEGIN
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A giant 16m-high pinball machine, slanted at a deceptively steep 45-degree angle. A place to play games… with gravity. But before you start building this thing, you’ve got to design it – not easy. Creating this playground took hundreds of hours of concept, design and of course, lots of calculations and engineering.
A surprising challenge was finding the right material for the floor – it had to be slippery, but not too slippery. Says Director Mike Christie: ”We had to experiment with the slippiness and grippiness of the floors. So they tried six different floorings. This is the slippiest of the six, and this is the one that Pasha was happiest with.“
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Pasha had to figure out just how to move across this oddly angled surface. He wasn’t falling at full speed – instead, he was sort of constantly sliding.
A normal pinball machine is slanted at about 15 degrees. If you’re watching Human Pinball and struggling to figure out what’s up or down, well – that’s kind of on purpose.
A classic feature of pinball machines is flashing lights that activate when the ball ricochets off them – clearly, a feature that needed to be implemented in this giant fantasyland.
When Pasha first saw it, the world-class freerunner was actually… scared. “They picked it up for the first time, and they stopped at 37 degrees, and I was like ‘what’s the angle right now?’ – cause I’m already scared. I was like, ‘What did I ask for?!’” It took a few days of practice and rehearsal for Pasha to get into his groove. “You gotta be friends with the wall,” he says. “You literally gotta stay next to the wall and use the wall.”
If you could truly create a freerunning environment from scratch – what would it look like? That was the question at hand, with one caveat: it had to fit in the pinball machine. For Pasha and collaborators Nico Martell (who’s Sports Director for Red Bull Art of Motion) and freerunning legend Michael ‘Frosti’ Snow, the possibilities were endless – but the technical difficulties were challenging. Nobody had an innate understanding of how it was going to operate. Pasha thought his breakdancing experience might help – but in the end, he had to invent a whole new style of movement. “I had a bunch of bruises because I was trying to jump. At the beginning I was really grabbing a hold of the features just to slow down!”
Nobody had an innate understanding of how it was going to operate. Pasha thought his breakdancing experience might help – but in the end, he had to invent a whole new style of movement. “I had a bunch of bruises because I was trying to jump. At the beginning I was really grabbing a hold of the features just to slow down!”
If you could truly create a freerunning environment from scratch – what would it look like? That was the question at hand, with one caveat: it had to fit in the pinball machine. For Pasha and collaborators Niko Martell (who’s Sports Director for Red Bull Art of Motion) and freerunning legend Michael ‘Frosti’ Snow, the possibilities were endless – but the technical difficulties were challenging.
Classic freerunning is about using the existing tools of urban environments. This is entirely not that. The biggest challenge of the entire project was building the set. Mike Christie elaborates: “We built a test wall in America to play with the angles and material. I’ve worked with quite a lot of big stadium events and Olympic ceremonies, and that really informed this more than what we did with Danny MacAskill Imaginate.” The finished structure weighed over 23 tonnes, was 16m high and with a 23m-long hypotenuse – and it had to be lifted. “Our first problem was finding a building where we could do that!”
Pasha’s playground was full of different features to have fun on, and each one required a different approach and movement to navigate. Once the ‘world tour’ concept was decided upon, the set design team and engineers worked closely with Pasha and Martell to develop the concept. Obviously the wonders of the world were a great place to start – and that got them the Eiffel Tower, the Great Pyramid and the Great Wall of China. Next up was imagining the landmarks in such a way as to be freerunning tools – no easy task.
"Originally, we had the Eiffel Tower on the ‘ground’ – we lifted it off the ground so I could slide under it!” says Pasha.
In the end, the Great Wall wasn’t so great – because that’s where Pasha had his worst injury of the entire shoot, a dislocated thumb. Luckily, it was on the second-to-last day of filming, and a little bit of flesh-coloured physio tape fixed him up.
“We should have done more with the flippers,” says Pasha. “It was really cool to play with moving obstacles.”
After dozens of people spent well over a year working on this, it was time to 'turn on' the machine – that meant a three-week long production at a massive soundstage in the UK, with over 25 people on set. The result? We’d rather show than tell – check out Human Pinball!
After dozens of people spent well over a year working on this, it was time to 'turn on' the machine – that meant a three-week-long production at a massive soundstage in the UK, with over 25 people on set. The result? We’d rather show than tell – check out Human Pinball!
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