The long awaited RV Project Episode 9 has finally arrived! It chronicles our mishaps and slip-ups between leaving the Red River Gorge and arriving in Colorado.

After dropping off the trailer in Indiana for repairs, we went to the east coast to watch my little brother Eliot and cousin Alec graduate college. In between it all, we tried to climb but, predictably, it was always either too hot or raining. We made the most of it anyway, meeting friendly locals and sleeping in Bert.

Summer doesn’t make for very good climbing in New England, and we only shot a few decent climbs. We are also novice with the camera, so the amount of quality footage is even more diminished by that fact. We decided to spice it up the only way we could think of: with stop-motion animation and poetic narration.

I wish we had production footage for this film. It would be cool for our previous episodes too, and I think of the boom on top of boulders in Horse Pens, or setting up timelapses on top of the old trailer. But for this, we went through many steps to create, cut out, and manipulate the paper cutouts, then learn how to add them in to the video. We spent hours watching tutorials. Then we laughed ourselves silly while writing the narration. We struggled through the basics of After Effects and Premiere Pro, but after three months we finally finished it, and had fun doing it too.

Frankly, you might not like this episode. It’s a total mishmash of hodgepodgery…some animation, some climbing, some rhyming, and a worm shaped like a dildo. We think it’s pretty funny, and at least we can promise that you won’t find another video like it on the internet.

If you follow the blog, you might notice we skipped over the Gunks. Though it was rainy and humid, and we slept in a cold and often wet truck bed, we actually had a pretty good time there. Besides, we didn’t get much footage there, since a DSLR isn’t the camera of choice to bring with you on a trad climb.

Hope you enjoy!