with great honor and pleasure I present to you my entry for the “MonkeyfingeR Design Lesula Giveaway” contest:
Apparently, the 20+ hours of hard work have paid off because MFD has indeed chosen my video as the winning entry. And competition was tough, check out the other cool entries which I’ve put into a Youtube Playlist
MFD chose 3 runner-ups as well: Ilya Shaposhnikov, Gilbert Lybbert and Greg whose video was so close to winning that they decided to give him a Lesula as well which means there were really two winners:
And if you’re wondering what the Lesula is all about, well, there’s not much to say about it right now except that it’s the next (third?) yoyo by MFD after the Evil-Yo and the Gelada. No specs or pictures have been made public, yet, but there are some teaser pics on MFD’s Facebook page.
Hooray! Pretty excited about this. Like Andreas, I treated it as more than just a “film yourself doing a few tricks” project… I don’t know how many hours I put in (learning the tricks, finding time to film amidst raising a family, editing the music, sorting the footage, editing the film) but it’s definitely up there in the 20+ hour range as well.
I have 65GB of full-HD footage in .MOV format, so however many minutes that is… but the toughest part was actually narrowing down that footage into a 1 minute video. I didn’t pick the “best” versions of each trick, but rather the ones that contributed to the overall … ‘storyboard’… of the video. And it was NOT easy. Especially because a few of them had the tricks worked into slightly more technical combos and part of me wanted to show that I can do more than one trick per throw.
The editing software I used (Corel VideoStudio x5) isn’t really great with a workflow requiring careful sorting and selection of clips… or at least, I never discovered a good workflow for it. So the software kind of fought me along the way as well.
Suffice it to say, I will admit to being a bit crestfallen when I hadn’t won, but I knew Andreas’ video was a nice entertaining crowd-pleaser (and his fun personality really showed!) so it was hard to be TOO upset for too long. Then before you know it, MFD made their announcement that I was to be awarded a Lesula as well.
To make a long story short…
Thank you, MonkeyfingeR Design!!! And thanks Jeremy for the tricks!
And thanks all you YYE peeps who gave me positive encouragement along the way.
It’s a unique throw. As you would expect from looking at it, the thinly tapered edges don’t have the same “comfort” in the hand as yoyos with the opposite profile; however, it’s still plenty usable in the hand, and you can snap start without issue. The light weight and huge catch zone (it’s ALL catch zone!) should indeed make this a good throw for long practice sessions.
Not indending to review the yoyo here, so I’ll leave it at that. Super thrilled they sent me the Lemon Merangled colourway, which was my favourite of the 3.
yesterday, I also got mine, which is pretty fantastic considering it had to be shipped all the way to Germany.
I second Greg’s opinion: unusual feel while in the hand because of the shape, nice and light on the string. Here’s my box opening and first impression:
English subtitles are available, you’ll have to watch from a PC, though, as they are not available on Smartphones. Blame YouTube. Or me for not making a dubbed version
By box opening video didn’t turn out, so I held it back. This one is so much better anyhow!
My “first throws” video didn’t turn out EITHER… but I posted it all the same, mostly because it gave me a chance to say “Thanks, MonkeyfingeR” in video form. Also, my son is running all around for the second half, which is pretty cute.
