Keyshawn
Date
Time
Place
October 11, 2024
4:00pm
Staten Island, NYC
SLUG Bike Life.
Key Slugger.
My friend, my teammate, my brother, Keyshawn Mason. Keyshawn and I have known each other for 10+ years. We have spent so much of our friendship doing the things that we love: playing basketball, laughing, talking about style, and laughing some more. As this new colorway was developing, both me and IG knew that Keyshawn would be a perfect fit. But what stuck out to us about Keyshawn didn’t have to do with basketball or the times we spent hanging out, chilling. It was the various videos and photos he’s posted of himself, bicycling ridiculous amounts of miles around NYC. It was not just the brute strength of his heroic hobby that impressed us, but the way each post was art directed - how the music matched this pace, and his style elevated the video. Ever since we were young, Keyshawn always had this way of communicating and representing his perspective on social media. He was a personality on Twitter before anyone I knew. This shoot was to highlight the man himself, Keyshawn Mason.
A Familiar Scene.
It was me, Keyshawn, Isaiah, Greg, and Julia. We all met at my house and traversed to a familiar site of ours: Wagner College. We would always go to Wagner College to play basketball, sneaking onto the courts, hanging out on campus. Riding a bike, the brown SLUG, the autumn leaves, it all felt very collegiate. Greg and I had decided to use a Christopher Cross song “Sailing” for this video. The freedom of the song was something we attempted to capture in the video. The shoot went smoothly as usual. We followed Keyshawn via drone, shot from the curb, around the corner, upper hill… we even strapped Greg’s $10,000 camera to the bike which was heart wrenching, but at the same time epic af.
All Laughs Over Here.
As we progressed, getting more and more shots, a very special guest was added to the mix. So special in fact, he flew across the Atlantic Ocean to be here. The guest: Leonardo Ackerman. Leo is a man of many gifts and talents, but above all, he is a lover of life. Having his presence on site elevated the entire experience. It was another ingredient added to the pot that we didn’t know we needed. We kept shooting. The air was light and freeing. We really felt like a group. At that point, to be honest, it was one of the first times in a while I felt a real love between six people. We were bouncing off each other and everything was dreamy.
As the shoot came to a close, we said our goodbyes. There was one thing, one moment that I remember, most vividly. It was all of us in a circle, side-by-side… by side-by-side… by side-by side, laughing. And that’s what it’s really all about.
