Two Westlock men and their quest for knowledge online will continue thanks to a $50,000 cash infusion.
In 2015, Stephen Robinson and his brother Lindsay got curious.
How do you do a barrel roll on skis?
How much work does it take to start a band?
How much work would it take to turn a life-sized car into a Dance-Dance-Revolution-pad-controlled drone?
To satisfy his curiosity, the pair started 52 Skillz, a YouTube series dedicated to learning a new skill every week.
Eventually the series was selected by the Telus’ Storyhive, a community-powered funding program dedicated to growing creative and original online content.
With a new show name, How to Learn Anything, and a $10,000 grant from Telus in hand, the Robinsons were able to up the ante, learning to solve a Rubik’s Cube while skydiving. The heart-stopping stunt has now earned them Storyhive’s grand prize: a $50,000 grant to produce five more episodes.
The team has until April to plan, shoot and produce the new episodes and Stephen said that the toughest part of the project has been keeping his stunts from becoming just that.
“We really want the full series to feel complete. We don’t want it to feel just like a bunch of stunts where some guys got some money and just had some fun. We want to hit on a whole bunch of different genres and skills,” he said.
The most recent challenge took them to the skies to see if a person could learn to solve a Rubik’s Cube in under 60 seconds while hurtling to the ground at 220 km/h.
“I got it with two seconds to spare. It was a 56-second solve,” Stephen said. “It was pretty intense.”
Strapped on the back of a skydiver, Stephen had about 60 seconds from the time the duo jumped to get the cube solved before the diver had to pull the chord to end the freefall.
Pulling off the task was no easy feat, practicing for it, well that came with its challenges, too.
“The Rubik’s Cube solving itself was a lot of just grinding it out, practicing probably two to three hours a day for a month,” he said.
“Going from having never solved a Rubik’s Cube to having it done in 60 seconds.”
Stephen couldn’t practice the skydiving aspect before the challenge so he did the next best thing, practicing under conditions he thought skydiving might be like.
“It was hard to prep for that,” he said.
“I tried to solve it while karting, I got sprayed by water while I was trying to solve it … and just a whole bunch of trial and error is how I kind of got there.”
In the end the practice paid off and Stephen was able to solve the cube, although not on the first try.
“We had five attempts in the budget and it took us six,” he said.
“The first attempt was just more like getting an idea of what skydiving was like because I’d never skydived before. I had no idea if this was even possible.”
The hardest part?
“Outside of the psychological factor and the stress that comes along with skydiving … the wind was huge,” he said.
“Physically turning it to look at another side was really difficult because the wind would just push it around.”
Up until this point, the show has been an online phenomenon, but that may soon change, Stephen added.
With all of the attention and the growth the show has experienced since its inception, he’s hoping pair might soon find a home on television.
“[The experience] has really validated the concept and the show’s potential, as well as my and Lindsay’s filming and editing style,” he said.
“We’ve been approached by quite a few different people about the concept and wanting to move it forward.”
