Episode 422 - Mr. Eric Jacobus

Mr. Eric Jacobus is a martial arts practitioner who works on films and games as a motion capture stuntman. He appeared on Sony's God of War and Spiderman to say a few.

I ran down there to LA, So what's the character? You're playing a bearded man defending a son." That was exactly who I was at the time, because I had no money, I had a wife and a kid, and we were not going to survive the winter. And I said, I'm going to take this job and I'm going to do it better than anybody else.

Mr. Eric Jacobus - Episode 422

Finding martial arts in the movie Pink Panther is surely the most unique answer that we've heard on the show. Mr. Jacobus was particularly fascinated with comedic martial arts when he started watching Jackie Chan's movies. Today, Mr. Jacobus is a stuntman and actor who works in film, TV, and video games as a performer and action designer. He had his big break when he portrayed Kratos on Sony's God of War. If you are a movie geek, Mr. Eric Jacobus' stories will definitely be a treat for you. Listen to find out more!

Mr. Eric Jacobus is a martial arts practitioner who works on films and games as a motion capture stuntman. He appeared on Sony's God of War and Spiderman to say a few. I ran down there to LA, So what's the character?

Show Notes

In this episode, we mentioned Donnie Yen, Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung.[gallery type="slideshow" size="full" ids="7319,7318,7316,7315"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqDxABLJG0chttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA8QrOAghZ0

Show Transcript

You can read the show transctipt below or download it here.Jeremy Lesniak:How are you? What's happening? Welcome! This is whistlekick martial arts radio episode 422. Today, I'm joined by my guest, Mr. Eric Jacobus. My name is Jeremy Lesniak. I'm your host on this show, the founder of whistlekick and I love the martial arts. Love everything about the martial arts! I love the people who do martial arts. I love the movements, I love how it helps people grow. I love the stuff. I love uniforms and belts and sparring gear and that’s probably why I started a company that, at least, in part makes that stuff and if you head on over to whistlekick.com, you can find all the stuff that we make. We make a lot of products but we also have a number of other projects that we’re involved in and you can find links to all of those from martial journal to the other sites. There's a bunch. I'm not going to give you a list. If you go to whistlekick.com, you'll see everything we got going on. If you make a purchase in the store, use the code PODCAST15, saves you 15% on everything that we do and you can sign up for the newsletter too. Keep you informed on what we’re doing. Now, if you want to know more about the podcast, whistlekickmartialartsradio.com, is the place to go. You can find all of the episodes we’ve ever done. Photos, videos, links, the whole shebang over there so check it out. We bring you two shows a week and really, the goal is just to help you explore and enjoy your martial arts lifestyle as someone recently called it so enjoy! Now, on today’s show, we bring you someone who has a slightly atypical story. This is not the story that you're not going to hear from most of the guests on this show but what I like about it is that I think we can find a little bit of ourselves in this story. It's a story of perseverance. I mean, really, that’s the word that jumps out at me and I think you're going to enjoy, at least, if I was a betting man, I’d put a bunch of money on it. So, here we go, here’s my conversation with Mr. Eric Jacobus. Mr. Jacobus, welcome to whistlekick martial arts radio.Eric Jacobus:Thanks for having me.Jeremy Lesniak:Hey, thanks for being here. We almost didn’t have this, right? This is what? Our third reschedule? I don’t want listeners to think like I'm saying that in a negative way. Just, every once in a while, we end up with an episode that seems to be a little cursed and this one, this one, when I saw my schedule for the board again, I saw your name. I was like oh, fingers crossed, fingers crossed, let’s not reschedule again because I think, once it was me, I think I was dying. I think I was sick and then I think once, it was you and I felt better about that because then we were even.Eric Jacobus:Exactly but we made it happen.Jeremy Lesniak:We made it happen. We’re here and barring a tyrannosaurus busting through the roof and eating me, I think we’ll be good to go so, yeah. Let’s talk martial arts. Let’s talk about this whole thing that we all do, all the listeners do, it's called martial arts radio so we try to start with martial arts so how did you find martial arts?Eric Jacobus:I think the first martial art fight scene I saw was in the Pink Panther.Jeremy Lesniak:Really? Okay, that’s a new response. We haven't had that one before.Eric Jacobus:That was back when you did judo chops and it was just around the Bruce Lee era but these were American movies, the ones I watched a lot was Return of the Pink Panther and my first martial art fight scene was a comedy. The Pink Panther fight scenes were genius and how they integrate the fight scene with the environment and they're just fantastically done because it was like the jokes never fail in those scenes and I think that from that, it was a natural transition to getting a movie with Jackie Chan heavily when I was in my teens. It was in a small town called Redding in North California. We really didn’t have much in the way of martial art movies, Asian martial art movies, so we had a handful at our movie store but not a whole lot and once Jackie Chan started coming into theaters with Rumble in the Bronx and Nice Guy which is kind of late in his career, at that time, he’d had have 15 years to make another Hongkong action movie. I started researching him and watching everything and then, I started watching everything Sammo Hung did and everybody associated with them and I had taken some martial arts as a kid. Not a whole lot, it wasn’t really interesting for me at that time. I’d taken some karate and that’s when I was 12 or so, did some gymnastics so I was a physical kid but no means a master and then, in my late teens when I rediscovered martial arts through Jackie Chan, I really got interested in not only doing martial arts but making martial art movies.Jeremy Lesniak:How did you get from one to the next? I mean, a lot of people watch martial arts movies and maybe a good portion of that, maybe even most of us, fantasize about what it would be like to do martial arts in a movie but I don’t think too many people actually sit down and say you know, this is something I want to do so what was it about that for you?Eric Jacobus:When I was watching all these martial art movies, I kept running into the issue of researching martial art movies and trying to find out which ones had the best fight scenes. Now, if you transport yourself back in time to 1998, the internet didn’t have a whole lot going on. There was FortuneCity, GeoCities, there were these small websites, there were Yahoo! as the main search engine, AltaVista and you would try and research Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung movies, there just wasn’t a whole lot out there and there were few sites that reviewed the movies but never anything reviewing the action and so, when I started going into Chinatown and just taking gambles on, I’d buy stacks of video CDs because I travel down to Chinatown just like that, it would be an 8-hour roundtrip and I’d do it on a Friday night and I’ll spend all the money that I earned from my job at the time and I’d bring back a stack of video CDs and DVDs and I would just watch them and then I started, I was actually a techie at that time, I was making websites and programming in Visual Basic and EHP. I was doing this at community college in Redding and I knew I had to make a website so I would just review all the action in these movies I watched so that’s exactly what I did. Over the course of about 3 years, I compiled about 500 movie reviews of very mainstream Hongkong action films and very, very obscure ones. I was watching Donnie Yen stuff that nobody saw at that time and I went to Hongkong, got a bunch of CDs and DVDs, got a whole suitcase full and I brought them back and reviewed every one of them and after doing this for 3 years, after reviewing just fight scenes for 3 years and because I have had a little bit of martial arts training myself, I started understanding how they were made because I would just watch them, watch these fights on repeat and reviewing them kind of helped me figure out why things worked, why things didn’t work, how the camera worked, how the editing worked, that was my filmmaking class. I was reviewing martial art action films, Hongkong action films or American. At the time, I’d get a couple Korean action movie reviews but really, Korea wasn’t taking off as a martial art market in the late ‘90s surely and once I realized that it's a fairly straightforward process, picked up a camera plus at the time, digital film making was actually affordable so around 2000, 2001, I realize that you need a capture card and just film something, plug into the capture card, put it in some free video editing software that came with the capture card, edit that thing, put it online, make a forum, get a bunch of feedback, repeat and that’s exactly what we did and we started a group called The Stunt People. We made a short, short garbage martial arts film. It's our first one on, the first year we made 35 short films and they're all just, we’re just trying to make fight scenes. We found sound effects and I’ll rip sound effects from other movies in our forum, I ended up sharing a lot of those sound effects and these guys around the world from like [00:08:52] Germany and you had a guy in Japan, you had a guy in Hongkong and there was a guy in Turkey and then, guy in LA and they start kind of springing up, these guys from Chicago start springing up and saying, hey, we’re really interested in doing this stuff too and they kind of had the same idea and so we started sharing sound effects and they’ll rip sound effects from some movies and we’d share them and it became this kind of underground, I don’t know, like a trade, like a market where we were just sharing all these stuff. We were also sharing what were the best camera angles for shooting kicks. Is that how Bruce Lee did it? Is that how Jackie Chan did it? So we did it. This way doesn’t work, here’s why. Here’s that editing technique and we would put our videos up online for years and there was no YouTube back then so you had to get FTP space from your school, from your friend who got a website or something. I had a buddy who had made a direct connect program. He gave me, John [00:09:48] he gave me a bunch of free web space and I ended up putting stuff on there and when you would watch a movie, you download a video clip and we would give each other very, very honest feedback. I mean, if your movie sucked, you're going to hear about it. If your fight scene was no good, if your martial arts is no good, somebody’s going to tell you, somebody’s going to say dude, your flick’s terrible and I got my fair brunt of criticism and that’s when I started taking martial arts a little more seriously but this is how we learned. That was kind of the wild west of the internet back then which was nobody was afraid of hate mail, nobody was afraid of hateful comment. It was like a comment was a comment. You either took it or you didn’t and I found that the most helpful comments a lot of the time would be the very critical ones. There were people that were honest enough with me, honest enough to actually help me get better.Jeremy Lesniak:Now, what was the end goal? Just the way you're talking about it, I imagine it was fun. I imagine you got to work with people that you enjoyed working with but was it just an all-encompassing hobby or were you trying to turn it into something more?Eric Jacobus:I think we’re all kind of looking at the Hongkong industry which was, you’re in post-handover Hongkong at this point so this is after ’97 and really, martial arts movie in Hongkong had taken a big hit at the time. I think around 1995, after that there wasn’t a whole lot of martial art movies going on. I think a lot of us felt like we were trying to carry the torch and then, The Matrix was an example of the torch being carried into America, right? Because this is literally what happened though, a lot of those Hongkong filmmakers and stars, Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Michelle Yeoh, Yuen Woo Ping, Jet Li, Corey Yuen, they all came to the U.S. after 1997. Now, you got Jet Li with Lethal Weapon 4, Jackie Chan doing Rush Hour, Sammo Hung doing Martial Law and Yuen Woo Ping doing the Matrix with Chad Stahelski as Keanu’s double at the time and he ended up making John Wick 20 years later and you saw these, you look at The Matrix and that was the torch being handed over, seeing the Hongkong action style of coming perfectly into the American audience and all of us in the sidelines going we would love to do something like that. We don’t have the money, we’re going to fail the auditions, we’re nowhere near Hollywood. Man, I wasn’t able to move down to Hollywood. I had no idea what I was doing. A lot of the people doing the auditions in Hollywood were martial art experts and we were not experts. We could make films but we were not martial arts experts. We could not ace an audition. We knew that so we had to be pragmatic about it. Family said okay, we’ll just work on the outside, kind of work in this indie world and see what we can do with the goal of turning martial art action filmmaking, or media-making in general because we’re probably going to get into games in this conversation too, and trying to make that into a career. We had no idea how we’re going to get there, no idea.Jeremy Lesniak:There was faith that it might happen or will happen.Eric Jacobus:Yeah, we had our sights on it or somewhere.Jeremy Lesniak:And did you have conversations with the others in this group? Did you sit down over food or beer or something and say, this is something that we can do, we can make this happen or was it more a Hail Mary?Eric Jacobus:That’s the tough thing is that, on the one hand, it looks like the world is kind of growing around you and you keep on making these really short, low-budget action films on to the side and the rest of the world is speeding forward and then, also, when September 11thhappen, it seemed like the action language really changed or identity so there was kind of this concerted shift away from showing action in the kind of Matrix traditional tripod, dolly, very clear movement, clear lines and then it went in to this very…if you think about what 9/11 did to action, you think about how people then perceive violence while people saw violence as random and lawless so you had to have a hero that can carry that forward like Jason Bourne, 2002, in the Bourne Identity and a lot of us would look at Bourne Identity going man, I mean, you can't see the action, you can't see the martial arts, you really want to kind of keep doing the Hongkong style and it was obviously not happening for a long time in Hollywood and yeah, they were doing some wire martial art movies but none of them really took off. Yeah, there were some stuff in china but none of us really want to move to china. Few of us did but I stuck around, a lot of us stuck around kind of hoping that the Hongkong style could come back someday and eventually, it did but we were doing this, I was doing that for about 15 years, doing day jobs on the side before I became a full-time stuntman.Jeremy Lesniak:15 years? That’s a long time to pursue a goal. Now, through that time, I imagine you're doing more than training and making these films on your own. Are you taking classes? Are you trying to make connections? Something tells me the story’s a little more complex.Eric Jacobus:I went to film school and around the time I went to film school, I was 20. I started taking martial arts very seriously at that point so I moved to San Francisco, opened up a phone book, went to the martial art section and just went down the line and the 2ndschool I called was a taekwondo school so I started on taekwondo and again, I had karate experience. I had the experience to doing martial arts and movies nonstop for 2 years so I came in actually armed with enough skills to advance fairly quickly in Taekwondo. I can learn pretty quickly. I can throw away the old habits and learn new habits pretty quickly so that wasn’t really an issue. It's not like my years doing martial arts movies caused some kind of stumbling block where I was going to have bad form forever and after taekwondo, I started taking hapkido. A much more MMA style of hapkido with a lot more kicks, a lot more punches, a lot more grappling and so, during that whole time of making indie films, I'm learning martial arts from a lot of the guys in the stunt team were teaching me. I'm going to their martial arts classes. Wednesday nights we had open sparring so a bunch of people would come in, I’d spar around people, I sparred with my buddies too because that’s how we learned each other’s timing. Dennis Ruel and I, we would spar a fair amount and we beat each other up a little bit and I do that with a bunch of the guys in the team. It was scary because they're all way better than me but I had to get in there and learn how to fight because I knew that if I really want to be convincing on camera and actually pull a hand over these guys, I had to be able to fight and so I’d fight them so we’d fight and what that ended up doing is our timing got so good. We could go really quick. We could almost go Hongkong speed without having speed camera, you know what I mean? And so, that process of learning martial arts along with the process of filmmaking was kind of nourishing us and enriching us for what was to come.Jeremy Lesniak:Okay, and so, how did it change? Where was the break? Did it happen overnight or did you start getting little stuff?Eric Jacobus:It was such a slow, slow process. We made a few feature martial art films. We made 3. One was called Contour, another was called Immortal and another one’s called Death Grip. I produced those. Contour was a $5,000 movie shot in a warehouse. We just wanted to make a Hongkong-style action movie. I think, to this day, that’s one of the few [00:18:03] because it was pure action. We had been working together as a team for a few years and we just kind of had our rhythm figured out and we just went a made this movie. It took us a year to make it and then, after that it was another slump. It was more day jobs, more chasing random Hollywood gigs whenever I could. I would get brought on to do very tiny things like music videos and we’d be the stunt team on a music video. In 2011, I raised $110,000 to do another feature film called Death Grip movie. It was a financial failure but the learning process was huge with that and again, another slump. I blew my life savings on that movie and it was a total slump after that and again, gone back to day jobs. Clayton Barber who was a well-known stunt coordinator in Hollywood, he did Creed, he worked on Black Panther, he found me and he said hey, let’s do a short film together and we did Rope A Dope. His idea to do a Groundhog Day with martial arts and that’s when things started picking up a little bit. I kind of gave up a lot of control at that point because I’d done Death Grip, I've worn every hat for that movie and it was exhausting and kind of run me down and humbled me and so, working with Clayton, working with other directors, started doing martial arts films then started taking a slight turn at that point. Then I started getting a few more jobs in Hollywood because I was open to working as a camera operator for shooting the rehearsal videos or I would be an editor for the rehearsal videos. I went to china and I shot some action scenes for a movie there. I was a fight coordinator in china, in Thailand and so, those jobs kept coming very slowly though, and it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do, honestly. The pre-vis work is how, pre-vis is the pre-visualization stage of making an action scene where you prep it all in the gym. I was in charge for doing a lot of that for some of these projects and did that for Altered Carbon, for Good Day to Die Hard, I did some of that for Black Panther and went to china again for 3 months and came back and thought I need to really figure out what I'm going to do because after I did the china job, again, I had no work. This is kind of the nature of working in stunts. They have a job and then you're unemployed and if you don’t jump on to something else then you're just unemployed and I really don’t know what I wanted to do. I wasn’t sure that I want to keep shooting pre-vis and editing pre-vis. It's a hard job and so, what happened then was kind of funny. I’d say I really just want to keep in shape right now. I just want to work on my technique and I want to challenge myself so what I did, I went to my garage and I watched Tekken videos from the game and I pull up the move list for the characters and I would just look at the video game characters and I just watch their move list and I would just do the moves that they were doing in the game but I would do it in my garage and I’d film myself and I’ll compare my technique with the video game character and I put it side by side in a video showing me and the Tekken character and I put those online and it went super viral overnight. Totally viral! The Tekken and real life series. Started doing Street Fighter, Dead or Alive, a buddy of mine who worked at IGN, he helped me get it on to the IGN channel on YouTube and then that got seen by millions and millions of people and some of those people happen to work at Sony Santa Monica. They made God of War and they called me in to audition for Kratos because they said you know how to fight like a video game character. Now, in God of War, we’re not throwing high kicks and we’re not doing any of that martial arts stuff but the fact that you can move like a video game character, maybe you can move like this Kratos character and bolder and a few more of this character in this God of War game so they called me in, I auditioned, got the part and that’s when things change.Jeremy Lesniak:What did that feel like? I mean, how many years from, we’ll call it the start, the impetus, how many years was that?Eric Jacobus:That was 14 years.Jeremy Lesniak:14 years.Eric Jacobus:To 15. Yeah, 15 years and I had had a son recently before that point in early 2016 so yeah, this job then came in 2016 and I didn’t know what the job was. They just said hey, we’re from Santa Monica studio, we got a game we’re working, we’d like you to come in and yes, yes so I ran in, went in there down to LA and say what’s the character? You're playing a bearded man defending your son which is exactly who I was at the time because I had no money, I had a wife and a kid and we were not going to survive the winter and I said I'm going to take this job and I'm going to do it better than anybody else and that was the motion capture job that really, really helped get me to where I am now.Jeremy Lesniak:What did that feel like? What was that moment when they said yes?Eric Jacobus:I think it was kind of this clarifying moment that a lot of what I was doing was just blind faith and it wasn’t really belief in myself. I wouldn’t say that. I've always been very self-critical and I've always doubted myself. I have and that’s not healthy but at the same time, I never put all this faith in myself because there is just something, there was something else driving me and I'm a man of faith. I think God brought me there. I don’t understand why but I test it all the time and it's a very strange trajectory that I took to end up in the motion capture world. It all made sense because the skills that I had developed in the film-making and martial arts world was actually more in tune to the motion capture game development world than Hollywood and that was the moment where it all clicked and I said aha! I get this now because the motion capture process, for the listeners, motion capture is when you put on a suit and then, they record your movements into a computer so you can actually, so the game characters that you're looking at in God of War and these other games, they move like humans because humans actually did this movements and you can research it, you can just look up motion capture and motion capture for video games, at least the playable part, is a very mechanical process. It's actually much more tech-oriented than filmmaking. It's much more tech than even martial arts because everything and then, that was the stuff that I was always good at that wasn’t always very applicable to film making but with game development it was totally applicable and so, I've thought wow, I've really found what I'm good at. I can do this and extremely relieving but I think that the best word for it would be clarifying.Jeremy Lesniak:And what I find interesting about that is that when you started building the skills, motion capture, if it even existed was research at that point. It wouldn’t have been the type of thing that game studios were using from what I recall.Eric Jacobus:Not a whole lot.Jeremy Lesniak:It would have been cost-prohibitive for most studios to have used that from my memory. We’re talking about that mid to late-‘90s but you were doing things you were passionate about, you were building your skills and it's something that I always tell people is that there is something, there is always something that when you look at the conversions of your skills, makes you, if not the best in the world, one of the best in the world. Something that you can do that 99 and a half percent of people wouldn’t even be able to approach.Eric Jacobus:Totally agree. Exactly.Jeremy Lesniak:And so, here’s the intersection of that skillset for you.Eric Jacobus:Yeah, exactly.Jeremy Lesniak:Does it feel like that when you put on a suit to do this, right? Sensors are a part of the suit. When you put that on, does it feel right?Eric Jacobus:Well, the suit feels really tight and it's not a very comfortable thing to wear sometimes but when I knew, so here’s the moment when I knew, I figured it out at this moment. So, I was working on God of War and it's hard to demonstrate this in words but, basically, when you're doing in-game motion capture, you have to start in an idle pose so like in the video game, if you're just standing there not touching the controller and your character has an idle stance, right? You have to match that idle stance as a performer. You have to make, because they’ve already figured out what that idle looks like at the game, so when you go into motion capture to combat, because I was just doing the stunt and the combat for Kratos. All the acting had already been done. A lot of the navigation had already been done but I had to go in there and fill in all the combat so I had to make sure that I got the stance correct, I have to have the posture correct because I had to match exactly what they had already made so you have to start with the idle stance and then, for every move that you do, you need to do the right amount of anticipation before the move. You have to do, when you actually do the attack, you have to hit at the right angle, the right hit box, they call it, to make sure that the move is actually going to line up with enemies and the way that they need it to. You have to hit a certain pose or silhouette when you're doing that strike and they may ask you to move your arm in a really strange way but, as a martial artist, doesn’t make sense. They're asking you to throw this punch and this other arm, so your right arm’s punching your left arm. Your left arm wants to go to your hip or you want them up to your face but they say no, it needs to come out the side because that’s what’s going to look best for the game. As a martial artist, if you can't make that adjustment then you can't give them what they need. That’s extremely difficult, right? So, if you're a trained martial artist going in there, you then have to modify your trained martial arts to make this character look as good as they need it to look. Otherwise, they got to fix you in post. They got to move your hand where they need to move it and that cost them a lot of time. They're not interested in doing that. They just want you to do that right there on the spot. I was able to do that like I said, for whatever reason, I'm able to pick up a new habit really easily so if they would say move your arm over here. I do it a few times and I can just do it then you need to recover a certain way so you go from the attack to back to the stance. There's a certain amount of time so for a big attack, there needs to be a small recovery. For a fast attack, it's a quick recovery. When you come out of that, your footwork needs to be exactly the same as it was at the beginning of the shot. Now, that is a mechanical process that I think most martial artists would consider a nightmare because it's not natural. It's not how they fight. It's not the way that you actually engage in self-defense. It's just none of that stuff. it's totally mechanical and weird and I had always…so, when they're going through all these with me and I'm doing it exactly the way that they need it and then, at one point, they say okay, for this next attack, we need some suggestion. We need this axe strike and they were asking me how I would move to do this certain axe strike in God of War and I asked a very simple question, I said where’s the camera? They said oh, it's over your right shoulder and I say how about when I turn my head towards the camera so you can see my head every now and then? And then, they said that’s fantastic, we’ll do exactly that. so, I was able to tap into how they're making the game that needs performance because the filmmaking experience that I have had was that I understood camera, editing, performance, writing, everything. I had to know all that stuff to make these short films so when it came to making the game, I would just ask the same questions. Where’s the camera? For a game, it's usually a lot behind you but that would dictate a lot of the moves and there would be other times where they would say, they would be talking amongst themselves, the directors on the mocaps say we need the footwork to be like this but if his right foot is forward then you still need to go back to idle, usually all these words I'm trying to discuss between themselves how to make something work so I would chime in and say what if there's this move that you can actually do in martial arts that gets you back to the idle that you need? And they would go oh, you can just do that? Yeah! And it was like the language was so clear suddenly and I could offer suggestion and I could help them develop moves necessary to make the character work from a gameplay perspective.Jeremy Lesniak:And I imagine that that’s an element of your skillset that very few are able to bring in. That makes you that much more valuable.Eric Jacobus:And it makes me, in a sense, it's kind of a, the mechanical nature of how I move, a lot of the time was often the struggle and I consider myself somewhat Asperger-y. I've never been tested but there's a lot of my personality that lines up with Asperger’s. It was always a struggle with social situations and then, also just kind of moving and copying people was extremely hard when you have Asperger’s. It's actually hard to mimic people. That’s why with autism, autism is an extreme aversion to mimicry and the thing that you keep running into is that if I copy this person, am I being them and you kind of get into this weird cycle in your head and so that was always kind of a struggle and I knew a few other people who have that issue too. It’s amazing. Death Grip was about a kid with autism. I don’t play that character but my brother in the movie but then I always considered I was socially disabled and physically disabled in a certain respect and this was always a struggle and then suddenly that becomes an ability.Jeremy Lesniak:That bit of information completely changes the way I think we look at the things we talked about initially. Kind of constructing your own reality where you have more control, where the people are following the script or following the rules. Did that feel more comfortable than because of that?Eric Jacobus:The issues were me which this difficulty with, and again with autism and Asperger’s, it's not that it's hard to mimic. It's that you don’t want to do it so copying people, dancing, it's across different domains. Once you kind of find what you're good at and, you'll find this in people with autism, once they find something they're good at, they zero in on it and they perfect it and usually it's involving objects, usually it's involving a computer, what I'm saying about Asperger’s, this is why I'm into tech first. I mean, I was a computer programmer. I really didn’t want to do anything much else when I was 15 and I just wanted the computer to do what it needed it to do and I focused on that and I began perfecting that. I don’t quite have the same issue that other people have but the issue is that they can't get out of that zone anymore so they perfect organizing pens, they perfect collecting a certain kind of thing and they just refuse to go out of that zone and so, the issue always remains that once you get so good at something like motion capture or filmmaking or reviewing Hongkong films, whatever it is, how then is it possible for you to take that skillset and then, transfer it to another domain and that’s always the challenge and these domains happen to be very transferable among one another and it's not my reality, I'm in the same world like you are and anytime I think that I'm making my reality is that I'm just trying to make things comfortable for myself and that’s not how I grow. The way that I grow is by getting thrown into an uncomfortable situation and having to deal with it and that was, those times when I was forced to grow like when I failed with making a financial return with Death Grip, when I was doing these films overseas and I had to work with other teams, it was very humbling experiences and those are the times when you really grow and, to this day, now, the question is now I'm really good with motion capture, how can I take that and then go into another domain with that and keep expanding the business and that’s always going to be the question because perfection in the given domain comes at a cost which is that you can't transfer to a different domain very easily. Now, if you happen to be in a domain that works for you whether it's working at a particle accelerator or organizing pens by color, you might be extremely good at one of those but one of those isn’t going to make you a paycheck, it's not going to support your family so when we started a company called SuperAlloy and we now, we take motion capture and filmmaking and action design and now, we’re trying to broaden the scope of what we do to video games and film.Jeremy Lesniak:Which seems to make sense because the lines are getting blurry between the two and for anybody listening that doesn’t play video games, you may not realize that the video game industry is bigger than the film industry that we’ve, what was it, Red Dead Redemption 2 on release day blew the doors of some records. Is that the current?Eric Jacobus:Yeah, you look at that, you look at, what’s that one that all the kids play? Fortnite.Jeremy Lesniak:Fortnite?Eric Jacobus:Yeah.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah, there was a tournament in New York last week and the winner took home $3 million. This is a game that’s free to play. I'm not a gamer but I was and I have a strong passion and interest in tech so I follow it because it's popular culture. It's where a lot of things are going so it's interesting to see how your starting to shift, maybe not shift, but how your skillset’s becoming even more relevant.Eric Jacobus:That’s a great point and you still see the old action film model like with John Wick. You see a lot of these Korean action films coming out that are still old school action films so the model is still there. The question is, as independent artists, how can we even make a dent in that because we thought that when YouTube came around and with cheap filmmaking, that everybody would be able to make a living doing the stuff but turns out that there are just millions and millions of people who make low-budget action films that don’t make a living off of it a lot of the time. That’s actually really hard. It's really hard to make a living off of making low-budget films and then with action, their costs triple when you start introducing action. You got insurance, you got to hire qualified performers. The world is so savvy to action now where you can't BS your way through it. You have to do quality stuff otherwise people just will downvote you, you won’t make the audition, whatever it is and so, now, the question remains: if you're an indie studio, how do you make a killer action project? And the answer to that might be the unreal engine or unity using motion capture, using these very cost-effective pipelines now to make very good-looking renderings. Look at what Neill Blomkamp’s doing, for example. He’s been a huge inspiration. He’s the guy that made District 9, Elysium, Chappie and he went out and he made a bunch of short films in Unity and these are partially 3D, mostly all 3D, the Adam short was all shot in 3D and that, it looks like a 3D-rendered movie. It doesn’t look real necessarily but at this point, the content, if the content is high enough quality, people totally give a pass to the rendering quality. Now, the rendering quality is great but I mean, at a certain point, you can't make it realistic. So you can live with the fact that your film is going to look like a cartoon, in a sense, but now, we could harness that because Unity and Unreal are free. You can actually make your movie in Unity and Unreal for free right now if you wanted to but then the question is how do you get people, how do you get human motion into that? and with motion capture systems like Xsens, that’s actually what we use, which is extremely good now. They’ve gotten extremely good and the data is fantastic. It's triple A level at this point it's like worthy of Endgame and you can actually go and get one of these suits, record yourself, put yourself in a movie and then you can make your movie about a guy living on Mars that’s going to cost you next to nothing and then, if you can get those stunt guys flipping their mocap suits on, you can put whatever character model you want and do in Unreal and you can put anybody in the suit and then, you can have them play some character. That’s how God of War’s made. There were 5 people being Kratos so you got voice, you got face, you got the person into cinematics, you got the stunt guy doing the combat in-game, you got the stunt guy doing cinematics. I wouldn’t even do the cinematic stuff a lot of the time because they’ll have to do somebody else in cinematics and then you put whatever character you want in the movie. You got your action movie, you got your 3D John Wick. As an indie studio, you can do that.Jeremy Lesniak:Really, really fascinating. Let’s switch gears for a bit because with the sheer number of people you’ve connected with, very talented people, the travel that you’ve done, I'm sure you’ve got a lot of stories, a lot of things that you’ve been exposed to that the listeners wouldn’t even imagine. So, if I were to ask you for one of those, one of those stories, those anecdotes, the things that you’ve seen or been part of, what might your favorite one be? What would you share with us?Eric Jacobus:I think that when I did the Man Who Feels No Pain in India, it was like a paradigm shift doing that movie. It was a huge blessing. The reason why I got that job, too, by the way, again, is because the director saw my YouTube channel. He saw the Rope a Dope short film that I did with Clayton and he said I wanted you to come to Bollywood and do Rope a Dope, when you look at Rope a Dope, if anybody out there wants to go watch it on YouTube. It's a Hongkong martial arts action movie in America straight up. We use the same techniques, fighting is dead on, it's the same thing. We just took the Hongkong film making system, Shanghai model, we just made that short film and it was a hit so the director said we want you to do that in India. Now, I know that, I've seen Bollywood films . I've seen Bollywood action films, martial art films there, they don’t really…they're not really about performance. They're kind of about the fine physics, they're about the hero worship. They're not about the choreography, they're about the drama and I said that’s not really, that’s really not how we make movies. When you look at Rope a Dope, the actors are doing their own stunts, stunt guys are acting. There is no difference between the stuntman and the actor. It's straight up like Jackie Chan. Jackie Chan will hire stunt guys to do the acting parts and that’s just how they made the movie. The camera guy was probably the stunt man, right? Because the camera guy is following the action perfectly. They know exactly how to shoot it. You look at all the Shaw Brothers movies, man, some of those camera operators, their work with the choreography in ways that camera operators today, they just wouldn’t be able to do it. Impossible. You got to actually know martial arts to follow that stuff as a camera operator. That is a different filmmaking model than Bollywood typically uses and I said, you have to train your actors so we don’t have to double. I don’t want to double the actors. You got to allow us to work with the camera department, usually that’s not allowed. We also need a first pass on the edit. Everything that’s shot and done, I need to be able to take the footage, put it into an edit, do a sound design and give it to you. You don’t have to use it but at least, you can see how the flow should be based on how we shot it because, as for shooting it, we know the edit as we’re shooting it and the odds of that happening in Bollywood, very low; but this director, Vasan, he said well, you can do it so we did it and we went over there and in India, they have the caste system. A lot of the time, actors are seen as gods. They're seen as a different status than the stunt performers but this movie, by this nature, the director had written, essentially, a Hongkong action film because in India, Hongkong action films were huge. It's been huge for decades, longer than they're huge in America. Hongkong action films have been big there since the ‘60s so, I mean, you look at someone like Bachchan and he embodied the martial art actions stuff because he was a fan. They took the kind of Kung Fu style of the upright Confucian type, the Master, and it worked perfectly well with the Indian Yogi. There was the same kind of character so they just took some of those extra movements, some of those Kung Fu movements and put them into Bollywood so they knew the language. The thing was they didn’t know how to shoot it, they didn’t know how to edit it and they didn’t really know how to perform it in a way that could even compete with Hongkong and make it globally viable. It was popular in India but not really globally and that a was the challenge but fortunately, the actors were totally cool. They were fine throwing themselves on the ground, all the stunt guys were acting. We don’t hide or anything. There's no doubling them and that kind of project is a dream come true and it's so rare, even in America, to have that kind of a project fall into your lap like that. that’s why I jumped at it. we ended up making these amazing relationships with these stunt guys and these actors and the stunt guys would come up to me and they say, usually the stunt coordinators, they just throw us on the concrete, they don’t give us pads, they hurt us and the stunt coordinator sits there and he’s being like a god and I said, listen, me and Dennis Ruel, who is also in Rope a Dope, he came with me to do this movie, we’re stunt guys too. We’ve just been doing it a little bit longer and we know how to put these stuff together and we also know how to keep you safe so, as stunt guys, we understand what it means to hit the concrete and every time there had to be a new stunt, I had to demonstrate it or Dennis would demonstrate to get their trust and we’d do it right there on the concrete like that’s how you do it. Now, what pads do you need? We put pads on them, we get them all safe and in the end, the movie speaks for itself. There's no doubling. I think we doubled somebody three or four times for some big stuff, by and large though, the actors are doing all their own fighting. I challenge you to spot a double on that movie so that was, by far, one of the most important, or I guess, life-changing moments in my career when we were able to bring that kind of language into India and make something like Man Who Feels No Pain.Jeremy Lesniak:What I'm hearing isn’t just the facts and the excitement and everything, I'm hearing a lot of pride. It sounds like you're very aware of the hard work that you had to put in and the hard work that you continue to put in. As you're talking about these other stunt guys and demonstrating the movements, I think we can all relate to, not necessarily, the stunt side, the movie side of that but being in a martial arts school and having someone who maybe doesn’t feel like they need to train anymore, they just tell you what to do but the best instructors, the ones that people follow, that want to learn from, they're showing you how to do it. It creates so much trust, so much respect to mix it up with them.Eric Jacobus:You’ve mentioned earlier when I filled out the information about this in this interview, I put my title as student and I know, I remember now why I did that because I've always been a student and I never took a black belt because I was not ready to teach because I'm always in the process of learning. Now,  I understand blackbelts, they still learn. I totally get that but my whole point here is that I'm really just a student of the Hongkong film model and I really didn’t make any of that up. I'm just taking what worked in Hongkong that everybody seem to love and I'm just taking that and putting it in these other country whether it's India, Pakistan, wherever it's going to go, that model is transferable and it's, I don’t really have pride around because it's not really anything I created. I'm just taking what gifts I have and applying it and what you're saying is I have some combination, everybody’s got some combo things, everybody’s got that mix that makes them, really, a monopoly on what they do and with Man Who Feels No Pain, we’re an American team, we took the Hongkong model and now we’re putting it in Bollywood and with motion capture, I've got this personality trait and I take that with motion capture and now, it's like oh, maybe now the people with autism actually might have a special ability in this domain so maybe motion capture is actually something that’s very well-suited for the action mindset. It's just a matter of teaching a person with autism the moves and the way that you teach them, martial artists, they do teach people with autism and if you can teach them and they can drill it in and they can get it perfect, it might actually be better than most people when it comes to that thing.Jeremy Lesniak:This mindset that you have, there's an adaptability and I mean, maybe it's not the right word…there's a willingness to use your skillset in a flexible way, I guess is probably the better way to put it that strikes me that you could be plugged into probably any movie even if it wasn’t an action movie and still have an impact. Would you agree with that?Eric Jacobus:Yeah, that’s why we’re in games now because it's like the model is, the way I see it, is very similar. The style of filmmaking that we’re doing in the game development model and I've been plugged in to big projects before and I did Mortal Combat Legacy Season 2, they put striker in that and I came in and learned the choreography, I gave a little bit of input but as I'm doing the choreography as a performer, I'm thinking okay, here’s how you shoot it, but the thing is I can't tell the camera guy how to shoot the action. I can't do it. it's just not, I'm not able, even though I have 12 years of filmmaking experience at that point, I can't talk to the camera guy and tell him how it's best to shoot this action. He’s going to shoot it however he wants to shoot it and he’s shooting it in ways that I don’t really agree with. There's some stuff that I wish he’d shot over here instead. Obviously, I can't control the edit so I mean, if you plug me into certain situations, I'm not much more useful than any other stunt guy but whenever we’re brought in if I can come in at the beginning of a project in the very development stages, start crafting the action vision with the director then I just see myself as a good friend later where I can take his vision of how his action should play out and I can carry it from that moment all the way to the end, make sure that thing gets executed, that’s all I really care about.Jeremy Lesniak:Let’s imagine a world there a production house comes to you and says, you know what, here’s a $100 million, you make the movie that you want to make. Who are you bringing in? Who’s the director? Who's on  the stunt team? Who are the actors? What kind of a style might the film be? What's your dream movie?Eric Jacobus:If I were given $100 million, the movie I'm making might make the investors a little bit angry because I'm probably going to go for comedy and telling investors you want to put a $100 million into an action-comedy, I’ll probably can do it for 10. Probably 10 movies, how about that?Jeremy Lesniak:No. I want one big one. Let’s pretend that the investors just trust you completely.Eric Jacobus:Yeah, I think you can…how to use that money aside. I would love to make an action-comedy that really…you know what you can do nowadays is you can do the movie in motion capture so I would probably do it like that. I might not do live-action for $100 million. I might do like an Avatar-style with comedy. Not with a social message, I just want to do a good action comedy. I want to do a Pink Panther but do it in a future world where everything’s kind of gone haywire like an ideocracy-type thing and you bring on a great actor, someone like Jeff Goldblum and the thing about doing everything in 3D that Jeff Goldblum can do all his own acting scenes and then we’ll have stunt guys do all the action scenes and it will still be his face on it. He can be cracking jokes mid-action. That kind of language can be used at that point. You're not very limited by any of that. You can create the entire world. For a hundred million, man, you can make an insane world with an action move. For the action team, I’ll bring on some of the guys I've used in the past and we would kill it with the action, we’d pre-vis it for a month. We would make sure that action really taps in to something in the culture right now. We have to make sure that we kind of touch on whatever the audience’s mind is on a political level and try to touch that. I think John Wick: Parabellum touched on it. With comedy, maybe you touch on it in a different way. I don’t know. We have to find that. That’s the process of pre-vis and actually creating the action language and then, we’d execute it and I know we can execute it without a problem. Personally, I would love to see more comedies out there. Not many people make comedies now.Jeremy Lesniak:And when you think of that genre, what are some of the archetypal examples?Eric Jacobus:Well, the action-comedy…Jeremy Lesniak:Rush Hour or are you talking…Eric Jacobus:Perfect example but that was in what? 1999, ’98? And then Rush Hour 2…Jeremy Lesniak:The first one, yeah.Eric Jacobus:Yeah, so it's kind of a long time since you’ve had, and you’ve had Rush Hour 3 but there's something about the globalization of film that I think makes investors scared of doing comedy because they think that comedy has to be verbal. Comedy has to be sitcom-like and how do you make the sitcom global? Really hard, really hard. They're going to prefer to do something that is easier to convey some kind of epic drama like a Korean drama type thing, they would rather put their money there but they forget the fact that Jackie Chan was making internationally successful action movies because his body told the story. His body was the comedy. Everybody understands that. everybody understands physical comedy. Across the world, everybody will get it because everybody’s basically the same in that way. Now, humor is going to differ, verbal humor will differ. We all know that Germany does not laugh at American jokes a lot of the time. They have their own form of it. Japan has their own form of humor and I get that so I think it's a matter of finding and then, the issue of how do you get a performer who can physically do the action comedy and really translate that for the world and that’s something that Peter Sellers was gifted at. It's kind of strange to consider him an action comedian but that’s basically what he was. You can physically, he would subvert expectation all the time and just do things with the environment around him that would make anybody in any corner of the world laugh. At this point, for some reason, investors are afraid to put money there. They’d rather put money in the marvel movies and into Star Wars and everything is about killing and everything’s about vengeance now and everything is about disgruntled youth who just want to take out their anger on some authority figure, I mean, it's kind of just, it's kind of ugly at this point and some of those are great films. It's like the release valve for comedy is, I think, is so much more potent because with the Charlie Chaplin-type, Jackie Chan-type. If you portray that guy and you have him do things that are kind of self-deprecating and funny, physically funny things with his body, you can deliver the same kind of catharsis that the Marvel movies deliver but the thing is that you make him very human and then people understand what it's like to fall, at the same time, and they come away feeling that their hero is human just like them so the audience doesn’t think like hey, I'm a super, they come out and they don’t think that I'm a superhero. No, they think hey, that character in that movie is just like me. That’s a big difference. That’s a big difference so that the people aren’t trying to escape their world. They just find that there's somebody else in that movie suffering with them, you know what I mean? That was Charlie Chaplin’s whole angle with Little Tramp is that he was showing, he was the immigrant who was struggling at everybody and that time period in America felt the same way.Jeremy Lesniak:Let’s switch gears as we start to kind of wind down here, we’ve had some great conversation today but I’d be remiss and probably get some hate mail if I didn’t ask you for your favorite martial arts movie and actually, I'm going to ask that kind of two-split question. When you think of all those movies, the 300+ that you reviewed and all of the others, what’s your favorite movie overall and one of the questions that’s come up or one of the subjects that’s come up when we’ve had other stunt folk on the show, what’s your favorite fight scene? So, two separate questions.Eric Jacobus:So, one of the first Jackie Chan films that I watched, after I've seen Rumble in the Bronx and I went on this hunt to see what other Jackie Chan films were out there, I just went and tried to find the best one, just to see the best one right away and everybody at the time said Drunken Master 2, Drunken Master 2, that’s one so I went and got the Tai Seng VHS of Drunken Master 2 cost me, I think, $35 at the biggest store. They had to order it from the east coast and when I saw Drunken Master 2, there was something. It still stands up probably as the greatest martial arts film at that time and there was something in my head and I hadn’t seen much at the time. I was still 16, I was young, I hadn’t really reviewed many action but I knew when I saw that, I was like it's not going to get better than that and I was right, never really gotten much better.Jeremy Lesniak:What is it about that film?Eric Jacobus:It's the character. It's a rite of passage movie. Jackie Chan as Long Fei Hong, he’s a goofball, he doesn’t train. He doesn’t take things seriously. He doesn’t listen to his father, right? So, it's this arc where he comes around like he grows as a character. That’s extremely important. A lot of martial art movies are you killed my master, I'm going to kill you and then, the hero gets what he wants, right? There's a little bit of growth there but not like this, you know what I mean? And Jackie in the movie is not killing people to do it. that’s the other thing too. He doesn’t kill people to accomplish his mission which is retrieving the Chinese artifact from the evil westerners. That was the story arc. That doesn’t really matter. It's really his rite of passage that matters in that movie and you can tell that’s where he is the entire time. His body is showing that the whole time. The maturity that he goes through, thorough those fight scene and it even plays out in the fact that Lau Kar-leung was the co-director early on and he’s featured prominently in the early fight scenes and Jackie is kind of under him for a lot of that and that’s why those first fight scenes in Drunken Master 2 on the train, in the fish market, they're very Shaw Brothers. It's very old school, very kind of like holding the tradition and what happens is last third of the movie when Jackie goes to the factory, that was his, that’s when it becomes Jackie Chan full arc and that’s like the beautiful transition is like I don’t think Lau was involved in that because Jackie fired him and I could be wrong and I'm happy to be checked on that so don’t quote me but you look at the action there and you look at the action earlier, it's like night and day and it still makes a great film because the arc works so at the end, Jackie’s kind of taking over. He’s doing his own thing at that mill in Shanghai and it really becomes his masterpiece at that point and the way that he utilizes the alcohol and the environment, everything around him and just doesn’t become this Shaw Brothers Kung Fu movie, it becomes this character story and how this guy interacts with these two people that are trying to kill him and how he uses the alcohol and how he just finishes out the whole thing is fantastic and that’s where I stand on the best action movie, best martial arts.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah, it's a classic and anybody who hasn’t seen it, try it out. Definitely, you should check it out. Now, is your favorite fight scene in there too?Eric Jacobus:I mean, it would be a cop out to say that. Here’s one fight scene that I love which is Sammo Hung in Pedicab Driver when he fights Lau Kar-leung in that. It's the fight in the casino where Sammo fights him and the reason I love that fight is because that was the point, it was 1989, so Sammo had perfected editing, shooting at that point and he had really honed the craft to the point where he could do, he could almost do like quick editing and keep people engaged with the quick editing but quick editing made sense. It didn’t make you, it didn’t cause confusion, it was clarifying and you would see that with all of Sammo’s stuff and I think Sammo is the master editor of all the Hongkong choreographers and if you were to back up to Wheels on Meals in 1982, that end fight is, maybe that’s the best fight. I'm not sure, right, because, again, it's hard to pick a favorite but if you even go back to Bruce Lee with the Big Boss, I would maybe I would say the Big Boss final fight would be one of my favorites too because again, you would see this crazy transition. You look back in time, I keep jumping all over the place but if I had to settle on one, maybe it would be the Big Boss final fight because it kind of was a strange one, maybe some people might think, but here’s why I picked it because that was the movie that launched his career and before that, you see all these footage of Bruce Lee training in his backyard, he’s kicking bags and he’s testing out kicks for the camera. Bruce is doing kicks that nobody else has done before. When you look at the Big Boss, every camera shot is so deliberate and the other choreographer on that movie is Han Ying Chieh. Han Ying Chieh was an old school Kung Fu guy. He didn’t choreograph the way that Bruce Lee did so when you see the two of them fight at the end, it looks like 2 choreographers battling it out. It's almost like they choreographed their own fight and that fight was so magnetic because the guy that wins out is Bruce because that style is what then took over in the industry which was the high kicks because he really popularized that. Before then, nobody was doing high kicks, nobody, which was strange because high kicks were around in Japan and Korea for a hundred years for that but nobody was doing that but Bruce Lee knew how to tap into the Korean martial art world, the Japanese martial art world. He trained with a lot of veterans in the US who had brought Korean martial arts over to the US. Chuck Norris and these guys, they were tournament fighters and they were using kicks because they had better reach. Bruce looked in that going even though, those kicks may not work in the street, they look way better than anything else we’ve got, right? You look at Hongkong movies up to that point, no kicks. Once Bruce Lee enters the scene, now you have kicks so I credit the Big Boss final fight for essentially, practically everything that we know about martial art cinema is due to that fight and Bruce’s involvement.Jeremy Lesniak:Awesome and yeah, another classic and for people listening who may not have seen those movies, I mean, there's your homework. Important to understand, maybe you care about martial arts movies, you should be watching those two because, as you said, there is so much that comes from those films that we still see today.Eric Jacobus:Absolutely.Jeremy Lesniak:So, lets pull out a crystal ball, what’s the future holding for you? What are your goals? What are you working towards?Eric Jacobus:I would love is to keep building this business, SuperAlloy, the motion capture and action design company we started and really begin to create platform to develop action design for movies, games, even live shows and I think that this requires some research. I've been putting together a documentary called the Art of Violence, try and release it by the end of the year and a lot of the stuff I've been talking about is going to be in that documentary and what we want to do is to start to kind of unravel and really dissect the world of violence and understand what it is that brings people to the theater, to video games, whatever it is to engage in violence, cathartic violence. We’re not trying to say whether it’s a good or bad thing. We’re just want to know why people do it. Do people get addicted to this stuff? Maybe some do, maybe others don’t. Do people react violently because they play games? Maybe some do, maybe some don’t. Maybe some people are violent to begin with. A lot of things could be done there and we would like to be at the forefront of that so that we can understand how to craft action design in ways that other people don’t and I think, like you said, the line between games and movies is blurring more and more and more and at some point, Netflix thought you're going to have video games. You already see this with Google releasing a console that’s going to stream games and I think that virtual filmmaking is just going to keep, like it's going to keep progressing. Virtual filmmaking just doing live filmmaking but integrating 3D into it as you're making a movie and I'm really excited about that. we really want to get the forefront of that and I think that as long as we are keeping out finger on the pulse of the action industry and also, keeping our finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the world, what crisis is happening now? Are people reacting a certain way to violence that they didn’t before? There's probably a reason why Grand Theft Auto 3 did so well when it came out a month after 9/11 because before 9/11, the games that were popular, the best-selling games were all based on rules and tournaments and sports, even fighting games, they had rules to them but then Grand Theft Auto 3 comes out after 9/11, people now are seeing violence in a totally different way. People kind of has this mass PTSD about it. They see violence as random and lawless so Grand Theft Auto 3 comes out and that’s kind of like the conduit for people and so, we want to understand the stuff and we would like to do a lot of research on this and design accordingly.Jeremy Lesniak:Fascinating. Now, if people want to find what you're doing, website, social media, any of that. Where can we send them?Eric Jacobus:You can go to ericjacobus.com and my YouTube channel is easy to find just search ‘Eric Jacobus’. It’s youtube.com/ericjacobusofficial and you can follow pretty much everything just by going to our YouTube channel.Jeremy Lesniak:Cool. Now, of course, we’re going to link to all that stuff at the show notes. For somebody that might be new to the show, whistlekickmartialartsradio.com, so you can head on over to find that there. This has been great! This has been awesome and you’ve given us more of an insight into the way the stunt world works. We’ve had a few folks on the show and with each of them, we get another piece and part of my goal in doing that because your martial arts story is similar but at the same time, very different than probably the majority of people listening today but one of the things that I love about martial arts is that it can be a vehicle, a conduit for doing so many different things so we try to bring on people who have done many different things with their martial arts and, of course, stunts is one of them and here we’ve talked about games, we’ve talked about so many different things just today and people might be listening, nodding their heads saying yeah, I could see myself doing that so I appreciate you sharing all this.Eric Jacobus:I love what I do and the entire message the whole time was that now is just the kid growing up in a small town and it wasn’t really…it's not divine, it's not like some kind of exceptional gift that I have. I have two things that I put together and I hope that people can see some hope in their own lives that if you have faith and you walk forward in faith, there are good things in store for you.Jeremy Lesniak:You can probably tell that I had some fun in this on. Getting to talk to someone who took their martial arts and turned it into something that we all get to enjoy, we get to see the results of the work of the hard, hard-working stunt people including Mr. Jacobus and without them, where would our favorite martial arts movies be? Where would video games be? I don’t think anybody would watch martial art movies without stunt people. I don’t think video games, at least a lot of the genres that are popular, would be nearly as compelling without the stunt people who are involved in the motion capture and all that so thank you for coming on the show, telling us what you do, how you do it and sharing so much of yourself in the process. I appreciate your time and hope I get to talk to you soon. If you want to find out more about Mr. Jacobus or anything else regarding whistlekick or this show, go on over to whistlekickmartialartsradio.com, find the show notes. This is episode 422. If you leave a comment, maybe follow them on social media. Maybe you want to follow us on social media, we are @whistlekick, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram. We got a lot going on. We have different stuff going on on all four of those channels so you might want to spend a little time on each. My personal email, jeremy@whistlekick.com. Don’t forget the code PODCAST15, get 15% off anything at whistlekick.com and if that’s not the way that you want to show your support, totally fine. Share an episode. Follow us on social media. Tell a friend at your training place. We don’t use a specific term like dojo or dojang, at the training hall, your academy, whatever we call it about what we do. Tell them about our show. 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