Punctuating a park run with a no-look, over-the-shoulder basketball shot doesn’t sound all too crazy at first glance. It’s a harmless little novelty to throw on top of a course that features a trampoline and a handful of other features you’d never actually see in a freestyle competition, after all. But pulling off the shot was a big deal in Sebastien Toutant’s recent viral park run, if only because the entire course — 22 hits in two minutes and 30 seconds of snowboarding — hinged on putting a ball through a hoop. And the Olympic gold medalist called it “almost fake” because the whole thing was designed to be shot in one take.
The Obstacle Course was really two years in the making for Toutant (Seb Toots). In 2020, he started doing parkour and trick shots at home and shared the videos with his social media following. In early 2022, Toutant sat down with his team to brainstorm ways to bring those old at-home parkour and trick shot videos into his snowboarding. He wanted to make something the whole world could enjoy, including non-snowboarders, while giving the snowboard community something it could still appreciate. His early ambition was to have a course so packed with features he’d be doing something different every five seconds.
“It’s really fun. It’s like building a house, you know? You’re making all those decisions and when it finally builds up, it’s really cool,” he says.
Long before a single feature was even built, Toutant scouted different places that could hold such an ambitious run, and the course itself was designed on a computer. They added things like a trampoline, a giant bouncing beach ball (aka an Omnikin ball) in a build that took more than two weeks.
“I wanted the viewer to be immersed, flowing from one feature to another,” says director Max Trudel. “And then you get to the end of the video and you kinda don’t remember how it started and you just want to watch it over and over again.”
“If Seb doesn’t land the perfect run, the project is just…it’s done,” he added.
The final product (above) was great. But the full behind-the-scenes story builds a whole new sense of appreciation — gimmicky trick shots and all.
Watch the full behind-the-scenes story of The Obstacle Course.
