Le Parkour, a 2007 documentary directed by Eric Morrison early in his year as a student in Film Production, has hit the elusive one-million-view milestone on YouTube!

The doc is a ground-level look at the acrobatic urban pastime, juxtaposing athletic feats with a less familiar side of the story: the novice practitioner. It’s gotten – and kept – the attention of online audiences for three years now.

We caught up with Eric to get his take on passing a million and a look back at the making of the film.

What have you been up to since graduating?

Eric: I graduated in 2007, right before the big writers’ strike. Needless to say, there wasn’t a whole lot of work in Vancouver. I applied for a job at Motion Media, a small media company in Fort St. John, which turned out to be a great career move. Let’s just say that there were very few media outlets in Northern BC, which meant that if anything newsworthy happened up there, chances were we’d be called to cover it. I got to shoot stories for CTV, Global, and the CBC by working there. Moving to a smaller market like that, even for a short while, can be a huge payoff for a recent student in terms of opportunities.

Since then, I moved back to Vancouver where I shot and edited a lot of web video for different companies. In January, I was hired by Radio-Canada Vancouver [owned by the CBC] as a videographer/editor/director for the local French news program, and I’ve been editing communications video content for Telus on a contract basis since September. Busy!

How does it feel to see this doc you made years ago –  and very early in your time at VFS, no less – reaching this kind of milestone?

Eric: It’s great to know that people are still interested in the piece. Le Parkour had a great run – it screened at DOXA in the short documentary program, and I was invited on a panel there to discuss the art of short documentary filmmaking. Le Parkour has been used as teaching material in documentary classes in the Film Production program, and now, one million views on YouTube! The pacing is great and the shooting is top-notch – I was lucky to have worked with a great team that I gelled so well with. Now if only those Parkour guys weren’t so darn talented, they wouldn’t have made Angus – who was supposed to represent the average guy – look so pathetic in comparison!

Big picture, what does it – or can it – mean for a filmmaker to get those eyeballs?

Eric: It means you’re on to something. You did something right. I think we chose a topic that interests a lot of people, one that is very visual and engaging to watch. Those aspects definitely helped us gain an audience. But if people watch it to the end – in other words, if you’re able to keep a viewer interested on guys monkeying around for seven minutes – you’ve been successful at telling a compelling story, and that gives you confidence as a filmmaker to take that next step, to move on to that next project with a steadier hand and a better understanding of what makes a good story.

Thanks, Eric, and congratulations on this feat! Readers can check out a stunning array of other student documentaries – on the VFS YouTube channel. Here, now, is Le Parkour: