A flip clock spun by a Black & Decker drill. A director chasing a Porsche out of a warehouse on a longboard. A single actor who drives, rides a mountain bike, and acts his way through a four-minute film without a stunt double. That’s “Jaunt,” a short film by Blk Elk Co. that just landed on YouTube after touring globally as part of the Banff Centre Mountain Film World Tour.
The film stars a Safari-modded Porsche 944 built by 944 Safari, the Northwest Arkansas shop owned by Daniel Davis. It is a naturally aspirated car, not the turbocharged variant collectors chase, and that is part of the point. The 944’s front-engine, rear-transaxle layout makes it lighter and more tossable than its bigger sibling, the 928.
Davis lifted the suspension, bolted on aggressive tires, added Hella lights, and fitted racks to carry a mountain bike and a full-size spare. Function over flash.
Director Daniel Mitchell shot the film on a Sony FX6 paired with Sirui anamorphic lenses. The opening sequence was staged inside 944 Safari’s own shop, doubling as a drab office set dressed with thrift store props. A CRT monitor with no visible branding. A self-help book whose spine reads “Real World, Here I Come.” The generic misery is deliberate.
Mitchell pulled off a single-shot transition from that pitch-black interior set to the bright, noisy modification shop floor, pneumatic impacts whirring as actor Justice Jax Berry climbs into the Porsche. It is the kind of move that looks effortless and requires anything but.
The camera work outside gets wilder. Blk Elk Co. operates a dually Ford Transit as its mobile camera rig, a truck that has been wheeled across the American West on assignments. For tracking shots on the dirt roads outside town, they deployed a Noxon cable cam capable of 43 mph, a DJI Mavic 2 Pro drone, and a GoPro Hero 13 mounted on a YT Industries mountain bike.
The cable cam footage through the woods is the film’s technical high point. A crew member controls the rig remotely while watching a gimbal-fed handheld display. Trees rip past in the foreground while the shot stays locked on Berry threading singletrack. Matching the rider’s tempo through those turns took real coordination.
Northwest Arkansas happens to sit on some of the best mountain biking trail systems in the country, funded in large part by the Walton family. The region’s cycling culture is baked into the landscape, and the film treats it as inseparable from the car. The 944 is the vehicle that gets you there. The bike is the reason you went.
The soundtrack layers jazz horns and percussion over the office scenes before pulling back to let the 944’s big-bore four-cylinder exhale on gravel. An original track called “How Sad” by A Dark Skinned Ghost carries the middle section. Sound design does as much storytelling here as the camera.
Berry handles every role. He sits at the desk. He drifts the parking lot. He sends it on singletrack. He returns to the warehouse muddier, wearing a long-sleeve tee instead of the button-down and tie. The faceless boss waves him back in. All of it happened on a lunch break.
That framing is what makes “Jaunt” stick. It is not a build story or a spec rundown. It is four minutes arguing that the car you own, even a 40-year-old naturally aspirated Porsche with a lift kit, can be the escape hatch from a fluorescent-lit life. You just have to turn the key.
Blk Elk Co. is a small creative studio out of the Ozark hills. They are not backed by a manufacturer’s marketing budget. The film’s tools, a dolly, a drone, a cable cam, a dually van, are workmanlike. The results are not.
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