Chasing Legacies

We have always been enthralled by an individual’s desire to pursue something greater than themselves, the relentless pursuit to achieve the next great thing and the insatiable desire to always do better and motivate others. We call this pursuit, living your legacy.

When we think of people who continually live their legacy, Karl Shakur immediately comes to mind. His story began in Sub-Saharan Africa where his life took a huge turn when he moved to Kansas on his own at the age of 19. Karl made a life-altering decision to follow his passion as an adventure photographer and visual artist. Before he knew it, he became an award-winning photographer whose story would be told internationally.

THE ULTIMATE COLLAB

In the Spring of 2020, we decided to partner with filmmaker Sam Newton to create ‘Chasing Legacies’ - a series of videos that show the world how extraordinary individuals live their legacy.

We partnered with Karl because we knew his story embodies what we believe in. Over the course of 7 days, Karl and Sam set off to the Costa Rican jungle to shoot our third Chasing Legacies campaign.

With the help of local guide and friend, Julio Carvajal, the team was given the opportunity to capture footage and images that very few have the chance to capture - and that’s when things got fun.

SAM’S POINT OF VIEW

We know that our experience isn’t possible for everyone but if you ever get the chance to travel throughout Costa Rica, we highly recommend that you do it in a helicopter. The natural beauty of this country is unlike any other. The plan was to get there quickly and get the shots we planned ahead of time - but those plans went out the window when inspiration grabbed hold of us. Next thing we knew we had dozens of memory cards filled with incredible footage and content.

We honestly had the adventure of a lifetime and an amazing creative team on the ground that made it so easy to come up with new and unique shots that matched the story we were trying to tell about Karl’s adventurous life as a travel photographer.

I’ve got to say one of my favorite shots was the motorcycle scene, watching Karl rip on that through the jungle after borrowing the motorcycle from a local made for some incredible footage. In all honesty though, exploring this amazing country and getting to know the people while we were there was the biggest highlight of it all.

IT WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO GO THAT FAR

The original plan was to shoot a commercial using one person who represented what it meant to live a legacy. Both Sam and Karl did an amazing job filming this project, so good in fact that they ended up with way more footage than what we knew what to do with.

After we realized how amazing the commercial was turning out and how much excess footage we had - we came up with the idea to run an editing competition where people would edit the footage for a chance to help us out on our next big chasing legacies project. This is where the Vincero X Sam Newton Edition Competition was born.

A WORD OF ADVICE

You never know what new and unplanned adventures may happen when you get out of your comfort zone. Our journey to capture Karl and his legacy turned into a one-of-a-kind editing contest to find our next content creator. So in the words of Karl himself: