Off-road racer BJ Baldwin and Black Rifle Coffee Company film "Recoil Reloaded: Sand & Sky" in Southern California in 2022. Black Rifle Coffee Company photo.
Off-road racer BJ Baldwin and Black Rifle Coffee Company have just released a high-octane, action-packed, very Michael Bay-sian addition to Baldwin’s famous Recoil video series. At six-and-a-half minutes, Recoil Reloaded: Sand & Sky unfolds like an adrenaline junkie’s wet dream, featuring everything from fiery explosions to dune-hopping in Southern California.
The video opens with Baldwin, an eight-time off-road racing champ, speeding through a desert town in a Porsche 911 Turbo. Sitting shotgun is his trusty navigator, BRCC co-founder Mat Best. They are chasing down a stash of missing coffee. Then a BRCC trophy truck appears, and the race is on.
Who wins? You’ll have to watch the video to find out, but here’s a clue: Baldwin is behind the wheel of both vehicles — the 911 and the truck.
The 43-year-old Baldwin is a professional precision driver well-known for racing trophy trucks. But perhaps his biggest claim to fame is Recoil, an online video series in which Baldwin pushes his off-road truck to its limits. Together, his four previous Recoil videos have amassed more than 100 million views on YouTube.
Baldwin joined BRCC’s motorsports team in early 2021. Recoil Reloaded has been in the works since then. Shot in 2022, it is the first Recoil film Baldwin produced in collaboration with Black Rifle Coffee. Thanks to BRCC and Sweatpants Media, Recoil Reloaded has a tighter storyline, slicker special effects, and even more ridiculous humor than its predecessors.
“Every other Recoil video is super awesome on the action,” Macgregor — the film’s director of photography — told Coffee or Die. “But can we elevate the visuals, the cinematography, a little bit and make it feel more like a movie?
“We used the tools that you would use in a traditional feature, like a $200 million Hollywood movie, and applied them to our six-minute-long film here.”
The hard work paid off. In the video, Baldwin pulls off one insane stunt after another as he races against time — and himself — for an elusive bag of coffee beans. At one point, he even launches the trophy truck 35 feet in the air over a moving train.
BJ Baldwin and his BRCC trophy truck. Black Rifle Coffee Company photo.
“It was terrifying,” Baldwin said. “For the train jump, we set up a bunch of cameras in different places, and we only did it once — I was only going to do it once.”
While the action sequences were shot in remote SoCal locations, including El Centro and Glamis Dunes, the dialogue portions were filmed in front of a green screen. Baldwin and Best spent a day shooting the shit in Baldwin’s real-life personal vehicle — the Porsche 911 Turbo — while pretending to rip through the desert. For Baldwin, it was easier to act and drive separately, especially since he isn’t an actor.
“The driving was easy,” Baldwin said (easy for him to say). “I usually don’t have any dialogue. It’s just straight action. So that makes Recoil Reloaded different: It’s got an injection of humor and dialogue.
“It’s definitely not like stuff that I’ve filmed in the past. That’s why it’s not Recoil 5. It’s Recoil Reloaded.”
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Jenna Biter is a staff writer at Coffee or Die Magazine. She has a master’s degree in national security and is a Russian language student. When she’s not writing, Jenna can be found reading classics, running, or learning new things, like the constellations in the night sky. Her husband is on active duty in the US military. Know a good story about national security or the military? Email Jenna.
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