I mentioned in my last post that I was on American Ninja Warrior. For the past year I have had so much to say and for the life of me I wish I documented the journey better, but I still remember everything so clearly as if it happened yesterday. With that being said, this week is the process of applying for the show.
Everything starts with the application. The long, boring, and tedious process of the application. When I tell you the application was hard to get through, I mean it. The application itself was about nine pages long with questions that really make you question how well you actually know yourself. There isn’t really much to say about it, but I will say this. One page is full of legal questions about if you every been sent to jail, have you ever been convicted of anything, and stuff like that. It was a good ten questions or so like that.
Then at the bottom of the page after all the legal questions there is the most important question on the application. “Can you swim?” Now you may laugh at that, I know I did. However, that a really important question since everything is above water and while no one plans on falling in the water, you are almost guaranteed to fall. Trust me, I know.
Once you survived the nine pages of questions, you have to submit a submission video that tells them a little about yourself, why they should pick you, and showcase your ninja skills. They give you between two and three minutes for the video so that was a lot of pressure for me because I’ve never made a video like that. Thankfully I had a friend of mine who as a two-season competitor helped me with the structure of the video. For me I knew my story was all about colorblindness and my warped wall skills. As much as I hate to say it, but I only used colorblindness because it gave me a better chance of getting on because it was my sob story. Unfortunately, sob stories work. They just love them, and I hate that, but I had to work with it. So, me being me, I had been recording the submission video all through the summer of 2022 before the applications even opened. I knew I wanted to be one of the first names the producers see when looking through the applications. In order to do that I needed to submit extremely early in the application season which is from late September through early December. By the end of the first week, I finalized my submission video and when I got home from vacation, I uploaded the video to the application and hit submit.
One thing I just want to mention before I finish this off is that my submission video was shot and edited using free software on the iPhone. I only say this because if you want to submit for American Ninja Warrior in the coming seasons, you should know that you do not need high end equipment. As long as the content is good and you tell them the information, they need than it’s fine. If you do some research, you’ll actually find that the video doesn’t even need to be high production. I just wanted to make my video nice for others to watch as a personal preference.
That’s pretty much the application process for American Ninja Warrior. After that you just wait and pray you get a phone call. Next week I will be talking about the moments leading up to the call. So, make sure you keep an eye out for that.