Digger’s Dance in the Snow

Last week on the Digger Man Blog we brought you the Hyundai dancing on ice, this week we have a whole dance troop of excavators performing for your delight!

This video was highlighted to me by Laura Parkes, mother of young digger and tractor enthusiast Charlie Parkes, aka @diggerlife119 on Instagram, who suggested it would be a great fit for the blog. I agree entirely and am delighted to cover the story here.

The video features employees of Quebec based excavation company Bertrand Ostiguy Inc, who brought together a collection of six 21-tonne excavators from the likes of Hitachi, CASE, Komatsu and Link Belt to perform a well-choreographed dancing digger routine, all set to an orchestral version of Metallica's classic 'Nothing Else Matters' by Finnish symphonic metal band Apocalyptica and filmed in a gloriously snow-covered field which really adds to the whole atmosphere of the video.

The whole routine was organized and filmed by the clearly talented 14-year-old Julian Ares, whose uncle owns the excavation business.

Talking to Montreal based CTV News about the stunt, Julian said, “My uncle had this idea a long time ago. We did a Zoom chat for Christmas and the idea came up about doing some dancing excavators. We just laughed at this but we ended up thinking about it all night”. 

As to why he chose the heavy metal song as the background music, Ares said it wasn't his initial choice. 

“At the start I wanted to do something that was slow because excavators are really big and can't make really fast movements. I wanted a song that was slow," he said. But his initial choices had too many high notes, and he felt the heavy equipment needed something with some more bass. That's when his uncle suggested he look up the legendary hard rockers. 

For the eagle-eyed digger spotters out there, two 8-tonne machines join the routine towards the end of the video, culminating in a total of eight machines performing at the end of the video. It truly is a stunning bit of footage for a young man who clearly has a career in media ahead of him, enjoy the video, its EPIC!