Jumping off a 50-foot cliff is dangerous in itself, but doing a backflip off a cliff while your upper body is on fire? That’s all in a day’s work for senior mechanical engineering major Daniel Rosenberry.

Rosenberry, whose flaming cliff jump has more than 24,000 views on YouTube since it was posted on Dec. 3, is part of JoyRiders.TV, a production company he formed with his older brother, Jonathan Rosenberry, in 2009. The pair, along with two other members, film extreme stunts in the vein of the TV show Nitro Circus, something they said they’ve been doing since they were kids.

“We’ve been doing crazy stuff since we were little,” Jonathan Rosenberry said. “Usually Daniel’s the guinea pig, but I put myself in that position sometimes too. For now, Daniel usually does the stunts, and I’ll film and do all the post-production work.”

In the cliff-jumping video, Rosenberry lights the back of his sweatshirt on fire and leaps off the edge of the cliff, flipping backward in the air while flames fly out behind him. The video was filmed in one take, giving him one chance to nail the stunt — and preventing him from being too concerned about the jump itself, he said.

Daniel Rosenberry

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“I was more scared that it wouldn’t work and we would have wasted our time not getting the shot we wanted,” Rosenberry said. “I had some butterflies, but that’s pretty standard for jumping off a cliff. I was more focused on the pressure of being able to do it the right way. Once we got going, it was really fun.”

Rosenberry and a team of JoyRiders spent the entire day practicing the cliff jump without the pyrotechnics in an effort to ensure the safety of the jump and that they could frame the stunt well.

It’s far from the most dangerous stunt Rosenberry’s ever done, he said.

“A lot of the snowboarding tricks and jumps we’ve filmed have been more life-threatening. They seem normal, so people don’t always see it as dangerous,” he said. “The jump while I was on fire is visually more dangerous-looking, but in my eyes, it’s not the craziest thing I’ve ever done.”

The brothers took a number of safety precautions for the jump, acquiring protective gear, keeping a fire extinguisher on hand and determining the water was deep enough to jump into. And though they determined Rosenberry would be safe throughout the entirety of the stunt, he suffered a small injury.

“Since he flipped into his own flame, he did get a little burned on his nose,” Jonathan Rosenberry said. “It was really small, but it did blister, and his mustache hairs got a little burned.”

Senior economics and finance major Ben McCartney, who was present for Rosenberry’s flaming cliff jump, said it was the “gnarliest thing” he’d ever seen in person.

Daniel Rosenberry jumps off cliff

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“You literally couldn’t see his upper body. He was just a fireball with legs,” McCartney said. “I’ve seen them do some dangerous stuff, but this is definitely the craziest — and best-produced — stunt they’ve done.”

Initially, the brothers planned to film someone wakeboarding on fire. The plan didn’t work out because the wind from the boat exhausted the flames, Rosenberry said.

“We had fire equipment left over, though, so we were like ‘OK, we have to do something with it,’” he said. “So we had this idea: Why don’t we just jump of a cliff? It’s pretty standard, so we knew it would work.”

In the future, the brothers hope to “up the ante” for JoyRiders.TV, Jonathan Rosenberry said.

“We’d like to film some more fire stuff, but my mom isn’t crazy about it,” he said, laughing. “We just like to think of things that haven’t been done before, that are challenging and would be fun to watch. You’ll just have to stay tuned.”