Fisheyes, Mixtapes, And Innocent Bystanders: A Love Letter to the Skate Video

I vaguely recollect the first time I realized my relationship with skateboarding would be an on-and-off game. I was about ten or eleven, and I had brought my friends to the skatepark for my birthday. I had been into the whole thing for a while. As kids do, I got an adrenaline rush from playing a Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 copy on my PlayStation 2 that I found for four euros in one of those now-defunct crappy game stores. You know, the ones that used to sell big fat joysticks with a thousand and one shady emulated and pixelated games; you would hook it up to your boxy CRT television and play games ranging from frogger to Formula 1. Yes, I had that one too, it was in a Darth Vader design.

I played THPS4 so much I had memorized the entire first level, never being in a position to progress through the other maps because I was missing a Memory Card, the key component of saving your gameplay and continuing tomorrow. I had the soundtrack memorized by heart and its lyrics vaguely so - I didn't understand a word of English back then, much less so when it was sung. Wanting to try out the real thing, I begged my dad and he bought me a 30 euro complete deck, with an image of a spaceship resembling the ones you found in the Bigpoint browser-based games, look it up. The whole thing was sketchy; wheels made of the hardest PVC blend that resonated like a miner's hardhat when kissing the ground, trucks that could have been made with prison-technique melting of aluminium foil sheets that wore off on the first grind (not that I knew how to do one), bearings that could have had cubes inside instead of balls for all I knew, and a board more fragile than the one your grandpa has left outside in the rain for the last ten years.

But it was a board, and it rolled, with a little effort. I managed the balancing pretty quick. After all, a small size pretty much puts one's center of gravity close to the board, forming a perfect triangle with its two ends so as to lower the topple-over rate to a minimum. That ratio does however not account for dumbassery and cool-itude, so my dumb wannabe-cool ass attempted to show an ollie to my friends when we were bored of just cruising in the maybe 25-by-25 meter hangar filled to the brim with quarterpipes, drops, and all thingamadoodles (forgive me, cool skaters) that actual skaters used instead of slaloming between the rabbit-toothed pantcrappers we were. It's enough to say my ollie was a complete fail, and it hurt both on the inside of my belly and the outside of my knee. I'd soon drop the board for a while and leave it in a corner with all the other unused stuff.

Several boards in and out, the last one that I haven't touched for three year is staring right at me from where I'm writing this maybe fifteen years later, its nose and a quarter of a wheel peeking behind paper bags and cardboard boxes and books on my reading list, staring with the same magnetic pull it manages to muster up in me every odd thirteen months. Come on. Skate me. You want to. You're tired of watching those videos, you want to live them. But how could I possibly live through a bigspin over 6 steps when throughout the years I've had the same problem with my board as I've had with my PS2 copy of Tony Hawk's Kid Struggles To Save His Game Because The Memory Stick Is Too Expensive? I could never "save" my real-life skateboarding progress because every once in a while, my brain would shut off the need to feel concrete roll under my feet for just long enough to completely reset my feeling of comfort on a board, and bring my Trickedex to a whopping one trick. A sketchy beginner's frontside 180 on which (I think?) I can still half-manage not to sprain my ankle. I've forgotten how to do a shove it, how to drop in, or how to get my shit together for a rolling ollie with a real obstacle about four times now. I'm shit scared of getting hurt, and nowhere near the physical condition that would allow me to get hurt enough to become good. And if that sounds like a whiney excuse for not persevering, it pretty much is, but that's not the point. For all my fear of skateboarding, all my disdain for the peculiar tough-guy clique-mentality species of skater (not all skaters, duh), and all my indecisiveness on committing to anything other than a Git repo, I'm still finding time for the intricate art form of skate videos.

Call them skate tapes, parts, favorite playlist sources, corporate marketing schemes, or very clear admissible evidence in court for charges of misdemeanor and minor vandalism, these videos are like none other.

Sorry, other sports people, but your videos pale in comparison to watching a fifteen year old laughing off a broken arm from a garage-high drop. They're nowhere near as funny as seeing a forty-something fall butt-first on their board and continue rolling down a San Francisco hill, as chill and mellow as a camera shot five centimeters above the ground towards a nose manual on a busy plaza, or as heartwarming as a hug after a trick done on the twelfth try.

No matter how engaging some parts might be, climbing movies for example set out for half interview half day-in-my-life approaches. You have to be present to understand the next part, there's a whole backstory, and a specific lingo you have to get past. You can't just show it to your non-fan friends, because every five minutes the impressive big wall shot switches to a talking head, and that can bore some to death. I'm not throwing climbing movies out. I love them, and I've seen amazing, heartwarming, adrenaline-packed ones I'll cherish, but they're a completely different feel. It's a documentary about sports.

Other sport videos (again, not all), the likes of which have been wildly popularized by big cash holders such as Monster with cars and downhill bikes and Red Bull with pretty much everything else from kitesurf to skiing, are cleverly and carefully orchestrated to maximize two things: the megalomaniac wow-factor and corporate logo-bombing. Expert sport movie videographers get the Big Budget to film ten takes per scene in pristine 8k 80 FPS quality from two crane shots and two other helicopters-now-drones. They slap on color correction, bring out the saturation of the Brand Color, minutely tinker the start and end and effect curve of a slow motion shot as as smooth as a toddler's cheeks, and do big-boy audio mix-and-master of The Music The Movie Deserves. They bring out the hero in the human, the grandeur in the moves, remove all signs of hesitation and fragility. The adjectives are impressive and incredible, sublime and mesmerizing, ka-ching!

That's because there's a ton of profit to be made from these videos. They're seasonal blockbusters and entire warehouses of fantasy inner-dialogue roleplaying. Every season comes with its own package. Peak winter is exclusively for ski and snowboard, with the exception of the occasional snowy mountain bike. Those of us who are neither near a mountain nor near a pile of cash to spare project our dreams of feeling the cold embrace of a breeze and the rhythmic fast-paced cracking of the snow while we stare at a first-person shot of incredible (really, I'm not downplaying how talented they are) athletes go down slopes with an incline the half of which we wouldn't dare touch. In the spring, we're heading off to the woodsy transition from a dramatic needle-ridden foliage to the light-mellowing flat leaves, hands-on with a bike we can afford only if we sell the family car. Peak summertime is home to surfing, waterski, skydiving, and paragliding, and you know the drill. In each of those videos we leave our envy, fascination, or boredom, and none of it would be possible if the image quality wasn't as sharp, if the audio balance wasn't as carefully set to make us hear what the athletes hear, and take us on a trip through the music.

No matter how impressive the high-performance athletes in those videos are, the footage is made for Everyone. Everyone, as a branded customer target group, not "anyone" as an anonymous and happy result of pure chance. And that transpires enormously when you superpose those videos with most skate tapes.

Far on the opposite side of the spectrum, made with just as much care and love and affection and skill, skate videos are raw, funny, dumb, a banger to listen as much as they are to watch, and above all human. Their recipe is one for disaster, as the crews set out to risk breaking more shins than boards, pissing off bystanders and security guards and police and rogue taxi drivers with a score to settle. And that's part of what makes their success so sweet.

The image definition isn't lifelike. Why the hell should it be? Have you noticed the less blurry a skate video is, the more boring it is to watch? The fisheye lens, and cult-status objet-fétiche that is the Sony DCR-VX1000 guarantee us a crystal-clear 480p crusty ragged video. Nothing better than this to put some distance between you and the video, and at the same time make you want to reach out. There's some quality in that low-definition I haven't managed to crack yet, so I'll leave it at that: it's better when it's not HD.

They come in sizes usually from about thirty minutes to just under an hour, depending on the videographer's mood, and they often roll like music albums. The opening sets the entire scene for the next thirty minutes of wheel squeaking. Sometimes, it's eased-in shots of seemingly effortless gliding across an empty street, complete with its downtempo track, engaging in a quasi-narrative run through everyone's talents and someone's passionate and sensible artistic touch. Or it's grandiose, with daring drop-ins on highway lanes, signaling that sometime soon you'll see stuff you could never even imagine doing yourself, you'll curse the skaters and their wits, and with every drop you'll feel closer to the ground from your fish eye perspective.

And at times, almost making light of near-fatal situations, it starts off with a clusterfuck of rails saying hello to nuts, boards kissing the camera lens, police chases, and hill bombing fueled by three Jägermeister shots. That should be your clue that you really should take what follows lightly, lest your heart fail. This is where they bring out the human in the hero. The gritty fails and repetition again and again are not about selling a perfect image of skaters, they're practically screaming "you can do it too with practice", and that's endearing both for those who do and those who don't do it too with practice.

And boy do they have skits, too! Or interludes, if you're setting on being fancy. Old shop owners shouting from the storefront that NYC used to be more polite, despite the fact that when they were your age New York was filled to the brim with street fighting punks and gangs on a raid. Mothers who prefer their neighborhood park gentrified, thank you. Homeless people left out of the public eye are in the lights and cameras of the skate video; albeit sometimes disrespected, they appear more as themselves in skate films than they do in any other genre, except for whatever Larry Clark envisioned as a genre in his 1995 cult classic Kids. Police chases, or at least parts of heated exchange with the brave pigs and rats who serve and repress are a common occurrence. (This statement is, for legal purposes, only used as a stylistic figure of speech and does not pretend to describe a physical and material reality. The sentiment remains though.)

Anyone who's known me for a few years has heard me say at least once I'm more interested in the effect of the creative re-imagining by skateboarding of the public and urban space than I am in actual skateboarding. So above all, very interesting information comes through the interstices between the end of the skater and his board, and the limits of the video frame. Urban space can be seen both on a small scale and a big scale. Guest appearances on the bottom (usually) of the screen are the cracks in cement, broken tiles, worn-out railings and countless small, quasi unnoticeable features that could either make a trick even better, or make kissing the ground after a two-meter flight easier. Debris, dust, and the time-biding wear of materials are main actors in these films. Topside of the screen resides the macro-scale of urban planning, and cultural differences in architecture are transparent when one video features different cities, let alone different continents. Both of those ends are connected, and the stage set in front of our eyes is as much decor and scenery as it is the driving force of intrigue, the main villain become hero's friend, once a trick is accomplished. The camera's quick ever-closing-up following of the skateboard embraces the slope and texture of curves and cracks and steps, like copying a work of art with a different medium. Do better, 4D cinema, we already feel the movement. Sorry for putting a conceptual spin on an art form that's already cool without being hard to read, but you should've seen it coming.

The soundtrack cements it all. It plays like a renegade mixtape of all the skater's handpicked favorites, sometimes dropping from extreme metal down to bossa nova almost as to remind us that, well, narration is not completely out of the picture. Nevertheless, it's never demanding, there's no Hans Zimmer making a bespoke synth preset to force us to feel anything in particular. Rest your eyes and ears for a bit and come back to it, to the boom-bap synced to the boardslide and drop, back to the hardcore punk accompaniment to a seemingly futile perseverance and repetition of tricks. And make sure to jot down the track names so you can download them later. or just play the audio and enjoy the rattling of wheels and screeching of trucks on rail.

It's a genre like no other, and it's not getting boring anytime soon.

And because my opinion counts because this is my blog, here's a few videos I liked. They're not the best, because what the fuck does that mean? They're very cool though. Pour yourself something, sit down, and let the pictures guide out away from my incessant rambling:

Enjoy.

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