This a short clip from a recent video titled JAX AND LUCAS by skateboard videographer William Strobeck. It's characteristic for a style of skateboard videography he developed while making the skateboard film "cherry", that was released in 2014 by the fashion brand Supreme.
This style has since become Strobeck's hallmark, where he focusses more on the skaters' face and feet, instead of on the larger environment in which the trick is done. In Bill's own words: 'That was like the whole thing with cherry, it's like, I wanted to make
something that like, you know, not just skaters could watch and still
have a feeling or understand that this is what we do every day. It isn't
just trick, trick, trick, it's like, you get a sense of what's it's
like to be out on the streets.'
While Strobeck has received praise for his novel approach, there are also many in the skateboarding community who don't appreciate the method he developed. As the top comment on YouTube states verbatim: 'kids skated gr8, bill its time to ZOOM TF OUT '.
The above clip was taken from the video Jante – 10:34 by film-maker Fritte Söderström. Fritte's camerawork is almost universally praised, even if both these clips are superficially very similar. The top comment on YouTube for this video says nothing but 'I was missing this type of filming'. Yet both of these clips are filmed from a static position, zoom in on the skaters' face and then switch to the skater's feet shortly before the skater does their trick. Why one of these filming styles is praised while the other is derided thus can't be a simple case of 'zooming tf out', as the previous YouTube user so eloquently phrased it.
Despite their similarities, these two clips are fundamentally different. In order to see why these two clips are so different from each other, we have to take a short lesson on the history of skateboard films.
Skateboard videos matured around the year 2000. During that time videographers were using professional handheld video equipment and were using it with enough skill to provide dynamic and exciting images that were without any technical detriments, such as camera shake. Probably the earliest example of this style was Menikmati, made by Fred Mortagne. This was followed up in 2003 by Sorry. The two clips below are both from Geoff Rowley's part in Sorry and they display the two hallmarks of the 'gold standard' of skateboard videography.
On the top is a clip shot with a fisheye lens. Held low to the ground and pointed up, this distorted wide angle lens allows the videographer to be close to the action and magnify it, while still showing the whole of the skaters' body and the surroundings. By following the subject closely on their own skateboard, the videographer is able to keep the attention on the skater while the surroundings rapidly change behind them.
On the bottom is a similar trick at the same location using a technique called 'rolling long lens' in skateboarding vocabulary. It is the skateboarders' version of a dolly shot, where the videographer rolls on their skateboard, often in opposite direction to the subject, and tracks their movement. This is commonly combined with zooming in or out and it requires considerable skill to keep everything in frame, in focus and moving at the right speed, while keeping balance on your skateboard. Yet if done successfully, it provides images with a lot of movement and action that make even simple tricks look dynamic and cool.
Hopefully this description gave you an impression of what skateboard films looked like at the beginning of the millennium. This style was a technological perfection of methods there were introduced in the early 1990's and very quickly became the norm in the early 2000's.
Towards the end of the 1980's, skateboarding moved out of purpose-built skateparks and into the streets. The attitude was a bit more raw, more 'punk', than it was before. The blood, sweat and tears image of skateboarding comes mostly out of this time. At the same time, video cameras were also getting smaller, cheaper and of higher quality. Notable are the introduction of Video8 and later DV, as well as the Sony DCR-VX1000 camera, which was introduced in 1995 and is still used to make skateboard films today.
The most influential video of this era was undoubtedly Blind skateboards' Video Days. Incidentally this was also the first movie directed by Spike Jonze, who has by now had a long and storied career that includes starting skateboarding brand 'Girl', creating tv-show Jackass and winning an Academy Award for best screenplay.
Mark Gonzales' part in Video Days starts with the following sequence which has since become an iconic reference point in the history of skateboarding:
Set to John Coltrane's Traneing In, the shaky and unsteady camera work seems to spontaneously react to the skaters' movements. Compare and contrast this with the clean and steady work of French Fred above, where the videographer becomes almost invisible. The premise of following the skaters' movements with dynamic camerawork have stayed the same, but between 1991 and 2003 the skills of the videographers have greatly improved.
This era also saw the the featured
skateboarders themselves becoming very involved in the technical aspects of the videography,
like in the provocatively titled film Jump Off A Building by Jamie Thomas and Ed Templeton.
Before this, the skateboard video as we know it today started with Stacy Peralta's The Bones Brigade Video Show and other videos that were produced by his company Powell-Peralta during the 1980's.
This is Ray Barbee in 1989's Ban This. Peralta's films are more cinematic compared to modern skateboard films. The pacing is a lot slower, there is less emphasis on individual tricks and there are often narrative elements present. A number of them were also shot on 16 or 35mm film, which becomes quite costly in the world of skateboarding, where a single trick often requires dozens of takes.
Although Peralta's films are still very watchable today, his style never found any imitators outside his own company.
The legendary Tony Hawk was sponsored by Powell-Peralta for a long time and when his own company Birdhouse first set out to make a film, he was influenced by Peralta and wanted it to be a full length (i.e. 30 minutes or longer) film that was entirely shot on 16 or 35mm film. It was released in 1998 and was aptly titled The End, as I believe it's the last skateboard film to attempt this. In Tony's own words: 'We decided to produce a video that would set us apart from other companies. The raw–and, in many cases, poorly shot–style of video had been the staple of the skate video market, but I thought it was time to step up and make a video that would have the longevity good Powell videos have had.'
So while a lot of things have changed and developed during those two decades, two things were established from the very beginning that make skateboarding look interesting and exciting, while still communicating the necessary details about the trick and the obstacle.
The first is that the camera itself should be in motion. This is pretty self-explanatory and the famous dolly-zoom technique used in regular cinema is a perfect example of this concept.
The second thing is that for communicating the trick accurately, you have to show the obstacle as well. This is a common mistake other sports journalists make when documenting skateboarding. They tend to focus too much on the person and not enough on their surroundings. To be even more specific, you need a strong connection to the ground in order to show skating well. Establishing the relationship of the skater to the ground they are on is of vital importance in giving your audience a feel for the trick the skateboarder is performing.
In 2007 we arguably saw the high watermark of the 'standard' skate video with Lakai footwear's Fully Flared. This film was a massive production and ran about an hour and a half in length, within an industry that usually measures its films' duration in minutes.
Between 2000 and 2007, the norm was definitely set for the making of a skateboard film, so it was only natural that after this time people started to appreciate various deviations from this norm.
Ty Evans, who made Fully Flared together with Spike Jonze, sought even greater technical perfection, with extremely high production values in his later videos. Through a collaboration with RED cinematic camera's, his modus operandi since the 2010's includes upgrading the rolling long-lens shot to a full camera vehicle with a € >50.000 camera strapped to the front.
On the other side we also have a group of people whose camera work got more slow, with more static shots that show the landscape, which in turn results in a more documentary feel. Jim Greco, a professional skateboarder with a long and prolific career, now focusses his attention on slower paced films showing much of what surrounds skateboarding. The plainly titled film The Skateboarding of Leandre Sanders And Ludvig Håkansson is a good example. Another example would be the land and island films by UK-based film-maker Jim Craven. Subtitled Tom Day and Zach Riley's journey from Land's End to John O'Groats, the film is exactly what it says it would be.
Besides a number of film-makers whove opted for a more static approach, there has been an even larger group that instead went with even more expressive and dynamic camera work, including the post-production, where the film-making itself becomes interwoven in the fabric of the film. This is mainly seen in films made outside the United States of America. Aforementioned Fritte Söderström is a perfect example of this, but also the Japan-based Far East Skate Network deserves to be mentioned, as well as the work of Zach Chamberlin, who rose to fame through Montreal-based skateboard brand Magenta. Independent film-maker Colin Read and his film Spirit Quest must also not be left out, as his evident proficiency in 'editing on the beat' has lead him to create music videos for bands like Radiohead.
A related phenomenon is that a lot of people who are simply really good skateboarders are using those skills on the board and are combining them with videography to create novel approaches. Gustav Tønnesen and Chris Gregson are extremely talented, sponsored, skateboarders, but these days they are probably equally famous for the film-making they have done.
In contrast to these various people who are all interested in pushing the envelope in their own way, we also have a group of people who instead go in the opposite direction. They take advantage of the abundant and cheap, if somewhat out-dated, technology that is available, by making lo-fi films that build upon the DIY and zine aesthetic that has been present throughout skateboarding's history.
The lowest of the lo-fi that still managed to achieve 'mainstream' recognition is probably skateboard company Fancy Lad. Their films are a glorious mess, incorporating camera glitches, scratches on the lenses, skaters that accidentally kick the camera, and wholly inadequate lighting. You name the imperfection and they proudly set it to some obnoxious musical arrangement for your viewing pleasure. The means by which some trick has been recorded seems of secondary, or even tertiary, importance in these videos and the tricks, which are equally out-of-the-box, are at the centre of attention.
Yet amidst all the chaos those videos bestow upon the viewer, they do stick to the two basic 'rules' outlined before; their camera is often physically in motion, and the ground is always visible. And as a result they're still quite palatable to your average skateboard audience.
Which brings us all the way back to Bill Strobeck and the beginning of this text. In his approach to filming skateboarding, Strobeck constantly breaks these rules of good taste by detaching the skateboarder from the ground, and filming from a static position, using an unusually long lens to counteract the lack of camera movement. In doing so, he flaunts the conventions of skateboard filming, which has provided him with equally as many supporters as detractors. In all likelihood Strobeck hasn't been the first to break these two basic 'rules', but he is definitely the first person to do so consistently and deliberately.
What is also telling as that these techniques were first introduced in "cherry", which is a film produced by a fashion brand. The style Strobeck developed is remarkably similar to the techniques employed by fashion brands creating videos from their runway shows. In those videos the film-makers naturally focus on the models and attempt to detach them from their immediate surroundings.
This is an effective technique to highlight the models as well as the brand that creates the clothes they wear. Therefore this technique does make the skaters in Strobecks' film appealing to Supreme's target audience; an in-crowd of self-proclaimed cool and stylish individuals.
So while I see the value of Strobeck's methods as a technique with a singular purpose, the widespread use of similar styles by other people for projects that still wish to have skateboarding at their core has lead many to critisize Strobeck and his imitators by gently reminding them that it's time to zoom tf out.
