Advertisement
Skate videos are and always have been a key element of skateboarding. It’s where the magic comes to life, and great skate videos have always been more than just great skating. While much of that magic is created on the streets, a large proportion of it also comes from the editing room. While we were working on this issue, Sirus F Gahan and Pontus Alv were just finishing the newest Polar video, which you have probably already seen as you hold this magazine in your hands. We searched their minds to find out how to crush it and turn great raw footage into the Citizen Kane of skateboarding.
Pontus: David [Stenström] started skating again after a break and wanted to film a proper part. That was the kickstart of this project. He started filming with Tao in Copenhagen. Then obviously, Emile [Laurent] was the most logical other one to turn pro. That was the the main concept: Two turning pro parts, and then a team montage.
Sirus: You have some things come together and when you’re on trips, you realize this will work with this and this transition could go to here. But then for me, a lot of it is when I sit down and just look at everything. It’s like a puzzle that has no single answer. So you have to find the answer to the puzzle, knowing that there are other answers too. Sometimes it’s just brute force. Sometimes you just sit there with the footage for weeks and just figure out a flow. So it’s half and half for me anyway. I know Alv thinks in structure a lot.
P: I wish that you could do skate videos more like a film where you’re like, “Okay, well, this is the concept”. If you’re doing a commercial, that works, but if you’re going to film a video part, those moments happen when they happen. That’s what we’re all aiming for, going out and hitting the streets, collecting those special golden moments. Then at some point, you feel like you have enough gold coins to present. But sometimes you go on a trip and don’t really get anything that makes the cut. It’s so hard to plan and direct. It’s like whoever is productive and whoever is motivated is just going to shine.
"You’re searching for music, and music starts to sound like nothing to you. Every song sounds the same. You lose your fucking perception of what sound even is."
S: Often you have an idea in your head, then you put it together and it doesn’t work. Sometimes I’ll keep trying to force it to work, but it just doesn’t work. I know for Alv, a lot of it is just what feels right and about the dynamics of the clips together and the harmony of them.
P: You take a puzzle with 1,000 pieces, put them all on the table and then you try to find the corners, the edges, the ones that have similar color. You’re like, “This is all in America, this is the same architecture, the same light, the same vibe”. That will help you to give some direction. Then you’re like, “This is an ender, that’s a great starter etc.” Then every editor will be following the flow, trying to create one long line where the skater is going out the left, he’s coming in from the right, he’s following the flow of the skater in the frame, so to say. You have some structure, but there’s no dialog, there’s no storytelling. We’re just here to show a bunch of guys doing good tricks. Then you try to create some vibe with Super 8 or some lifestyle. Then obviously, the biggest storytelling that we have, the only thing that holds it all together is the song.
S: My personal workflow is quite regimented and organized. But then for this one, footage is coming in from all over the place in different formats and in different folders and they’re all full of different clips, unnamed. If I was to sit down and organize all that footage, it would take me two weeks. I don’t have time to do that sometimes. The organization gets put on the back burner and you just deal with it. I never really made timelines specifically. I like to know the footage, but not lay it out yet and let that process be more spontaneous or less cemented. And also because my brain is so organized and compartmentalizes everything, I try to bring in the chaos a little bit because the beauty is in the chaos. I think, personally, the best edits to me are the ones that feel not really straight, and they have that entropy that is part of the universe. It’s just this disorganization.
P: There’s two different parts of this. There is the hard drive organization, which is the first and maybe the most important thing cause it really helps you to find your shit. And then it’s also watching all the footage because the other organization is in your brain, where you need to have everything memorized. So when you edit and see things you know with what it could work together. And then you also have the other thing where it’s footage from older projects you want to throw in. Then I normally do pre-edits, where I lay out the part without music, cause every fucking skater in this world loves to watch themselves and get high on their own supply. Then you’re like, “Okay, we need a little bit more lines or a few more technical things” and they’re like, “I’m on it”. That’s such a motivation for riders. But yeah, I guess the difference between me and Sirus’ workflow is that I like to lay out everything in a pre-edit without music. I think that’s me and Sirus’s biggest nightmare is to find the right music for the part. If you have it already super organized I just fire music on the timeline till something sticks. But I’m also trying to be more loose and playful. Just like old skate videos. When you are getting very professional, there’s a risk that you get very stale. You have to try to reinvent your playfulness because you know how to do it well. You know too much. In “Strongest of the Strange” it was more like, “I don’t know what I did, but it’s good”. The same if you build your first DIY, the first quarter pipe is a piece of shit, but you’re proud. Then you know how to build a perfect skate park and it’s real professional but dead. It’s the same with video making.
S: Neither of us usually edit with other people. We had to work out the process a little bit. But Pontus really came with the ideas for how it was going to lay out. I had the organization, I knew all the footage, I knew where everything was and what Super 8 matches. So I was the fingers and he was the guy with the pen and the paper. That’s the flow that we ended up getting into.
P: We had a rough laid out version, but Sirus was not happy with that. He wasn’t unhappy, but it was just very rough. The biggest challenge was that Emile had so much footage, which is a luxury problem. But then I guess we had to make up a concept of how can we use all this and how can we sprinkle it, spread it out, and where can we connect? But then we had many great sessions together and Sirus has these little magic moments where you’re like, “Oh, that’s sick!” And then you’re just having a jamming session, just jamming on the timeline. Boom. “That one feels epic there. Let’s try this one. Let’s try that one”. I think me and Sirus are open-minded and friends enough and don’t have the big egos. The goal is to make the best shit we can. If you’re a good editor, you want to make the material you get look as good as possible.
P: The worst thing with editing is if you get stuck. You drive your car into a concrete wall. It breaks you down mentally, physically, personally. When you are two, it’s like “Okay, you drove into a wall but why don’t we do it like this?” Sometimes you both drive into the wall and then you just go take a long walk, go on a long bike ride and just leave it and sleep on it. Miraculously, sometimes it just happens. You have a breakthrough. The breakthrough moments are the best moments, but also editing when you’re stuck is the worst feeling.
S: If you search for it, then it doesn’t come, so you have to stop searching. And it’s always the fucking music. You can’t find the right song. You’re searching for music, and music starts to sound like nothing to you. Every song sounds the same. You lose your fucking perception of what sound even is. Then you give up and you don’t think about it for a few days, and then you’re in a cafe and a song’s playing. You just have to let the universe bring it to you, which I wish that wasn’t the way. But if there’s two of us looking for songs and we both have different reference points, then you’re doubling your productivity.
P: Smoke a joint, get fucking drunk, get laid, get angry, get shit-faced, then you get back on the computer Monday morning. I had moments in editing where I was stuck with Hjaltes [Halberg] song. Me and him were searching for months. Then I went to the cinema, watched a documentary about Berlin’s underground music scene in the ’80s. There was this Anne Clark song in it and I was like, “That’s fucking it!”. I was running out of the cinema calling Hjalte, “I got it!” But sometimes it’s... Because with skate films, there is no dialog. They don’t talk. There’s no story. The only story you have is music. I learned if a skater skates fast, you should use a slow song and vice versa. It doesn’t always work. Sometimes you have a children’s choir singing in the church, and then all of a sudden, magic happens and that’s the beauty of editing. When you drop something in that timeline, and you have that Hallelujah moment. Like the Kiki [Kakitani] song in the Japan video where he does that 50-50 to boardslide on those rails, and then he tries to do another trick, and then it goes with the hand and the song goes off… When I saw it, it was just so epic.
S: That made me laugh so much when I was editing it. I couldn’t stop laughing every time I watched it. That had to stay.
P: That’s the beauty why we enjoy skate videos and why we enjoy making them. That’s what we are searching for. That’s the goal.
S: For me, it’s not skateboard videos at all. Well that’s not true. But I usually watch them when I’m stuck. When I’ve lost all conceptual idea of what a skate video even is. Then I’ll watch my old favorites and be like, “Oh, yeah, you can just make the skate video like this and it’s all good”. But in terms of inspiration, I definitely don’t really turn to skate videos. They’re all the same. Not back in the day, but these days, so there’s not much inspiration, I find.
P: The thing is, what’s the purpose of skateboarding? You have your favorite riders and you want to see them beautifully enjoying their skating, their style, banging out amazing clips on amazing spots. But obviously, that’s the typical skateboarding, showing off your skills that we all watch. We want to see the best, just do the best stuff. Then what is interesting, if you look at the first attempts of making skateboard films, in the ’80s, with Stacy Peralta doing “Search for Animal Chin”, they shot the guys in a group. That’s obviously what I was doing with the “Trocadéro Days”. They also had storytelling, like Lance Mountain, skating inside the house and whatnot. So sky’s the limit of what’s possible. But I think it’s interesting that back then you had all this creativity in skateboard films. And then nowadays, it only comes down to measuring who is the best skater, showing off the gnarliest tricks. And I think we lost that spirit and feeling of actually riding a skateboard. Does it look enjoyable? Does it look like the guys are having fun? If you put on Natas’ part from “Wheels of Fire”, where he’s just cruising around the streets in Venice Beach, or [Jan Maarten] Sneep the other day posted a Donger part and you’re like: “That’s what it’s about, isn’t it?” Skateboarding became athletic, it is like video games now in real life. And yeah, that’s amazing, too, in a way, but is it the reason why I love skating? Or is it because I saw Donger going down the street just looking like a fucking Bruce Lee of skateboarding? I don’t want to be the old dude, but if you look at skateboarding, normally the answer to the future is in the past. In the ’90s, we had the period of this pressure flip, super technical skating. Then you got Salman Agah, Ricky Oyola, Donny Barley, just hitting the streets, doing long 50-50s, that was the revolution of back to basic, back to style, back to enjoying. I can see we are lacking that in skateboarding at the moment. Also the sponsor me tapes I get are single clips. Nobody films lines anymore.
"They’re skaters, not actors, who you can tell where to go and what to do. I wish we could work like that, so that we could actually direct skateboarding and conceptualize it."
S: To me, it’s probably the expectations of the skater. It creates these weird boundaries that you have to work within. There shouldn’t be any rules, but there are rules. Especially today, there are rules that skaters want to be represented in a certain way, and they want control of their footage. And that’s probably because of social media, because they’ve been able to curate how they look online for a number of years now. So when it comes to videos, they want that same level of control. And that’s very limiting. There’s only a certain number of ways they want to be represented. And it’s really anxiety-inducing, because you want them to be happy but you also want to do something interesting.
P: I 100% agree with that. When we did “Trocadéro Days” I had this concept and I briefed the Blobys. They were like: “Whoa 80s, cool!” They showed up with bandanas and made a denim vest, we were vibing and they were fully not aware of what the result will be. It was just play and that shines through in the footage. They were open for everything. That’s what’s so amazing with new skaters. But then, of course, the second video comes around and certain people were like, “I’m not sure if I want to do this or that”. They are aware. They’re skaters, not actors, who you can tell where to go and what to do. I wish we could work like that, so that we could actually direct skateboarding and conceptualize it. Some skaters might be down with that, but that’s a challenge. Today, it’s just a challenge to make a skater go skate, make them get out of bed, damn it. That is the biggest challenge today, having the guys to be open because everybody’s so aware of everything, of social media. “I have my own image. I curated my Instagram. I’m editing my own parts. I want to look like this, dress like this, shop like this, edit like this. This is my profile”. Every skateboarder is his own brand. Normally, the brand used to be the one that dictated the output, but now you don’t have that freedom. At some point, we as editors in a brand just have to do what we got to do. We haven’t shown any of the video to the riders, they don’t know the songs, they don’t know anything. So they get what they get. In the end we got to do our job. And either you trust our vision and style, and you like what Sirus and I have done in the past, or you trust someone else. Because nowadays filmers like William Strobeck, he’s a brand. Sirus is a brand. Johnny Wilson, Tao [Tor Ström] etc. “Oh, Johnny did a video. I want to watch it!”. So the filmer or the editor is almost like a pro skater, I like that. What’s Supreme without Strobeck? What’s Hockey without Benny [Magliano]? What’s Limosine without Logan [Lara]?
P: Sometimes you have amazing skaters but you have to create them. You just tell them to do those five tricks, then they do them and go back to the bar or Tinder dates. That’s one version. Then you have the other version, with people that are super specific. They have crazy ideas, they have crazy spots and visions, which is also super fun, that’s what you want. You want the skater to be like: “I’m going to do this trick on that spot and I want it to be filmed like this.” For me, that’s a wet dream. But normally, it’s a mix.
S: It’s really inspiring when skaters have a vision for themselves and their part. It’s just a thin line, when it’s like, “I want to be represented like this because this is the trend at the moment”. And then there’s like, “Oh, I have a vision for what I want”. There’s a difference in that, and that’s really enjoyable to work with. That makes your job a lot easier. Then you can work together on something. But it’s always like the skater wants to be represented a certain way and they want to direct you to make them look that way. But they can’t actually do the direction. They just want you to magically represent them like that.
P: Paul Grund is a good example. He has a complete vision. He told me, “This is the song I’m going to use”. When he sent me that song, I was like, “This is nuts”. But in the end, it worked out. I love it when a rider has a vision and it works. But sometimes it’s the other way around where a rider likes some music – there’s a lot of music that we all love – but it doesn’t work for the part. I think a lot of riders have a hard time separating that.
S: It’s a very thin line whether it will work or not, it can totally flop. A lot of times these days when brands try and do it, it just doesn’t hit right. If it creates its own world, like in old Alien videos, you can do a lot with it. But if it’s just random it actually distracts you.
P: I want to give a big shout out to Neil Blender because he is the godfather of editing skate videos, at least as far as what I and Sirus do. He did the first Alien video “Memory Screen”. I love everything he did with Dinosaur Jr. and his whole world of art. What he did and what he created was amazing. That inspired generations to come. Spike Jonze set the tone of the fun, Neil Blender brought in the artistic aspect. I feel like he doesn’t get the credit enough for what he created. Also, Neil Blender is in the actual workshop logo. Alien is Neil B. backwards and if you look at the logo, it’s a turned B.
"It’s like a rhythm, like a dance, it’s a ballet show. It’s like a theater. It’s high, it’s dramatic, it’s up, it’s down, it’s fast, it’s slow. It’s like a good fuck"
S: Pontus did it. [laughing]
P: There are some Holy Grails of skateboard parts, it’s a bit too much to use those songs. But what’s the rule? Who set up those rules? We got into skateboarding because we love the freedom of it. Steve Berra used “Debaser” from the Pixies in a Birdhouse part. If I use it in a video, would you know that it’s ABD? The kids don’t know. So where does the limit go? How long back? Also, today, with the modern society, how can anyone keep track of every video coming out? I don’t have time to watch 20 videos a week and track up every song. That rule doesn’t apply anymore unless it’s something super iconic.
S: Pontus definitely has some.
P: Obviously, music, music and music, that’s always important. Speaking about music, we didn’t mention it, but dynamics is the priority in a skate video. You need to have slow music, fast music, tempo change. If there’s no dynamics, you get a headache. It’s just like a bunch of skating in your head to a bunch of fast music. It needs to complement, contrast. Sweet and sour, highs and lows. And the basic beginner mistake is that people don’t follow the skaters. I always say, have a pen on the screen and follow the skater with the pen. The skater has to come in where he went out otherwise your head is searching for the rider on the screen. It’s like a rhythm, like a dance, it’s a ballet show. It’s like a theater. It’s high, it’s dramatic, it’s up, it’s down, it’s fast, it’s slow. It’s like a good fuck. I think there is something out there that we haven’t seen yet. I’m really up for that challenge to create something again. It got boring. We all film with the HPX and it’s all about getting the bangers, but there is room for something totally different. But will it be good and will it be choreographed? Will it be fake? That’s the problem. Skaters want it real and raw. It’s very hard to create something when it’s... Skateboarding is not supposed to be choreographed.
S: I can’t wait for that. Then we don’t have to deal with the skaters anymore. “I want you to do a backsmith there.” Boom, done.
P: I was playing with the idea that you could create a Mark Gonzales “Video Days” B-sides. Same vibe, same look, but on other spots. Like, “Oh, this is footage that never came out”. But it’s definitely a fair question to be raised. I think we haven’t seen that yet in skateboarding. We did it in this video, we generated one clip and we mixed it in with all the others. We’ll just see if people will notice.
Advertisement
