This little clip consists of someone I skated with most days in Oz, yet filmed very little of. Resident number one at the citypark in Melbourne. Richard Flude, Nugget (Shane O'Niell) and Brenton were there every single day. Those three are some of the most consistent skaters I've ever seen.
Anyway - I think this little clip would have come from a visit to Globe HQ (as this hip was built in their car park) on a shoe blag mission by Brenton. As I mentioned - he's one of those guys who can do everything on a skateboard. I tried to get him into filming stuff, but I just think he felt a bit too self concious to be pushing himself. This would have been one of those 'break in' attempts to get him into the swing of it. A simple spot and a bunch of tricks he can fire off first shot which'll look fun thrown together.
The broken arm (fourteen weeks and counting) has made me slack on all things keyboard related of late. One finger typing sucks. Doing it for a laugh on a blog doesn't come in on the list of things I'm up for currently. Sort of.
Anyhow, after an operation which has seen my arm once again wrapped to the point of immobility and - just to add to the excitement - a hip which has had bone marrow removed to help said arm, I've been put in the strange position of having to take proper time off of work.
Fun, but only partially as these painkillers have a knack of leaving you staring into space for hours at a time.
Anyhow, during this time out I managed to get around to sending my damaged fisheye in for repair. No filming anyway for the above reasons - but now I have time on my hands I can finally get on with the things you only ever worry about seconds before you fall to sleep.
One of which for me is thirteen years of footage for which a good chunk only resides on DV tapes. Under the previous regime, once the footage appeared in a video it was deleted from the hard drive if no more fun was to be had with it.
Except now, all these years later tapes are deteriorating and memories are fading.
I've begun a recapturing project which will hopefully see me regrab hundreds of random lines and ticklers from forgotten faces, child-doubles of now more well known names and those that just never went and aged at all.
First up - a little trip to Prague. We got in on the 27th July 2004 - the night before the Mystic Cup Qualifiers. Rodney and I shared a room kinda near the park. We got straight down there for a little session and the first half of the clip below was filmed as we had arranged to meet a few Antipodean pals for a shred.
What's really amusing is that this was a Creme Skateboards trip. Rod was (is?) pro for them. I believe the rest of the team at that point was Manuel Magreitter and Dominic Dietrich. Maybe there was an Am or two. Who knows?
Notice however how only Rodney appears in the park section of the clip. Powers that be over at Creme HQ were so clued up on skateboarding that they managed to send us out to meet up with Manu and Domi at Mystic with a plan to us useing some downtime from the contest to go and film.
Nice idea, if a little limiting.
However, Creme negated to let Manu or Domi know. They also failed in letting us know that they were at Mystic with Quiksilver who would be using downtime to look after the lads in only a way which Quik would - boat parties and other general shit that has fuck all to do with skateboarding.
So, once all three Creme bods had finished their runs, I tried to get the action underway only to find out all the above. Rod retracted to a purely support role from there on in, pissed at the donuts who sent him there - yet excited to party and roll with old Aussie mates. He was good value on the sidelines.
I'm stoked the Aussies were there. I'd hung out with Morgan and Jake a lot. Jake would come and give us a shout when he was down in Melbourne way back when he was scared of anything even booze related. This was right around the timme Jake got on Volcom (He's wearing SMP gear here as well as Etnies) and probably not long after Blind. We both went to grab some food one afternoon in Prague and Jake refused to let me pay as "I'd looked out for him when he was younger, so he felt he should return the favour as he's now doing okay". That's fairly fucking rad. That line of Jakes at the end was something he did in two part with the upmost of ease - yet come camera time, it became a nightmare. As he says at the end (His last of probably 70 tries) - "I really don't care". Fair play.
Morgan had asked me to film a video park with him while I was in Australia, which we'd finished a few months previous to this - so it was nice to see him post deadline in a neutral country for the good times.
Jon Lorcan was someone I'd kinda met a few times. He's a rad guy - always grinning. I think this was right around the time he became the editor for Slam magazine. Actually, after this trip he usked me to come film a tour video for Slam. They'd be going to Lisbon with a good crew but sadly I was elsewhere over their dates. Ciaran O' Conner ended up putting that one together for them. One of Ross' tricks from Savoir Faire ended up getting filmed on that trip by Ciaran. It's probably the oldest thing in that video!
On street only duties is Ben Gauci starring in an unfinished line. Blind in one eye. A painter and decorator who had a moment as Dark Star TM. He's fairly excited about the world. I've not heard from him in forever. Richard Flude, Steve Gourley and Ben were the first people to take me street skating in Australia. They just grabbed me out of the citypark, threw me in the van and took me on their mission. For that, I eternally hold them in the highest regard.
I think a bit of this ended up in Morgan's Liquid Pixel World Lap. I can see Morgan getting doubles on the final Jake line...
I've been following these for a little while now - Ex-pat Dom Henry and his pals have been creating a kind of New Zealand version of Hold Tight London and it is rad.
How good is this? I just nabbed it from the Thrasher site. In the days of mage ramp madness and private vert sessions on gadget ramps its amazing to see a session with Lance Mountain, Darren Navarrette, Red, Christian Hosoi , Mike Frazier, Mike Crum, Max Schaaf, Rune Glifberg and Lincoln Ueda all on one "standard" vert ramp.
I think I've already mentioned that I found a bunch of CD-ROM's with backups of a lot of lost Hi-8 footage.
I put this clip together a few weeks ago - just before the Stone Age Tour (Of which I still need to post up). It's Tom Ball footage from my parents video camera, Alex Mead's camera and my first one, too. In fact, Alex filmed a bit of this, if I remember correctly - The kickflip at the end was his. A little Jelly Mumbo's in there, too.
Anyway - Tom is rad. Still shredding. Not sure how his golf game turned out these days, though.
This is going to be amazing. I saw a liitle sneak preview of Tanners part and it was a j-o-k-e. The premiere is tonight...and I've not booked a ticket. Looks like I'll be knocking about on my own while everyone else enjoys the DVD.
Ben Raemers came to stay last night before he went off on his mission this morning to Belgium, Rotterdam and Amsterdam. I'll meet him in Amsterdam in a couple of weeks for a weekend of riding bikes around the city.
We ended up looking at some internoodles, which led onto going through some footage of new-ish local spots (bear in mind that I've filmed about 10 things in total the past year), which then led me to rediscovering a load of footage tucked away on a drive.
There's all sorts there. Like this clip of Chris Pulman.
I think it may have been in 'Good Shit', although I'm not sure. I know I filmed Fos' wrist breaking. It was right where Chris' above trick was filmed, just before the mini ramp was built (Which I think was brand new in the Pulman clip). That slam was horrible. I'm glad I don't have the footage and that he does.
Anyway - what pushed me into putting that up was that this morning on my usual internoodles rounds, I came across this Blackbox High 5's.
This was a little ad I put together for last years UKSA National Skateboarding Championships.
I think Niall Kenny filmed the Ben Nordberg training footage. I like Nordberg. He is up for it and doesn't take himself too seriously.
Hopefully it is obvious what we were trying to do here. I mean, it's clearly goofy footage of him pissing about while bored on some tour. Kind of a shame as I wanted to do a really serious one. One where no-one would actually be sure if we were joking or not. I mean, we came out with the "National Skateboarding Championships" (A necessary evil) moniker which kind of reeks of everything I didn't want to be near when I got into skateboarding - so we could of managed to pull off the 'not getting it' angle easily, I'm sure. Anyway, if you missed it -gutted. It was a good excuse to not only get all the usual contest faces together but also knock about with those not normally prone like Snowy, Joey, Lev, Nicholson, Tom Knox, Tanner, Howsey, Sean Smith and the like. The actual skateboarding was fucking crackers, too.
Thanks to everyone who attended. Everyone who entered and the parents and friends who came along to make some noise for those skating.
Thanks also to Jart Skateboards , Electric , Skullcandy and Vans for the prizes and Red Bull for the free drink all day and sorting out the barbeque. Also, big ups to Revolution Skatepark for the venue, Brooks for the video clip, Chris Johnson, Denise Hickey and Mark Heaton for the photos as well as Biscuits, Nick and Adam for judging and Lev for MCing!
Skater of the Day: Tom Steele
Under 15s 1. Jack Collins 2. Neil Kellas 3. Ollie Beeby
16 and Over 1. Awadh Mohammed 2. Daryll Dominguez 3. Harry Lintell
Good friend of mine, Matt Compton has given me good reason to pass on a bit of grim gold. Reason being (I need a reason?!?) is it kinda reminded me of The Orphanage. Not in some plagiarist sense; just in a very creepy "What the fuck? I want out of here" sense.
Matt Compton's most recent film, 'Bubbling Under' is one of the thirteen films involved in the Film London's Best of Boroughs awards.
Then pass it on to your friends, your family, your enemies, your lovers, your neighbours, your children, your colleagues, your employers, your employees, your hostages, your kidnappers, your milkmen, your baker your.... well you get the idea.
I just put this post up on the Tweaker blog. Figured I'd double post it here as the video is so good...
"Skateboarding for the love of it is so out."
...Was this part filmed PRE-Flip?
If so, that means that Luan came up with this without Ewan and Co. breathing down his neck.
Does stuff like this video part happen anymore without management, PR and marketing (AKA the paid up pro-team/TM, the staff photographer and the employed filmer) giving the skater hell and riding them hard on deadlines, paychecks and cover shots?
You could probably count the amount of times this sort of knockback shit has happened this millenium on one hand. In fact, all I can think of is PJ Ladd.
PS. PurpleTurtleDrizzle - Extra points for filming it off the TV. Lose them all, go straight to jail and don't collect £200 for encoding your username in the top corner of the clip.
