I’ve ridden a skateboard off and on since I was 9, and in the past 6 months I’ve taken up longboarding as well. Several guys that live in my neighborhood ride, and soon after I started riding with them, the subject of skate videos came up. I offered to shoot one, and, as they say, the rest is history.
This post is going to be more of a film-nerd approach to longboard filmmaking (and filmmaking as a whole) than a longboarder’s approach to breaking down the actual tricks performed in the video or the set-up used to perform them on, so if you were expecting the latter, turn back while you have the chance. You’ve been warned!
Of all the videos I’ve shot, this is the one I have the least cinematic reservations about. We had over 30 shooting-hours (3 times what we had on The Divisive Device, our longest movie ever!), so I was able to get a lot of footage. Since I got so much footage I was able to be very picky as an editor, resulting in a tighter, better cut than most of our other movies. In post I made extensive use of the YouTube Video Editor’s ability to interpolate frames, allowing me to slow clips down 400%, great for the slow, dreamy look so common in action videos. There was a bit of aliasing around the edges of moving subjects, but the end result looks way better than showing the clip at 6fps.
The camera rigs in this video were numerous. I tested out all sorts of ideas I’d had in the past but hadn’t been able to execute, due to time constraints and laziness. I got moving shots with bikes, longboards, dirt bikes, and a homemade cable-cam, and, to mix things up, I was able to use a bucket truck to get a higher vantage point.
In the end, this video is kind of a “proof-of-concept”, so not all of the rigs and techniques I used worked perfectly, or were used to their full potential, but I’m looking forward to shooting a lot more videos- the stuff I learned shooting this video applies not only to longboard videos, but film as a whole!
Enjoy!
