Not to be confused with Lurkers. “Lurking” has fond associations around here.
Steady Lurking is a video by Mike Williams, mostly filmed in New York and outlying areas. You wouldn’t notice it if you spend any time at the Chinatown and Tribeca skateparks or 12th & A, but a lot of young kids still skate and film at actual “spots” in this city. It’s a good sign for whatever the next generation of New York-based skate videos turns out to be. (Sidebar: Cameras should be banned from every skatepark except Chelsea. iPhone/GoPro at 12th & A is okay…especially if you’re doing a longways ollie over the picnic table.) While we concluded that skaters are too happy being garbage to ever skate to “Tip Drill” on Twitter the other night, at least this video pays homage to two Ricks at the same time (any Rick James use is a x2 Rick homage), and solves the “Has anyone skated to ‘Mr. Sandman?'” question that any skaters who watched the 2012 NBA post-season asked themselves every time *that* damn commercial came on.
Fun video. Embedded below in two parts. Buy Tall Will a drink from the deli when you see him at Lenox.
good
but tired of instagramesque b-roll taking up 30% of all NYC skate vids
maybe someone could make a vid with some skits?
@Skate Scholar, PhD
There have been many attempts to emulating the alien/greg hunt style.
oh I didn’t realize that Greg Hunt was responsible for alot of the artsy footage in Alien videos… I know he transitioned from a pro for Stereo to a video/photo guy (which he probably was the whole time anyway) – and I knew he was an artsy fellow – but I didn’t know that he contributed so much.
not sure how much greg hunt has to do with it but these ny kid videos all run the same shit. film me / goin ham / 5 on it / steady lurking all have those weird super 8 blend effects and make them all look like theyre made by the same person when theyre not. cant even tell the difference.
I am pretty sure the artsy footage in alien/habitat videos (Photosynthesis , Mosaic, Mindfield) is contributed by a variety of different filmers. My Greg hunt comment was speaking to his involvement in the different projects that have a certain style of art direction that is often emulated. Maybe the style should be attributed more to Joe Castrucci (director of Photosynthesis and Mosaic) then Greg Hunt.
In the Mind Field DVD there is an extra section where they actually show the dude making all the artsy stuff like the weird physics liquid effects and the smashed wind up robots. Whether it was Greg Hunt or not I’m not sure. However, NYC vid filler is more like, show a few bridges and older buildings, run it through the melted film effect, blurry, super-8, black and white, too many cuts, guys rolling down the street, a taxi. Frankly it would be more interesting to just have straight up hoochie cleavage shots at this point.
haha
back in the mid 90’s, when me and my friends made videos, we would put our attempt at artsy/lifestyle or whatever you want to call it footage in there – however crude and contrived it might be.
Funny part is, we didn’t even really know what we were doing, really. All we knew was, in A Visual Sound Jason Lee was riding around on a bike waving to people in black and white – and there were other random ‘artsy’ sections in other videos too (like random Super 8 clips of the sky, buildings going by in the car or the go-to seagull on the beach…or some other san francisco type shit) – so we should obviously be doing that too, right? We simply called anything like this “non-skating footage”
Of course, we didn’t have any vintage cameras or anything – so we just filmed the artsy shit with the same video camera we used to film the skating with. This of course means there was no actual contrast or difference in texture like you see in Alien videos. haha, so we kinda missed the point a little bit. I guess it was somewhere between trying to emulate what we saw in Alien, Stereo, Real etc videos… but also copying off Dan Wolfe – or trying to.
in conclusion, yes to hoochie cleavage shots.
That artsy/super 8/lifestyle/grainy footage/old home movies thing has been permeating otherwise watchable skate videos for like 20 years. Real and Stereo are heavily to blame.