Keys To The City — The Making of Palace’s ‘DETROIT 313’ with Lev Tanju

🔑 Story and Art Direction by Farran Golding
📷 Photography by Alex Pires and Polaroids (background images throughout) by Jack Brooks, originally published in the PALACE DETROIT 313 Photo Book

In the summer of 2026, an exhibition on the history of skateboarding at London’s Southbank Undercroft took place in a subterranean venue next to the world-renowned spot. In this corner beneath the Queen Elizabeth Hall, which was once part of the Undercroft itself, short films from communities connected to Southbank’s past and present played on loop. They were directed by and featured skateboarders the spot had incubated: the professionals whose careers it has been intrinsic to, the filmmakers whose archives present an ethnography of the area, the 100-strong crew of skate moms who meet regularly, and an atmospheric work by Lev Tanju, the founder and creative director of a generational entity born out of the brutalist landmark: Palace Skateboards.

In Tanju’s film, Danny Brady, Lucien Clarke and others from the extended Palace family skate Southbank, the clatter of wheels on tiles so loud, it’s as if the audio might shatter the relic of a camera capturing them. The film has the defining grain and flicker of early Palace videos as the footage was shot somewhere around the late 2000s on the first day Tanju pulled up to Southbank with a VHS camera. When Tanju found the videotape earlier this year, he dropped all other ideas he had for his contribution to the Southbank exhibition. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is such a special moment,’” he recalls. “I found this and I was like, ‘That’s going to be the video.’ I wasn’t going to spend weeks making something different. This feels perfect. It was very off the cuff.” According to Tanju, this is how he has edited all of Palace’s videos including the fabled DETROIT 313, which was released last month.

Kyle Wilson, nosebluntslide + Jack Brooks, Palace’s senior videographer, footage archivist and lead filmer for DETROIT 313

Perhaps not since Lakai’s Fully Flared (2007) has a skate video in modern memory seemed as perpetually “coming soon” as DETROIT 313. It was first teased in late 2018 with a clip featuring Kyle Wilson and Heitor Da Silva, but by the time its release was announced in mid-June of 2026, it had become equal parts myth and meme. Prior to the DETROIT 313 trailer, the only official line on the video came in occasional allusions in Palace’s print ads with captions written in Tanju’s signature staccato bullet points. “PALACE / DETROIT / FULL / LENGTH VIDEO / SOON COME / MAYBE / EDITING IS LONG” read one in November 2025. “VILLE [WESTER] / DUNNO WHAT HE’S DOING / LOOKS LIKE HE’S GRINDING A FISH TANK / […] / ANYWAYS / NEW FULL LENGTH VIDEO / COMING VERY SOON” teased another back in March 2025. With seven years of filming undertaken, some filmmakers might assemble such a project meticulously, clip-by-clip as the footage racked up over the years, or take time away from near-completed drafts to give the timeline fresh eyes, slowly refining it. Tanju, however, is a deadline artist whose editing process comes down to instinct and iMovie.

“I made the video in two weeks, but I had a music folder I’ve been looking at for years. Some of the sections I made in one day,” says Tanju, speaking over the phone from London. “The tricks are going to be in the same order, whatever the music. I have a way that I think a section should be. I dropped the footage in the timeline and found the music I liked. Some were perfect and it was like, ‘Bang, done,’ and others didn’t really work, so I had to revisit it and move stuff around. Like the order of the video and the bits that connect the sections. That took a few days, but it’s a fast process. I’m lucky because [Jack] Brooks, who runs the filming [operations], collates all the footage. I don’t have to go through any tapes, so everything is organized for me. I started dropping things in, being quite reactive to what I think is good. If I think it’s done then cool, it’s done.”

Filming trips for DETROIT 313. Danny Brady with locals early into the video (right) and Ville Wester, frontside bluntside with Yoryo filming towards its completion (left).

Palace’s first trip to Detroit took place in August 2018. When Tanju reviewed the footage upon returning home, the city immediately transformed from a place for a filming trip to a filming destination for something greater. They fit in a few more missions before COVID put the world on hold in 2020. Filming picked up again over the past couple of years, albeit with a cast spread across London, New York, Philadelphia, Copenhagen and Spain. “It takes six months to get the team all together again. It’s a slow process. I said, ‘Go on one more trip and this is going to be a wicked video,’ basically,” Tanju recalls telling Danny Brady, the longstanding Palace pro and the company’s team manager. “Then there were enough enders and things I felt were important to make it a full-length.

When trips culminated in November 2025, it was estimated that about 60 days in total were spent filming the video, which clocks in at just under an hour’s runtime. It features parts from riders representing different points in Palace’s story including its formative Wayward Boys Choir of Lucien Clarke, Chewy Cannon, Danny Brady, Rory Milanes; their steady East Coast expansion of Shawn Powers, Jamal Smith and Jahmir Brown, the post-Palasonic new blood of Kyle Wilson, Charlie Birch and Heitor Da Silva, and their recent European pick ups Ville Wester and Pedro Attenborough.

Danny Brady, backside noseblunt (left), backside 180 to fakie 5-0 revert (right) and with Ville Wester (below).

Tanju never felt any rush for DETROIT 313 to come to fruition. It could have been released three years ago, “it just wouldn’t have been as long or as good,” or it could have taken a decade if it felt right to do so. What makes a video into the video is the final product being something good that people want to watch again. A classic. “To me, the video makes sense as what I think of as the essence of Palace: hanging out, skating, having fun, no pressure. It’s about the people, innit?” He’s happy for the team to choose their own level of involvement, whether it’s a video part or even one or two tricks. “Not this team manager, whip-cracking, ‘that’s not gnarly enough’ [mentality]. There are loads of tricks in the video that other people could do. That’s not what the video is about.” Tanju cares about good skateboarding, but it’s the marriage of ability with the feeling of place and portrait of a person that makes for a part in a Palace video. “In the same way that in some videos in the ‘90s, people would do an ‘average’ trick, like a switch crook on a ledge in an FTC video. Everyone [of that caliber] can do that, some people could fakie flip into, but that’s not the point. It’s like, ‘That’s a good trick with good style and representation of the skater.'”

Regardless of how much screen time somebody takes up, he treats their footage with equal reverence. “They’re all my favorite skaters and that’s why I put them on the team. That’s one thing: if I’m going to make a skate video I need to be 100% happy with it. That doesn’t mean looking over the footage and questioning myself, I just want to make sure I feel what I feel for everyone’s section. I want everyone to feel like they’ve had the same treatment and to feel I’m proud of all the sections.”

Jahmir Brown, switch backside taislide and Chewy Cannon, switch wallie, both pictured background with Kyle Wilson.

Shawn Powers, hippie jump (and reclined, background) and Jamal Smith, backside heelflip.

Lucien Clarke, frontside kickflip and 360 flip.

The years spent with DETROIT 313 in the works are seconded only by Palace’s first full-length video, Palasonic. Captured entirely in London, Palasonic began around the time of the brand’s inception in 2009 and was released in 2017, a timespan that Tanju puts down to him being “even more disorganized.” In the years since, Palace’s video output has come to encompass individual parts, clips welcoming riders, promos for collaborations with all sorts of partners — from skate brands and sportswear to fashion houses and fragrances and even Elton John — as well as long-form videos. Palace graduated from logging their footage via VHS to Betamax tapes (a form of cassette that’s superior in quality, but was much less popular) with BETAMAXIMUM PALACE (2018) and followed it up with DEEPER UNDERSTANDING (2019). They shocked audiences by seemingly leaving analog formats behind with their first HD full-length video, BEYOND THE 3RD WAVE (2021), though reverted back to using Sony Betacams for BETA BLOCKERS (2023), which had also stayed in rotation to film DETROIT 313.

Pedro Attenborough, backside 180 nosegrind with Yoryo filming with a Sony Betacam. “I like VHS, but I wanted something a bit slicker that still feels like VHS,” recalls Tanju of switching cameras after wrapping up Palasonic in 2017. “So that leads to finding Betamax cameras, which aren’t that expensive, but they’re a nuisance to carry, film with and capture.”

Tanju considers DETROIT 313 the truest successor to Palasonic. Both videos are captured over the course of transformative eras for the brand, using archaic technologies, each filmed entirely within the confines of a single city. “It’s a big ask from my side to them,” acknowledges Tanju. “The cameras are massive, they’re so heavy. To put that on the filmmakers, I’m really grateful that they accepted that.” However, beyond the visual textures of both Palasonic and DETROIT 313, there’s also a connection between the tentpole, tape-based feature films that’s spiritual and sonic. “London works [for a video] because London is where we’re from. I was born there and it’s the city that Palace was spawned from. Detroit matters so much to me and has so much relevance to Palace as a brand.”

Rory Milanes, switch ollie and pictured below with one of the Sony Betacams used to film DETROIT 313 and other Palace videos since 2018.

Today, soundtracks that use an eclectic range of electronic music are hallmarks of a Palace video. Since he was a kid, Tanju had long-admired house and techno from Detroit, but the use of it in videos accelerated after 2012’s “TRES TRILL,” a period where he believes that brand found itself. “This is what we’re doing, we’re skating to the music we listen to,” he recalls thinking. “At the time, I was getting into techno and that was influencing us. So my first point [of reference] was looking to Detroit techno for songs to use in skate videos. We used so much. That’s why it made sense to make a video in that city. I don’t think you can do that in every city. But it interests me more because it’s a portrait of the city. It puts it all in a nice basket. It’s got a context.”

Lucien Clarke, Rory Milanes, Heitor Da Silva and musician John FM (sat in the car) who features on the video’s soundtrack and in an interview published in Palace’s DETROIT 313 photobook. “It’s still a destination spot for not just ravers, but for people who are interested in the history of America,” he says of the city. “Was Detroit just cars, this entire time? No! We were way more than that. The cars gave us ways to make versions of jazz, garage rock, techno and house and rap and all of these things. Being self-reliant brings out this fortitude and this wild creativity.”

Tanju says he had a list of artists who he felt had to be in the video before he’d even started looking at the footage. The video is bookended by old and new Detroit: the techno collective Underground Resistance (“So influential for me growing up and even nowadays”) and the DJ, singer, pianist, producer John FM (“A friend of ours and an amazing artist, one of my favorites”), respectively. Although music from the Motor City is the raison d’etre for DETROIT 313, its soundtrack reads like a star map for the state of Michigan. There’s Arab-American noise-rock band Prostitute (Dearborn, MI), who are heard in the video’s intro and at the start of Danny Brady’s part, which also includes “We Will Fall” by The Stooges (Ann Arbor, MI). Lucien Clarke skates to “GI Joe” from Lil Yatchy’s Michigan Boy Boat mixtape, a nod to the place the prince of bubblegum trap considers his second home. Kyle Wilson is welcomed on screen to “Interlude” by Lamont Dozier, an intrinsic figure in Detroit’s dynastic Motown Records. Charlie Birch’s part opens with a scene of him battling a handrail, spurred on by locals, that’s scored to John Beltran (Lansing, MI), which is followed by a main-event video part set to “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Amazing Grace, the 1972 gospel album by Aretha Franklin, a Detroit icon. The track provides a circularity back to Palasonic, which opened with Underground Resistance’s Robert Hood and “Never Grow Old,” named after the Franklin song whose sample it’s built upon. There’s a eulogy of sorts for Chris Cornell, the frontman of Soundgarden who died by suicide in Detroit in 2017, through an acoustic version of “Black Hole Sun” in the coda to Ville Wester’s part.

Ville Wester, switch crook and pictured right with Chewy Cannon.

Wester’s main section, however, is one of the few tracks in the video not linked to Detroit and is the song one would least expect to find in a Palace video: “Star Shopping” by emo rap trailblazer, Lil Peep. “Ville’s my gateway for emo. Lil Peep, he’s iconic, innit? I wanted to use something that people wouldn’t expect, but fit. It’s a beautiful song. That’s something that took two minutes. I put Ville’s tricks in a timeline, dropped the track on it and it was goosebumps. He’s cool, he was repping Palace when it first came out and lyrically he’s fucking deep, man. It’s quite boring, a video that’s all techno. You need the ups and downs and that’s why I like to use those different tracks.”

Wester himself is something of a case study in the evolution of Palace. Ten years ago, the type of skateboarder who rocks studded belts, Slipknot hoodies and paints their fingernails black would seem like the subject of the pithy captions which make up the hardback tome, Palace Product Descriptions: The Selected Archive. But in the mid-2020s, Wester adds an interesting dimension to Palace, his presence feeling almost prerequisite for a brand who pulls off collaborations with London-based gothic ring emporium, The Great Frog and HIM, the Finnish metal band of Heartagram fame. “I guess I’ve become a bit of a mosher later in life,” says Tanju, with a laugh. “Palace was pretty ‘yo’ at the start, you know what I mean? Then it went techno. To me, Ville feels so current. Big boards, big wheels. It’s interesting to watch. To be able to do mad street shit better than someone skating on a ‘normal’ board. Raw power, technical as well, I’d never seen anyone skate like him.”

Four of the seven wrap-around cover variations of the DETROIT 313 photobook. Clockwise: Rory Milanes, backside smith; Ville Wester, fakie 270 to nosebluntslide; Heitor Da Silva; heelflip; and a Detroit resident at Hart Plaza. Photography by Alex Pires and design by Joel O’Connor.

So how does a brand founded on friendships and Southbank maintain its vibe once it has become globally prolific and expanded its team far beyond London? Recreating the Undercroft’s iconic pillars in their retail spaces is one through-line, but Tanju believes videos are the biggest part of it — be it the consistency of his editing touch, or subtle connections like Rory Milanes taking the opening sections of both Palasonic and DETROIT 313. “It helps that we have a team that are still skateboarding [together] even though they’re older and then the young guys fit in perfectly with them. They help that vibe. If you’ve got a new person, you film a trick, and then Rory is in the background. It’s funny, innit? It makes it feel like Palace.”

When DETROIT 313 began, those “young guys” were the likes of Kyle Wilson — who made sense for Palace as a Londoner says Tanju, solely and straight to the point — and Heitor Da Silva, who reminded him of Quim Cardona. They featured in the first teaser for a project with the perhaps semi-sincere working title of “DETROIT 3019 THE MOVIE” and apparently due for release in 2019, a knowing joke from Tanju. “I knew this wasn’t going to come out for, like, five years. I hadn’t even thought of making the video yet, but I wanted to get people excited,” he says.

Heitor Da Silva, nollie backside kickflip.

After Charlie Birch moved from Liverpool to London for university, he quickly got scooped up by while working at Mwadlands, the indoor park Palace built in the image of the U.K’s famed Radlands. Tanju remembers meeting Birch much earlier when he was “like, seven years old” on trips for The Big Push (a competition where British board companies and later footwear teams toured the U.K., hosted first by Document Magazine and continued by Sidewalk.) “He’d be skating a handrail by the time we’d get to the spot,” recalls Tanju of the pint-size Birch. But by his debut for Palace’s DEEPER UNDERSTANDING, filmed on location in Liverpool at Tanju’s suggestion, he had begun maturing into a powerhouse in the vein of scousers like Howard Cooke. “A lot of people have said I should have put certain people on sooner, but I was waiting for them to grow into their styles. What’s the difference in waiting a year? If they rode for a different company, maybe they’d still want to skate for us, you know? I just wait to see when I would want to film them and put them in a video. Sometimes it takes time for skaters to develop.” Birch, Wilson and Da Silva are all now pro.

Charlie Birch frontside feeble and ollie and with Justin Bohl (below, left).

The premiere of DETROIT 313 took place on June 20th at the Senate Theatre, preceded by a skate jam at the Bishop D.I.Y. “This kid came up to me. Although he wasn’t a kid, he was like 20-something,” says Tanju, who then slips into an American accent. “He was like, ‘Man, I was in high school when you dropped the first teaser.'” The video was released a week later, a day after its U.K. premiere at Palace’s HQ, Manor Place. Tanju had no interest in hosting the first screening anywhere except the city where it was made. “If you want to get the industry to a premiere, you have to go to New York or Los Angeles,” he says. “But I wanted the first premiere to be in Detroit to do an event and give something back to the city. If there were 20 skaters there, I’d have been happy. It was to get everyone together in Detroit and hang out with people in the scene.” The video was introduced by Justin Bohl, a local videographer and Palace’s tour guide throughout their years spent filming in his hometown. “We wouldn’t have been able to do the video without him. He did everything for the team. He fixes up so many spots and he’s the mayor of Detroit for the skate community. We’re grateful to him for giving us the keys to the city and looking after us,” says Tanju. During their pre-premiere meal at a pizza joint, Bohl’s mother gifted the Palace team a basket of cookies she had baked as a dessert.

Justin Bohl, frontside 5050.

The other lesser-known hero of DETROIT 313, and every Palace production, is Jack Brooks, their senior videographer and the company’s archivist. Returning to London from Palace trips, Brooks immediately and diligently logs and hands the footage over to Tanju. Sometimes on multiple occasions. “Brooks probably gave me a hard drive with Detroit footage on it about four times and I kept losing it. Without him, the video wouldn’t be possible because he worked so hard on collating all the footage.” He’s also the only person who saw the video prior to the premiere due to what Tanju considers to be his watertight technical judgment and a comprehensive knowledge of the tricks captured, ensuring nothing that deserved a place in the video was overlooked. “Anything skate-related, he’s the man. It’s a crazy business to work for because one day you’re doing this and at other times you’re filming something weird. He’s humble, easy to work with and super organized. And he loves doing it.”

Jack Brooks filming Charlie Birch, accompanied by Kyle Wilson. “As the cameras and filming got more technical and hundreds — probably fucking thousands of tapes needed logging — Brooks came into his own and owned it,” says Tanju.

Tanju still considers making a skate video with his friends the most enjoyable part of Palace, yet also the most difficult. “I love doing it. It’s my passion. I do it naturally and I don’t have to think about it; it just happens. If I have the time to do it. I don’t leave myself enough time. I have all this footage of people who have been working their ass off for seven years. I don’t want anyone’s part to be lesser than anyone else’s. It’s been fun and for me it’s my favorite video I’ve ever done.”

Danny Brady, frontside bluntslide. Below, still searching for sugarman and with players of the Wayne State Warriors college football team.

From an outsider’s perspective, there are few skate companies with the resources that Palace has. But whether it’s working with outdated tech or concentrating a years-long video into one location, there’s a sense that working within limitations, even self-imposed ones, is where Tanju flourishes creatively. “The whole visual identity of the brand was created from not having any money,” he says. Years ago, on his first paid filming gig for a clothing brand, he was equipped with that early VHS camera and a malfunctioning VX whose fisheye lens Hjalte Halberg had recently busted. After the VX gave in, Tanju taped the fisheye to the VHS camera: a low-budget solution that gave way to the visual language of skateboarding’s most adventurous enterprise.

“The other side of the spectrum is that if Palace wasn’t doing what it was then, we wouldn’t be able to fly ten guys to America seven times, get a nice house and feed them, and film a cool skate video. But also, I wanted to make skate videos, so I was going to make them with what I had. I still use iMovie because that’s all I had when I got the camera years ago,” says Tanju. “It’s a mixture of being in a great place where we could do what we want, but also using what you have, having an idea you’re stoked on, and being invested in doing that. Like, fuck it, let’s just keep going there.”

DETROIT 313 crew at the Detroit Palace. Back row, center: Chewy Cannon, Yoryo, Ville Wester, Danny Brady, Jack Brooks. Standing, left: Steven Botsford, Bren Sungahid and Justin Bohl. Seated, center: Kyle Wilson, Heitor Da Silva and Lucien Clarke. Standing, right: Jamal Smith, Kanin Garner, Shawn Powers and Pedro Attenborough. Front: Jahmir Brown and Charlie Birch.

Related, innit: Favorite Spot With Lucien Clarke on Victoria Benches (2023), How To Have A Good Time in Detroit — An Interview with ‘Minted’ Videographer, Justin Bohl (2023), Five Favorite Parts with Jahmir Brown (2021), Deeper Understanding — An Interview with Charlie Birch (2020), An Interview with Lucien Clarke (2017), Five Favorite Parts with Danny Brady (2015)