📝 Interview by Ted Barrow
📷 Photos by Anthony Claravall, Corn, Pedro Raimundo & Zander Taketomo
To follow up our release of German’s part earlier this week, Ted Barrow interviewed German about what it’s like putting out your best video part at 47, plus much more ;)
📝 Words + Photos by Frozen in Carbonite
Circles, bro. Life fuckin’ moves in circles.
June 1993: I purchase the VHS cassette of the Plan B skate video, Virtual Reality from Classic Boards (R.I.P.), ride my bike over to my friend Seb’s house, and promptly view the film. It is hard to describe the sensation of seeing the triple-screen intro for the first time. The only comparison I can think of is the phenomenon drug users speak of when their first hit is so mind-blowing that they spend their whole life chasing that same high. Or so I have read.
September 2024: I sit in a movie theater inside a museum in New York City – still the Greatest City in the World™ – anticipating a one-night-only screening of Virtual along with a gang of nineties pros and skate industry veterans. Eyes lock on as the triple-screen explodes.
How did I get here?
🔑 Intro & Interview by Farran Golding
📝 Photo by Zach Sayles, originally published in Matt and Neil Herrick’s interview for Vague Skate Mag #25
Journeys through cities are a defining characteristic of east coast and independent skateboarding videos. It’s palpable in Matt Militano’s footage, most recently his opener for Zach Sayles’ ethereal production Veil (voted one of the top ten videos of our 2023 Readers Poll and available as a hardcopy directly from Zach for the enthusiasts.)
While skateboarding that is, frankly, very difficult comes packaged with an inherent sense of sincerity, there has always been a playfulness to Matt’s skating — a byproduct of the more unexpected influences he outlines here.
📝 Words, Interviews & Top Graphic by Farran Golding
Skateboarding found its first industry standard filming rig when the Sony DCR-VX1000 video camera was paired with a Century Optics MK1 fisheye lens in the late 1990s. Fundamental to producing every tentpole skate video throughout the early 2000s, a precedent for skateboarding’s visual language emerged and footage captured through a fisheye lens became the defining trait of skateboarding cinematography.
Eventually, Panasonic HVX and HPX cameras equipped with an Xtreme fisheye succeeded the VX and MK1. Popularized by William Strobeck during the mid-2010s, this change of filming set-up coincided with long lens videography becoming the zeitgeist. Observing the Quartersnacks Top Ten (our closest thing to a longstanding data set) evidences a decline in fisheye use over the past decade.
📝 Words by Mike Munzenrider
🎨 Collage by Francesco Pini
One of the most remote skateboard demos ever happened more than 20 years ago in a village north of Madang in the lowlands of Papua New Guinea. Located off Australia’s Cape York, Papua New Guinea is the eastern half of the island of New Guinea. Some 840 different languages are spoken there — more than anywhere else in the world. Just around an eighth of its population lives in cities, so it is very rural. “It’s not developed at all,” says former pro skater Kenny Reed, who in the early 2000s, read a book about the place and decided to go there by himself following a skate trip to Australia.
Reed says he had hoped to get deep into the country’s highlands, but the travel agency with which he booked his trip said such excursions can take six months of planning. He was coming on short notice and was given a more simple itinerary. “It wasn’t as far out as I wanted to go but it was really far from civilization,” he says. The people he met were subsistence farmers who didn’t wear shoes. He’d brought his board and folks were curious about it, though hard surfaces were tough to come by. “The king of the village had a plywood floor in his hut [so we took it out] and we used that,” Reed says of the resulting one-man demo. “After that, they taught me how to throw spears and shoot bows and arrows.”
