Still Gold — Brandon Westgate’s 2023 B-Sides

In acknowledging Pretty Sweet‘s tenth birthday last fall, it was tough not to consider how it was one of the final videos before social media took over …everything. (Yeah, MySpace, Facebook, IG, et al. had all been around, but it had yet to feel like skateboarding revolved around them.)

Perhaps one of the final innovations of the old-world skate video ecosystem — before every innovation was steered towards increasing followers — was Emerica opting to release the raw files of their marquee project, part by part, for free six months after the video dropped. Emerica’s Stay Gold “B-Sides” are practically as well-remembered as the video itself (voted by QS readers as last decade’s second best), giving way to a 2010s phenomenon of fan-made remix videos and a recipe for getting twice as much mileage out of a video that a company could spend years working on — a formula still with us today.

Anyway, Element dropped Westgate’s raw clips from their E.S.P. Volume 2 video.

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