Name Dropping — Four Videographers On Putting Skaters’ Names in Videos

Intro & Interviews by Mike Munzenrider
Illustrations by Requiem For A Screen
(H/T To Memory Screen on the research)

More than two decades ago, Rusty From Maine became the avatar for all viewers shocked by Ty Evans’ departure from skate video norms.

“I just bought your video number nine, The Reason. Man, the opening montage there, no little captions with the skaters’ names on it? What are you guys doing? You know how annoying that is?” asks Rusty in a voicemail immortalized in the opening minutes of 2000’s Modus Operandi.

At the time, the lack of skaters’ names in a Transworld video was a jarring experience, when — for the better part of the preceding decade — 411VM had served up captioned names for all. Then again, such titling wasn’t always the case. Go into the distant skate video past to a time before name titles, and skaters had to play the same detective games we play now, albeit without social media clues.

Do such clues mean we no longer need to be told each skater’s name? Is it a simple aesthetic choice to leave titles out of a video, or is there a responsibility to let the world know who’s in what clip?

We spoke to four videomakers to find out where they stand on the question.

Each interview is condensed and edited for clarity. They are presented in the order in which they were conducted.

Keep Reading »

Peepin Out The Window

Caleb’s pro! Photo via Genesis Evans. Caleb’s Bunt (from February 2020) is really good, btw.

“Couple manuals, couple flatground.” Imagine skating for 34 years and still being this fucking good. Pocket‘s latest “Followed” episode is with the goat Daniel Lebron. They really got the pacing of life thing figured out in Spain. Big love to the Mexican families in L.A. ♥

The Duplex dudes out of Florida have low-key been putting out some of the best independently-released, no media-outlet-backed videos of 2021. “Five-Six-One,” their latest, is absolutely no exception. That Leap of Faith clip over the lady is so wild, plus Jake Sanso goes off like usual. Peep their earlier releases: “Sk8 Wing” from May + “Duplex 2” from January.

Keep Reading »

The WKND Dudes in Connecticut + Albany

Ollie in front of Supreme by Max Wheeler. No, a different Supreme. Photo by Bobby Murphy.

The scope of skateboard travel got way smaller this past year-and-a-half. Connecticut — that lil’ big state that is basically just outside The Bronx — posed an interesting case study. Following the thaw-out from the most depressing winter of our lifetimes, our first trip out of New York was to CT. We came armed with inspiration from “Your Big Cheesecake,” a March 2021 Connecticut video that was blurbed about on here in the winter, and originally found on Skate Jawn. In it, you find a vast network of cutty, underseen spots sitting in small cities that are all a shorter drive away than Philadelphia. It wasn’t until just recently that our brains were forced to understand that maybe there was some skateboard escape nearby that wasn’t one we have been to dozens of times before. The rewatchability of “Your Big Cheesecake” definitely helped hammer that point home.

Keep Reading »

Hard To Choose One

Summer 2020 QS goods are arriving at skate shops now. Product should be in all of our accounts in the U.S, Canada, Japan and South Korea by the end of this week at the latest, but Europe and Australia will be a lil’ late. Check your Australian and European locals in early June. Please support shops via their webstores or if any are doing curbside pick-ups for product while they remain closed in some areas. Our webstore will relaunch with summer goods on this Friday, May 22 @ 10 A.M. E.S.T. Top spread via Prov Tokyo.

Keep Reading »

‘You’re Ruining The Aesthetic’ — Five Videographers On Skate Video Music Supervision In 2019

Graphic by Requiem For A Screen

Skate videos have long been a portal for musical discovery. Except in recent years, it has began to almost feel like …filler. If one editor finds success with an untapped genre or artist, there is always an avalanche of imitators. If you find that “how has nobody skated to this?!”-song, the answer to your question is often “someone has, it was just in some video you missed.” And a popular song? Forget it, it has been in twenty kids’ IG edits since the day it got uploaded to YouTube.

(Don’t even start with the dude editing his “Trip to N.Y.C!” video to Big L right now.)

Choosing a song that makes an impact, and gets people tracking it down is hard when our attention spans are their fickle 2019 selves. We reached out to five people who routinely put out edits (i.e. not the guys dropping one full-length every few years) to get their thoughts on how the process of selecting music in skate videos has evolved.

Keep Reading »