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.

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Five Favorite Parts With Jack O’Grady

Interview by Farran Golding
Collage by Requiem For A Screen
Photos by Thomas Robinson via Jack’s Thrasher Interview

Missed the chance to run a “Five Faves” in September, but 8-for-10 so far on the promise of doing one a month in 2021 isn’t so bad ;) The latest comes from a young man bound to be in consistent S.O.T.Y. contention for the foreseeable future. We are also now two-in-a-row on people born after the release of Video Days citing Guy’s part as a major influence.

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In Memoriam — The Oral History of the Twin Towers in Skate Photos, Part 2

Intro + Interviews by Adam Abada
Collage by Requiem For A Screen

It is fitting that there are maybe the most skate photos of the Twin Towers featuring Keith Hufnagel and Harold Hunter: two of the greatest representatives of New York skateboarding.

Revisiting our series from two years ago, here are five more stories behind images of the Twin Towers in skateboarding, including many of Harold and Keith.

Looking into the stories behind them, I learned how essential they were to the fabric of so much of the skateboarding that has come out of the five boroughs. In memoriam photos of the Towers turn into stories about people and eras who shared some form of dual history with them, and in turn, ourselves. They remind us that if anything can be learned from difficult loss, it’s to always make the most of the time given to us. And that can be turned into hope and happiness, at least for a short time.

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‘Imagine If You Could Just Rip Across That’ — An Interview With Dick Rizzo

Intro & Interview by Farran Golding
Collages by Requiem For A Screen
Photography by Mike Heikkila
Run Painting by Andrew Durgin-Barnes

In the blink of an eye, we’ve had a decade of Bronze, a homie video series turned brand that reshaped the runtime required to deem a project “full-length.” Quasi transcended their birthright as a successor to Alien Workshop, carved out a singular path, and released two of the best longform productions in recent memory. The moniker “HUF” now covers not only the guy whose video parts defined less is more, but a longstanding brand.

Dick Rizzo – or Richie to those who know him — has in one way or another, intersected with these moments in contemporary skateboarding, which makes it all the more surprising that his story hasn’t been more thoroughly explored.

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