The Age of the COVIDeo — An Interview With Jon Colyer About ‘Sanitizer’

Interview by Adam Abada
Original Photos by Jason Miller & Adam Concannon

The COVID age has coincided with a boom in local skate videography. The past year has given us incredible, fully-realized projects from places like Dallas, Pittsburgh, the eastern half of Connecticut — there were two full-length Seattle videos in the same week last year.

It’s not that these places wouldn’t have been producing great videos if not for the pandemic, just that through some combination of unemployment, no travel diluting the local color of the footage, and the time to take second and third looks at spots that have been passed on before gave the last year’s crop of hometown videos a sharper vision than ever before.

Jon Colyer‘s Sanitizer was one of those projects. Portland is a place with no shortage of skateboard mythology — and while there are influences from Dane Brady, Matt Beach, and the D.I.Y. culture that the city is know for, the video felt out of left field, stacked with skaters you likely never heard of, and spots you have never seen.

We had Adam track down its creator to talk about how Sanitizer came to be.

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