News: The Birth of The Skate Video

If you’ve ever filmed a trick of yourself skateboarding, edited your own video or been inspired by a skate video you owe a small part of that experience to Stacey Peralta and the Bones Brigade crew. Before Stacey Peralta, skate videos were just documents of live contests or events. Simple utilitarian pieces of media that captured the skateboarding as it happened. But Stacey and his work with the Bones Brigade team blended skateboarding and video into what we know today as the “skate video”. Thus changing an entire generation and the following decades of skaters and youth around the world. And giving birth to a whole new art form.

“Dogtown and Z Boys” was a smash hit when it premiered and it propelled Stacey Peralta into the limelight as a documentary filmmaker, winning awards and praise from countless fans. But although the story was fascinating and made for a great watch, I didn’t feel too incredibly connected to a bunch of surf-renegades all the way across the continent. Jay Adams and Tony Alva were a full generation before my time and it wasn’t until the rise of the Bones Brigade that I started to take notice of skateboarding culture. My older brother starting skating somewhere around 1984 and as he started getting more and more serious about it and once my parents finally were able to afford a VCR after years of renting one from the grocery store every weekend, our shelves started to slowly fill up with skate videos. I quit soccer after 5 years of not having Saturdays to myself and proceeded to spend the next year on the couch. As my waist line grew so did my familiarity with the line-up of network daytime TV. After soaking in a good hour of the “Ghostbusters” cartoon, I’d follow it up with some GI Joe, Thundercats and of course a healthy dose of Looney Tunes. But I started getting bored, so when my brother would go out skating I would break into his room and dig through all of his shit. An unauthorized sneak through the room of a 14 year old is like exploring the pirate ship in The Goonies when you’re only 10 years old. I remember finding the Ice T album “Power” in his record collection and almost suffering an aneurism. I probably stared at the girl’s ass on that album cover for a solid 40 hours that year. But after a while, it was inevitable that I’d get bored enough with all of his stuff to finally break down and watch one of his skate videos, even though I had little interest in skateboarding at this point. I think I was 11 years old when I first popped in the home-made mix tape lying next to the VCR labeled “Thrashin-Y-Mashin”. Haha, that name still makes me laugh to this day. What lie on that 2 hour long video tape was about to change my life forever. My brother had created a little modern day mixtape with several videos pieced together including “Future Primitive” and “Public Domain”. Watching Mike V shred through the streets of NY and Tommy Guererro fly down the hills of SF boggled my mind. But even more intriguing to me was the way the the editing and choices of music managed to pull emotion and excitement out of me for a sport that I didn’t really give a shit about at the time. I was literally won over by skate videos and the way Stacey put them together before I was won over by skateboarding itself. It was the power of the skate video that sparked my interest in setting up a board and trying it all out.
Stacey has been working on a new project which just premiered at the Sundance film festival and I’m pretty excited to check it out. Jahmal just forwarded me a little Sundance interview with the original Bones Brigade team and I though it was pretty interesting listening to Rodney Mullen talk about it. We rarely give the credit to him that is due but this brilliant dude from Gainesville, Florida invented every flip trick that we do today. And it all happened in his parents barn on a slab of concrete. Amazing.
Anyways, I encourage you to watch the trailer to the new documentary and maybe follow it up with the little Sundance interview if you have the time. I think it’s important to see where it all began. Because as corny as most Powell Peralta videos were back then, they still are a pretty incredible to look back on and realize how gnarly of a production they were, especially considering they were an unprecedented first of their kind. Soon followed by and improved upon by Mike Ternasky with the H-Street videos and then mastered by Mike Hill with the Alien Workshop video “Memory Screen” in 1991.

from February 01