Photo by Henry Kingsford


Sam Griffin is a visual artist living and working in London, England.

His art practice is a mix of sculpture and drawing, and often references architecture. Although his work has little to do with skateboarding, Sam has ridden a skateboard for the better part of twenty years at his own leisure.
He recently contributed to the book ON A DAY WITH NO WAVES. A CHRONICLE OF SKATEBOARDING 1779-2009 by Raphaël Zarka (Link), and even worked at London's infamous Slam City Skates.

In the following essay Griffin draws on his art processes to piece together a history of skateboard videos and how they inter relate with camcorder technology of the day.


This presentation seeks to chart the history of skateboarding in the 1980’s and 90’s and the use of the emergent video technologies and formats as a means of documenting and distributing its associated culture.

Whilst still enjoying its second peak of popularity in the boom/bust cycle that has characterised its evolution, Skateboarding in the early 80's was yet to encroach on the popular consciousness in the way that it has done today, with some professional skaters earning millions of pounds per year and a now unprecedented rate of skatepark construction both within the UK and across the world.

At this time, its popular, but relatively marginal cultural position as a choice of pastime favoured the use of the VHS video format as the primary means by which to disseminate this still nascent culture in to teenage bedrooms across the planet.

More cost effective and targeted than mainstream television or film studio distribution channels, it crucially allowed skateboard companies and teams to showcase their talent in a context they were able to define-important at a time where the popular perception of skateboarding was still hovering between it being a toy, hobby, or even a competitive sport.

The first forays in to the production of these videos point to a desire to align skateboarding with a more recognisable form of display-based visual presentation.

Videos such as the Bones Brigade Video Show employed high production values, with skaters shot on 35mm film, using multiple angles and jump cuts to heighten the spectacularised context in which the Powell-Perlata team (known as the Bones Brigade) were being presented. In addition to the high quality of the visual aspect of these productions, they are also notable for their music - which was created especially for each video.
This approach to skate video production reached its zenith in the 1987 Powell-Peralta film The Search For Animal Chin.
The format of this video was similar that of the previous Powell productions: It contains a loose narrative thread with skaters such as Tony Hawk, Mike McGill, Steve Caballero and Lance Mountain performing tricks that by modern standards are technically simplistic, but notable for their height and speed, and most memorably formed part of choreographed routines that took place on a ramp complex of unprecendeted complexity designed especially for the video by the legendary ramp builder Tim Payne (along with some improptu and somewhat reluctant assistance from Lance Mountain and Mike McGill)

It is worth noting that the ramp complex was so large that aerial camera work was required to capture some of the trick rouines successfully.

or go here to watch the entire video

The end of the 1980’s heralded the introduction of VHS video shoulder cameras, allowing skateboard videos to be shot and edited at a greatly reduced cost - most famously evidenced by the decision of Stacy Peralta (of the then dominant Powell- Peralta skateboards) to sack his entire production crew in favour of giving handheld cameras to the team riders to capture their manoeuvres themselves instead - as the focus gradually shifted from the constructed terrains of the skateparks and ramps, to the city streets instead.
This signalled a significant change from the previous aesthetic of the then market leading Powell-Peralta and Vision videos.

Productions such as the early H-Street film Shackle Me Not in 1988 and Hokus Pokus in the following year cemented the agency of this new approach, and from this point onward it became the standard technique for creating skate films, and heralded a new phenomenon of skate-specific videographers (or filmers) such as Daniel Harold Sturt and Dave Schlossbach – both filmers for H-Street team.

So then here’s a bit of Matt Hensley from the 1989 production Hokus Pokus:

As some of you can see – gone are gigantic professionally built ramp complexes – instead we have Matt Hensley skating with equal, if not more skill on a homemade quarterpipe in his parents‘ garage.

Coincidentally, this reduction in production values was also shortly accompanied by a downturn in the popularity of skateboarding, possibly as a symptom of the period of wider economic contraction in the early 1990’s.
The reduction in investment in purpose built facilities (both public and private) forced skateboarders to then explore the city streets as a source of new terrain.
Even in its infancy, where skaters were recreating in the street the manoeuvres that were previously seen in the skateparks, the new handheld video camera technologies provided an ideal means by which to document tricks that were in emerging from this nascent ‘streetstyle’

The size of this new recording equipment also suited the often transgressive nature of the skaters’ use of the urban environent – with footage very often shot in a short space of time on private property.

Unlike the previous nods to a constructed notion of counterculturalism in the earlier Powell Peralta videos, this new style of skate documentation was more closely aligned with a kind of cinema verité. Skaters sought to capture the raw experience of street skateboarding; the architectural curiosities that made up this new terrain, the increasing number of confrontations that occurred with the general public, security guards and police during this process, and crucially the new generation of tricks that were emerging as part of this shift in focus from skatepark to street.

Videos such as the 1990 Useless Wooden Toys produced by New Deal Skateboards capitalised on the video camera’s status now as a household item. Team members would now film eachother, and also up-and-coming talents at the time, with a view to including their footage in the final production. In this way team rosters were sometimes crystallised in the process of filming each new video, thus ensuring the most innovative tricks and their inventors made it in to the final edit.

For example – here is a short clip of a young Ed Templeton in Useless Wooden Toys:

Again, the development of camcorder technology played a pivotal role in the documentation of this new approach, and also to the acceleration in the evolution of the activity itself.
These videos were not distributed simply for entertainment - as a full motion accompaniment to the coverage provided in skateboard magazines, they also doubled as impromptu instruction manuals for hungry teenage minds keen to master the latest tricks.

The early 90's were an exciting time for skateboarding - with the emergent streetstyle eschewing the simpler but more dramatic manoeuvres that had characterised the late 80's, in favour of more technically complex tricks. Such was the pace of this progression, that at one point skateboard magazines even took to publishing lists of the tricks that had been invented since the previous issue.

Videos then provided a vital link in this memetic process of skateboard trends rippling out from California and across the globe - not only through the established channels of national distributors and skateboard shops, but also owing to the nature of the VHS format, the circulation of numerous pirated copies of the videos easily exchanging hands between young skaters.

Footage of the latest tricks was picked apart, rewound and pored over endlessly in slow motion as a means of unlocking the techniques needed to perform them.

The introduction the VHS and Hi-8 formats even ushered in a short lived revolution in skateboarding's accompanying printed media: The video grab - a sequence of still frames lifted from raw Hi 8 footage showing the entirety of a trick that, owing to its technical complexity would have been economically unviable for the average skate photographer to capture on 35mm film (using a rapid fire SLR camera) as the skater could have feasibly taken many attempts to complete the trick, wasting an entire roll of film on each failed attempt.
Thus the video grab offered the skateboard magazines a cost-effective way in which to showcase this new generation of technical tricks, although often with grainy, barely legible still frames of maneouvres that had only been invented in the previous months or even sooner.
This approach to capturing new tricks for video found its zenith in the early Plan B productions such as the seminal 1992 video Questionable - in which the possibility of limitless takes afforded by the cheap Hi-8 recording tapes was exploited to raise the bar in trick complexity and dangerousness seen in videos significantly.


For example – Rodney Mullen’s section in this video took full advantage of this technology. Formerly a solely freestlye skater, Mullen had previously been responsible for inventing the majority of flip tricks that have beome common in modern street skateboarding, and so used this part to showcase a huge range of tricks of unprecendeted complexity:








In this way, the influx of video technology in to skateboard film and printed media established a pervasive simulacrum, whereby cutting edge tricks were presented and digested as being part of the quotidian routine for the professionals who originally performed them, irrespective of how many attempts the original manoeuvres had taken to capture on video successfully.

In short, for subsequent generations of young skaters, video documentation created the bar to aim for, in terms of consistently performable technical prowess.

As the video format established itself as the dominant medium for coverage, consistent structures arose with the narrative of skate productions. Videos began with an opening montage of the individual tricks from each team member. Skaters were then given a video section each within which to demonstrate their skills, which was itself composed of a combination of single tricks and sequences of tricks performed in quick succession, known as a line or run.
With increasing frequency each skaters‘ part was then linked with the next either via scripted skits or pieces of amusing footage gleaned from encounters with the general public, vagrants, police and security guards - who themselves often struggled to make sense of what this group of young people were doing.

As different companies and teams strove to define this still nascent culture and their particualr take on it, a diverse range of approaches to skateboarding and video making sprag up.

At this point in the evolution of the activity and its associated documentation, skateboarding and the horizons of its stylistic concerns began to expand – most excitingly, new branches of street skateboarding began to emerge from the east coast of America. With a focus on speed, consistency and a simpler but more refined technique incorporating wider vocubulary of street obstacles, it served to challenge the stylistic and more importantly geographic supremacy of the then-dominant Californian scene.

This departure was epitomised by the 1996 video Eastern Exposure 3: Underachievers by Dan Wolfe – shot entirely in black and white, at locations mainly in Philadelphia and New York, the video was an instant classic.

Representative of a renewed desire to capture the rawness of the daily experience of street skateboarding, the various skaters‘ parts placed a particular emphasis of runs of tricks performed one after another.
This served not only to portray the reality of street skaters moving through urban space with increased immediacy, but also became a tacit reminder of the consistency with which their tricks could be performed, even in the most adversarial of surroundings - such as on the road in moving traffic. Far from the azure sky and perfect spots of California – its rebuttal of the then current orthodoxy was striking.

So, here we have an absolute belter of a section – this is Ricky Oyola from EE3:








This desire to capture a more fluid and aesthetised form of skateboarding was however not without its proponents on the west coast of America – the Stereo skateboards video Tin Can Folklore from the same year, also sought to place importance on finesse over technical innovation and along with the Alien Workshop videos Memory Screen and the later Timecode heralded of the use of a deliberately archaic medium to attenutate the aesthetic of the final film – in this instance footage shot on camcorders was mixed with footage shot on Super 8 film.

And here’s Ethan Fowler from Tin Can Folklore








As the 1990’s progressed to the Noughites skateboarding again began to enjoy a massive resurgence in popularity – and with increasing revenue attached to the skate industry, the productions values associated with skate videos began to incrementally increase.
It is also important to note the impact of the emergence of digtital SLR cameras at this time. Capable of shooting sequences with a sufficiently high frame rate to fully capture tricks, they revolutionised the production of magazines in the same way as the Hi-8 format had previously ushered in an era of limitless takes within which to capture a trick in full motion a decade earlier. Crucially these digital cameras grealty reduced the cost of capturing more technical tricks, which in the past would have expended an entire 24 shot film roll for each attempt made by the skater. As a cost effective alternative to the now redundant video grab technique – it quickly became the industry standard for sequence photography.
Thus this increase in production values fuelled by a confluence of emergent technologies and greater industry revenue lead quickly to a renewed fashion for presenting skateboarding in ever more spectacularised contexts, removed from the more tangible treatments that had characterised previous videos.
The videos directed by Spike Jonze for the Girl and later the Chocolate teams attested in part to this – productions such as the 1993 Goldfish, the 1996 Mouse, and 2003’s Yeah Right illustrate the shift in Hi 8 Camera technologies to the Mini DV format that ushered in an era of higher and higher resolution video documentation of skateboarding. Building on previous traditions, the varous skaters‘ sections were interspersed with skits of increasing complexity and with increasing use of CGI technology to augment the entertinament value of the videos – and in some cases to present fictitious tricks and scenrios that on closer inspection were impossible without digital post production:


Spike Jonze - Invisible Board - Here


Other teams also returned to the approach pioneered by Powell-Peralta in The Search For Animal Chin – the 2004 DC Video contained a now famous closing segment filmed by the skater Danny Way on a series of vast custom ramp complexes – including the now famous mega ramp

This new wave of spectacularised skateboard documentation peaked arguably with the much anticipated video for the Girl team’s associated footwear company Lakai and their 2007 production Fully Flared.
Conceived my Spike Jonze, Ty Evans and Cory Weincheque as a video documenting the talents of the Lakai team (then the most formidable collection of professionals in the world) the video spared few expenses, with footage shot in HD using dolly shots and other techniques more reminiscent of the 80’s Vision and Powell- Peralta videos.
In particular, the film began with a spectacular opening sequence where each team members‘ balletic skill was captured in slow motion amongst a cacophony of expoding obstacles and fireballs, positing the notion that the skaters involved were almost superhuman.

This era of state-of-the-art camerawork and large budget productions has however been offset by several productions whose aesthetic evidences a more deliberately retrospective gaze.

In the same way as the lo-fi approach of the Stereo videos had set their approach apart in the 1990’s, videos such the 2007 film Gnar Gnar by Krooked skateboards employed a deliberate use of obsolete Hi-8 and VHS cameras to give the final film a resolutely 1990's feel, more in keeping with the now acknowledged 'golden era' of street skateboarding – as an exension of this approach, it is also worth noting that the final film was only available for purchase on VHS format; a DVD version was never created.

This approach was used most recently and innovatively in the Etnies short film Crapshoot produced as part of the 2010 Transworld 'Skate and Create' film competition.

The whole film take place inside a recreation of the infamous 'World Park' – (a notorious private skatepark built in Los Angeles in the 1990's where pros riding for the then dominant World Industries group of companies honed their flair for both skateboarding and misbehaviour)
To ensure the seamlessness of this fictive historical document, the skaters involved were all dressed in appropriately oversized 90's skate fashion, and are documented again on Hi 8 cameras, thus making the entire prodcution virtally indistingushable (barring some of the tricks) from the historical moment it references:


Transworld Skateboarding's Skate And Create here


As an extension of this synthesis of skateboarding and technology, the advent of skateboarding in simulated environments has also begun to play a distinguishable role in broadening the horizons of actualised skateboard practise.

The EA Skate and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series of games, through their need to maintain an entertaining level of gameplay, have presented a simulated version of skateboarding where the level of trick complexity far exceeds the capabilites of most of the current professionals.
The games are however endorsed by many of the current pros – with sophicated motion capture technology used to transcribe the stylistic nuances of each playable professonal skater in to digital form. Thus, the experience of skating in these environments though fantastical, retains the critical degree of plausiblity needed for these simulations to become a test site for maneouvres to try in the real world – as the professional skater Joey Brezinski recently noted:
Its so sick trying to take a video game trick and make it reality, it just takes way longer with your feet than the sticks..

"I can think of a trick, do it in the game and see how it works visually...the mechanics, weight distribution...then go do it in real life with a head start I never had before. It just takes longer and hurts more in real life!

A recent example of this skateboarding which is more reminiscent of a videogame segment was the section filmed by Torey 'T-Puds' Pudwill as part of the 2010 Transworld video Hallelujah, with the influential blog Boil The Ocean (link) going as far as to note:
Torey Pudwill… his “Dudesx3″ part served as a notice of arrival and here he appears intent on pushing his freakish powers to the limit of video-gamedom with all those kickflips in the midst of ledge combos and generally lazer flipping whatever frightening jump is in front of him.

As the short history represented by this collection of footage attests to – each successive generation of skaters since the late 1980's has benefited from access to an exaggerated simulacrum of skateboard practise with which to orient itself toward, and then eventually exceed and document for consumption and digestion by the next wave of upstart skaters.

In particular, the cumulative influence of video fomats, camera technologies and crucially now, the internet has only served to accelerate the speed by which what appears at the cutting edge of practise can be disseminated, digested, replicated and then surpassed. With pros sometimes filming their final tricks the night before the premier of the film they will appear in, and pirated copies of the footage circulating worldwide within hours of a DVD release, the metaphorical distance between professional and hungry audience has never been smaller.

End.