Can You See?
Can You See? is very different from every other video on this page. It's sort of somewhere between a
regular skate video and a documentary. I think of it as a documentary more than I think of it as a skate video.
There's so much for me to say about this video. I guess I'll start with a paragraph about what I started out
wanting to accomplish. Oh yeah, and for the sake of my own sanity, every time I type "skateboarding" in here,
it counts as "skating and biking."
For a while I had been thinking about the idea of representing skateboarding (another
thought process sparked by my research papers). It seemed to me that very few videos ever really represent
skateboarding. Basically, what 95% of all videos do is to capture little pieces of skateboarding. When we
watch videos, we watch 'em to gain information and ideas. We want to see who's doing what trick, what kinds
of things/setups kids are skating, how big different people are going, how tech others are getting, and if
you're really fuckin' lame, who's wearing what kind of clothes. Videos seem to capture what we do to us
because we already know what it looks like. However, you can't show a video to someone who doesn't skate
and have them understand. They don't see what we see. I wanted to make a video that captured skateboarding;
I wanted to make a video that showed what we did; I wanted to make a video that caught why we do what
we do. More specifically and personally, I wanted to make a video that my friends, when they watched it, could
point at and say, "That's what I do. That's it right there. Watch this and you'll be able to see what I see."
My dream was that some kid somewhere who was having a bunch of problems with his parents not understanding
why he was spending his time like this would get ahold of this video, show it to them, and feel like the
video could help the parents see what the kids see. That's why the title is Can You See?. The title
asks two groups if they can see. First, it asks my friends if they can see themselves reflected in the
video--my dream here is that they watch the video and feel kind of like their experiences and the activities they
enjoy have been distilled down into one 40 minute video. Second, it asks people who aren't involved (parents,
friends at school, school teachers/administrators, etc.) if they can start to see why we do what we do. It's
not like we can make them spend the minimum 2 years of practice and committment so that they can know why we
keep throwing ourselves to the ground without any hope of "winning" anything. I want them to start to feel
what we feel, see what we see, understand our reasons, comprehend our thoughts. I want people to be able
to understand.
There are lots of things I did to try to make this work. The first one I decided on was the idea that I didn't
want to do video interviews. I didn't want to have people's faces matched up with their voices. I wanted it
to be like their voices could be anyone, you, or no one. Even though the video is (very intentionally) about
my friends and the ways that they are, I wanted it to be about what they did. When people heard various
quotes, I didn't want the thoughts expressed to be immediately attributed to a specific face or personality.
I wanted the voices and thoughts to be more like skateboarding itself speaking. Through this I was hoping
that anyone who watched the video (my friend or not) would see and hear themselves in the video instead of
seeing and hearing a scene that they aren't a part of--I think this is the major flaw in every,/i> attempt
at capturing skating...people always end up making it too much about their scene and themselves instead of
about the activity itself. The next thing I decided to do was to avoid conducting the interviews myself.
I was really worried that if I interviewed everyone, my questions and interests would push the person being
interviewed to talk about things I like instead of whatever was in their minds. I did this by getting a
little handheld tape recorded and writing up 4 sets of questions. The first set of questions was the only
one that I asked everyone to answer. I told them that after they answered those 4 questions, they could
answer or not answer any questions they wanted. Then I sent them off somewhere to answer the questions by
themselves. This way, my voice and interests were minimized, if not completely removed. One or two of the
interviews had the questions asked by my, but that's only because the people specifically asked me to read
them the questions.
After I worked that out, I realized that if I didn't have video interviews I was going to have to have
something on the screen while people were talking, so I started thinking about what that should be. My
first thought was obviously tricks, but I decided that I wanted the tricks to have their own place. To put
the tricks with the interviews would be to mix things together that don't mix in real life. What we think
and say about what we do is relevant to the tricks we do, but we don't think and say those things while we're
out havin' a hot sesh. That's for later that night or some rainy day watching videos or a car ride or
something. I eventually decided on having shots of empty spots and various things that we do under the
interviews for one major reason. I've thought for a long time that it's weird that skaters are constantly
looking at and for spots no matter what. We just look at shit differently. I don't think I need to explain
this so I'm not going to. I chose empty spots (as well as the alternating interview/skate section format)
in the hopes that people who didn't skate would, by the end of the video, start to be able to see what we
see. That's why I wanted to avoid having too many shots of kids actually skating spots (something I did
consider for a bit); I wanted people to be able to start to see for themselves the ways and the things that
we see every day. I wanted them to come to this kind of vision on their own. I wanted them to be able
achieve it without being told. I assumed that the video behind the first interview section would only be
interesting and significant to skateboarders because others wouldn't be able to see the spots the way we
see them yet. That's why I chose to put the "What is skateboarding?" answers in this area. I thought that
not only would the be one of the more interesting sections to people who didn't skate, but it would also
complement their first glimpse into what it's like to be a skateboarder. After the first interview and
riding section, I was hoping that people would start to recognize the spots they saw being ridden from the
interview sections beforehand and by the end of the video (or on a second viewing) be able to see the
empty spots the way we see them.
While I was gathering footage of empty spots, I decided that anytime I was going to have a moving shot, I
wanted it to be from a skateboard. It seemed a little dishonest to be trying to make this whole video about
skateboarding and then not use skateboards to make it. Any of the moving shots that are shaky are that way
because they were done from a skateboard. One of the ideas that I had when thinking about making
this failed but was pretty cool. I was thinking at one point that I would try to get a still and moving
shot of every spot, and the every moving shot would be moving in the same direction. That way I could have
parts with still shots of spots and parts with moving shots; what I was really excited about though was the
idea that if I could get all the moving footage going the same direction, it would kind of look like you
were going in circles around the spots or spinning. However, this proved to be too hard to pull off,
mainly because the direction I chose was uphill at a lot of spots, which made getting footage real
hard. I did, however, try to get shots of spots that were interesting and in some way new. Whether it
was from a different vantage point than usual or travelling past it (like you were seeing it from a car
window), I wanted the spots to be interesting looking as well as enticing to skaters. I hoped that when
kids who rode watched the video, they would see spots and be like, "Damn, I gotta skate there!" Or, "Yo,
that looks like this or that spot." Again, though I was filming specific spots, I wanted kids to be able
to see their own lives and spaces in this.
Instead of doing the riding sections by person this time, I felt like it was a lot more appropriate to this
video to do it in terms of area. Anyone who's watched this video more than once will notice that there's
a Pittsburgh section, a wreck section, an HCS outside section, and an HCS inside section. This is
something that I've always wanted to do with a video, but never got around to. I'm actually still really
attracted to the idea and would like to try it out with a video that's all riding instead of being split
like this one was. I like the idea that you'd get to watch lots of different styles of skating, different
people's approaches to spots, and see a spot get destroyed. I've always wanted to put together a little
section that focuses on a lot of people skating one spot and put every different trick they do into that
section. It seems like it'd be cool to be able to watch a spot get destroyed. In my head, it'd be kind
of like watching a whole session...with the non-makes edited out. I actually think the HCS sections came
out a lot like that, especially the inside one. It's really fun for me to watch 'cause you can see how
different everyone's approach is to the same setup, you can see the different things people choose to
ride, and you can see the different tricks people think to try on the same piece. This is true of the
other sections in the video, but not nearly as strongly as it is with this one.
I had a great time choosing the music for this video. Trying to find a song that fit with all the different
styles, with the different kinds of things being skated, and with the areas in general was real hard, but it
was a challenge that was well worth it in the end. I stopped here for a minute to try to decide which part
is my favorite, but I can't decide. I like them all equally. The music came out so good for every one of
the sections. I also had a lot of fun trying to find new ways to film spots that I had seen 100 times before.
I wanted the shots to be interesting to me and other people, but I wanted it to still be very clear what
exactly the spot looked like. It was really hard to capture some of the spots completely ('marble park'
downtown and 'fountain park' on northside were pretty hard). I also ran into some great characters while I
was cruising around the city shooting spots. While filming the bank in Lawrenceville, a security guard came
out to ask me what I was doing. Once I explained, he wanted to talk about filming stuff because apparently
he liked to make movies. He told me all about his weird movies (very drug and acid trip oriented). He also
told me that to make money on the side, he films pornos. He never explained if he filmed for a porno
company or if he made his own pornos and sold them. Either way, it was fuckin' hilarious.
Editing this video was so fucking hard that I can't even tell you about it without getting all tense. First
and foremost, editing audio that's isn't on mini-disc is fucking time consuming. Think about it. I had
cassettes full of interviews. To get topic-oriented sections of audio, I had to rewind and fast forward
through every single interview like 80 times to find the clips that were relevant to the topic that I was
working on. Editing the audio took SO long. It was brutal. I actually edited the audio like 4 months
before I started working on the video. It took so long...seriously hours and hours and hours in front of the
stereo just rewinding and fast forwarding for little 2-5 second clips of audio. Also remember that if I
messed up or forgot to put something into the tapes, I couldn't go back in and insert it later. Everything
had to come out exactly right the first time 'cause with cassettes you can't stick something in the middle
without covering something else up (also a problem when making regular skate videos). If you want to fix
the beginning of a section, you'll have to re-edit EVERYTHING that's after it. Editing the video was
easier, though not simple. It was difficult to get the interview sections of video to match the length of
the voice track...that's why some run a little long. I got pretty close, but didn't succeed as much as I
hoped to. By the time I finished editing all of the normal riding secions and the interview/empty spot
sections, I was about ready to be done, but I had forgotten the wreck section. That wasn't too bad 'cause
I've done those a lot. The one newer things I tried to do with this wreck section was to put things in that
weren't necessarily brutal wrecks. I tried to include falls in the wreck section that were 'good catches'
or realy close 'almost hurt' falls. I kinda wanted to put those in with the wrecks because a lot of times
the 'good catches' are as athletic and cool-looking as that actually landed trick. When I finished this
section, I was really ready to be done.
However, I had an idea that I just couldn't ignore. I realized that if I was trying to represent skateboarding,
I would have to give at least some recognition to all of the attempts that didn't result in a good wreck or
a landed trick. I decided to do this by making a section that I've had in the back of my mind for years. I
decided to make a 'frustration' section...and I have to say, I love it. It's so fucking entertaining to watch,
and it makes you relive every moment you've ever had like that, because we've all had our share. My idea did
morph a little bit along the way. Even though it started out as purely a frustration section, it started to
contain shots of people smiling, riding away from or up to tricks, bro-ing down, and just generally being
themselves. I didn't do this intentionally, but I think it happened for three reasons. The first one being that
the frustration needed to be balanced out by some sort of expression of fun. The second reason is that the
shots were too cool, interesting, or funny to be left out of the video. The final reason is that subconsciously
I knew that I didn't have enough footage to make it a full section and had to fill it out with something.
That sounds kinda lame, but we got a life and that was a busy time for everyone. As painful as it may be,
skating's gotta take a back seat to other stuff once in a while.
Well, that's about all I can think of for this video...or any of the other ones for that matter, since this
is that last one I'm doing. I hope this shit was interesting 'cause it took me forever to get it all done.
It was, however, fun to go back, watch all the videos, and then get to talk about them. A lot of this is
shit I've never really sat down and expressed formally, except maybe to Derek or something. I guess that
Can You See? would be a good title for the whole set of videos and this page, since when it's all
put together it probably captures the same things as the video itself. Toss me any feedback/comments. This
time I've Outie 5000 for reals. Peace.