Belzebaby

Emily MaRee

If you are as invested in the women’s skateboarding industry as I am, you will absolutely know what Quit Your Day Job is. If not, Quit Your Day Job is an all-female skate video released in early 2017 by filmmakers Monique O’Toole and Erik Sandoval. This was the first U.S. based all-female video in ten years, that included women from all over the world. Even though the world was overdue for something so powerful like this again, in my opinion, it came at the right moment. When I first heard about QYDJ, it was through of course, GirlsSkateNetwork. The video was about a small handful of the women participating in the full-length video, from the U.S. and Canada. They had all joined together to rent an Airbnb for a month, to skate and film for this video. I thought that was the coolest thing I had ever seen. The passion for what they were doing was flowing out of them. Who cares if some of them had to sleep on a floor! They wanted to film this video, and nothing would stop them. 

About two months later, the trailer for the video dropped on GSN. This was real, and this was happening. But here was the kicker, they needed money to fund the project using an Indiegogo campaign. Yes, many projects need to be funded this way nowadays, but this seemed different. Do you ever see men pros ever having to Indiegogo their videos? I sure don’t. I remember posting the Indiegogo link on Facebook saying, “The fact that female pro and amateur skaters are so ignored by the industry, that they have to ask for money to help make their video is ridiculous to me. Check this out, if they reach their goal this is gonna be huge”. And I was right, it was huge, but more on that later. Now I’m a poor college student, spending a huge chunk of change is hard. But, when I saw the perks on the crowdfunding page, I knew that if I didn’t contribute, and if this video didn’t get made, I would feel so awful. So, I went all in and got one of the signed Vanessa Torres boards and the video of course. She’s my favorite skater, and I could be contributing to something historic, I had to! For a while I was concerned that the video wasn’t going to make it, but with the outstanding showing the women had that year during the Street League Competition, and all the new fans they gained with that, they were able to get the video over-funded. I remember watching the numbers on the Indiegogo page going up after I watched the competition, I was so proud of my heroes.