#skatecreate

Evaluation of the Trailer 

I decided that it was a good time to release a trailer for the film as I hoped that it will increase the social media attention and publicity for the film’s release. The idea behind the trailer was to create something that captured the essence of the subject matter without giving too much away. It was also important for me to show who is featured in the film as I felt this is a not only a selling point but also a way to increase potential promotion.

In order to achieve this I shot fresh skating footage. I wanted to capture how creative skateboarders are. In an ethnographical sense, the best way to achieve this was to put them in a situation where they needed to be creative. I asked so ex-students to help me with this as I know them well enough to be able to rely upon them creatively. We shot at the skater made spot that I used in the film as the skaters have to create their own obstacles from what they can find (which is another example of them being creative).

As previously planned, I had the idea to use a drone to get an aerial shot. My plan was to make the word ‘fly’ out of the materials that are at the wasteland that has been transformed in to a skate spot and to get the skaters to skate this. I asked Blake Max (a current level 4 student at Oaklands College who shot the other drone footage for the film to help). I am thrilled that we managed to pull this shot off. It wasn’t easy though. Firstly, when we arrived at the wasteland it had been mostly cleared by the council. We had to rebuild and collect all of the things we used to create the word from scratch. This meant heavy lifting and on a 29degree hot day this was a challenge. We managed to put the word together but the letter were close together and because we couldn’t permanently, there were some issues with health and safety  which made skating on it hard for the skaters. Luckily, they were able to creatively solve these issues. I think in fact these ‘obstacles’ acted as a catalyst for their creativity, much like the Oulipo.

I shot the action from a static (ground) point of view and Blake shot directly above the DIY hurdles, close enough so that you couldn’t make out that they spelt a word. Whilst they skated Blake slowly flew directly upwards to reveal the word. After we had shot this a few times to be sure that we had the shot I wanted to get some close ups. I used the fish eye lens to achieve this. In skate film terms this is known as ‘going fish’. The reason for using a fish eye lens is so that you can capture the full trick (because of the width of the lens) but at a closer proximity.

In post-production I wanted to select some key lines from each interviewee that captured the films subject matter. I started with Eloise’s line “how is art and skateboarding related” to set up the narrative. This follows with Grant Hatfield “I think skateboarders are the most creative people around”. Ben Gore creates a discourse with the line “I see skateboarding as an art”, which is then countered by Ed Templeton’s: “I see it as a lifestyle, but that argument is a semantics argument”. Barry Kay’s line “to skate you have got to be creative” adds some reasoning to the argument and to finish off Mat Lloyds: “I don’t give a shit dude, I just want to skateboard” makes the film enticing as it re-presents the key argument and gives it a hook.

I built up to the reveal (aerial shot) using these interview snippets and footage of skateboarders using obstacles creatively. I think that I have achieved a real sense of what the film is about without including too much of the film itself.