I wanted to tell our story with a greater scope than the usual small slice you’d see of a hyper-specific time and place. I wanted to share the objective history and take the audience on a ride through the unfolding of our particular subculture’s roots, and I wanted to do so visually. 

– Victor Friedman

Words by: Victor Friedman

Andy Strahan, soyale. Picture by: Javan Makhmali

The way I conceive of the early years, every six months or so was like a different period (complete with new styles, a slew of new tricks, etc.). Everything evolved so rapidly. Go back and watch VG2 back-to-back with VG3. I remember when VG3 came out, our reaction was: “Everything’s different now,” and then we echoed that sentiment later the same year with Fast Shoes and again the following year with Plastic Balance. I guess, technically, every six months could be considered an era unto itself, but there were enough commonalities that it just seemed to make more sense to me to consider those “periods” within an overarching era, which I suppose ended in late 2000 with balanced fastslides (which, incidentally, Drew Bachrach was doing in 1996, if not earlier) and freestyle (ungrabbed) tricks. Because the montages are mixed-year, it’s very useful to be able to date tricks based on hardware, clothing, etc., for those sections. A number of tricks in this project were highly innovative, so it adds an extra layer of appreciation to be able to identify the different periods within the era, and also to know which tricks came out when. If you have the greater context for each period, then you can compare apples to apples – you can look at a trick, see that it was early ’96 and think about how it stacks up to VG3, then see another trick that was mid-’96 and see how it stacks up to VG4. It’s obviously easier with the non-montage sections, which are explicitly labeled, so you can look at an Era profile from 1995 and put it in the context of The Bottom Line or Hoax II and look at another one from 1998 and put it into the context of FOR or Elements. If you know that someone was doing something before it was officially “invented,” that’s obviously very meaningful, and it’s just one of those things that will either be extremely obvious to you or it won’t. It just depends on the individual viewer’s personal knowledge of skating history.

Despite all of the mixed-year montages, there is an overall chronological narrative build to the movie (largely due to the profiles) so, in order to get the full effect, I’d definitely watch it in one sitting (it’s the same length as Hoax II).

 

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