CYC Offers DIY Skate Video Workshop

Skateboarding and videomaking have gone hand in hand since the good old days of the Bones Brigade and Vision videos in the mid-Eighties. Back then, shooting footage of your friends usually meant grabbing your dad's super-8 camera and sitting beside the back yard half-pipe as the skaters practiced their backward McOllies and shredded perfectly good plywood into knee-gouging splinters.

Times have changed – man, how they've changed – and these days you're more likely to find a mini-press-corps of budding videographers gathered around the neighborhood skatepark or the pro-built local ramp, Canon GL-1's at the ready, flush with new fish-eye lenses and boom mikes. Punk has turned pro, again, but few of those Mahicaned camera-kids have the skills to edit and streamline all that fantastic flying footage down to a watchable level. And no one except you is going to want to watch your brother smash his groin into a stair-railing over and over and over – not even Bam Margera and the CKY boys.

Thanks to the MMAC, however, local skaters-cum-professional videographers Seth Johnson and Jake Borndal are here to help. Their DIY Skate Video Workshop, running July 12-26, will teach kids ages 12-17 how to pare down their endless summer to manageable lengths, as well as the tricks of the trade (vis-à-vis how to get that perfect shot without getting some newbie's deck lodged in your camera-eye).

Johnson, a filmmaker and member of the Cinemaker Co-op from back in the day, says that these days "skateboarding is a platform by which kids can get involved in a lot of creative endeavors like photography, writing, music, and filmmaking. And so to support kids in the efforts in doing those things, I'm actively involved in campaigning the city of Austin to build its own skate park (you can check our efforts online at www.austinpublicskatepark.org), and this workshop fits right into that."

Longtime local skater, skate videographer, and UT student Borndal is quick to note that there are already plenty of young skate video enthusiasts out there – "it seems like everybody has some sort of skate video they're working on these days" – with Austin's vast network of skaters having already established a history of DIY videos and films.

"The problem," says Johnson, "is that although a lot of people have the ambition to create a skate video, and end up shooting an endless amount of video footage, they tend to find themselves overwhelmed with this unwieldy amount of skate video footage, and they can never conquer that massive amount of footage and cut it down to a digestible package.

"What we're trying to do with this workshop is to help the kids deliver a professionally edited finished product. We'll spend some time in the classroom talking about the concepts of skate videography from shooting to editing it all down on Final Cut Pro. And by the end, you'll come away with a really solid and watchable piece of filmmaking."

Workshop info and registration available at www.motionmac.org.