Deathbowl to Downtown

Deathbowl to Downtown screened last night at the Castro Theater. Deathbowl is the latest film from Coan Nichols and Rick Charnoski, the team that produced Tent City, Fruit of the Vine, and many other skate related flicks.

The poster says that Deathbowl is about the evolution of skateboarding in New York City, but the filmmakers had something else to say at the opening. Basically they said that Deathbowl is really about every place that skateboarding evolved from sidewalk surfing to street shredding. It just happens to be set in New York.

I like that explanation better, because even though the film made me want to hop a plane for NYC to scout the Burroughs... (You hear me D?) it also made me nostalgic for my early skate days back home in Louisiana. Lake Charles isn't comparable to NYC in any legitimate way, but like the skaters in the film my friends and I operated in an environment that was hostile to us and we made due with want we had. Like the skaters in the film we stayed out all night skating downtown, got hassled by cops, and looked west towards California. Unlike the skaters in the film, we dreamed about New York City also. My formative skate years were in the nineties when "street skating was skating" and it was all Wu-Tang and Zoo York for us.

Deathbowl to Downtown made me want to skate. I don't know what bigger compliment a skater can give a movie. When I walked out of the Castro Theater I wanted to call my friends to get an all night sesh going... but I didn't. I'm old and had to work in the morning. So instead I headed to Thee Parkside for the after party, Thrasher video, and whiskey. Then I headed home and went to bed. Lame.

Highlights from the film:

The portrait of New York in the seventies as a grimy post industrial wasteland and playground for graffiti writers, misfits, and skateboarders.

The evolution of street skating from jocking ramp tricks to stylish Mark Gonzales inspired street ripping that set the stage for modern skateboarding. For that matter all the scenes with Gonz were amazing.

Growing up street skating made me particularly biased to the street section with "plazas for days." Nichols and Charnoski interviewed a Harvard professor who made note of New York City skateboarders in a study about the uses of urban architecture. They also interviewed the guy who designed the Brooklyn Banks, and he didn't seem the least bit annoyed that his creation was one the most famous skate spots on the globe. The guy who designed EMB should hang out with him for a minute, maybe it will rub off.

I won't spoil any more of the movie. Definitely check it out if it comes to a city near you. Screening dates are on the website. You can also preorder the DVD there.

Make It Happen angle. I have no idea how they funded it, but the sponsored by Mountain Due might have had a little something to do with it.



Also dig up Roller Slobs if you can find it. They opened the night with that short and it's well worth tracking down.

Roughneck BART Tour 2008 Video!!!!

High Res version for the those of you with good connections:



Here's the long awaited BART Tour vid. Sorry it took a couple of weeks. I had a lot of footage to go through and Abby and I spent last weekend at a wedding in Louisiana. Congrats Crystal and John.

BART Tour is a San Francisco institution hosted annually by Roughneck Hardware. This year Johnny got the party started at Mission Skateshop with bagels, mimosas, and a memorial for Van Wastell RIP. Skating started down the street at Potrero Del Sol skatepark where Ratface took best trick on the tombstone with an all out assault on the damn thing. Next up was 24th Street BART where Chubbs took the honors for biggest frontside wallride.

I rode BART with the crew up until Embarcadero Station where I hopped out and jumped in the Civic. (lame I know) I missed some crazy manuals and a civilian getting taken out. Luckily Hidehiko Fujiwara was there with the one chip, and so was Satva (check out his vid.) BART got stuck on the tracks so I beat everybody to Walnut Creek. Johnny texted me to let me know what was going down, and asked for beer, so I picked up a case of Coors which made the Civic a popular destination.

Walnut Creek was madness with three best trick contests: stairs, transfer, and hubba ledge; switch kickflip, launch to backlip, and kickflip front fifty respectively. The only name I caught was Justin who rocked the hubba. After the contests Charlie tossed a couple of boards and nearly started a riot. The guy who wrestled the second board from the mob was chased out of the park.

Then it was off to Berkeley with Charlie, Lil' Stevie, D, and Chubbs in the civic for road sodas and quicker transportation. Berkeley went off smoothly and without cops unlike in years past... just good times, bbq, and skateboarding. Jon Stallings took best trick on the big quarter pipe. Ride or Die.

Thanks to Johnny and Charlie for organizing BART Tour. Thanks to Hidehiko for joining forces with me on the video. And thanks to the artists on ccmixter.org for the music.

Music credits:

Lady Fingers
High Stakes

The Psychosomatiks
Fort Minor Remix
(Editors note: can't find my way back to this url)

Coffeetrim
What Cha Need and
Look at Me

For more Roughneck head over to the new site.

See you next year.

Debates aren't all that's going on this weekend

If you skate and live in the Bay Area the next few days are going to be pretty fun.

The Tim Brauch memorial skate jam is happening all weekend in San Jose.


A friend of TeamJaded named Pete Koff is working on a doc about Tim Brauch who was an influential professional skateboarder who passed away at the top of his career. Abby and I have helped a little with shooting and consulting, so expect more about that sooner than later.

And on Monday... at the Castro Theater: Death Bowl to Downtown the NYC skate doc is screening for free.


...That's right for free. Seating is first come first serve so get there early.

Ratface BART Tour MVP

Ratface and Roughneck Johnny at the first stop of Roughneck BART Tour 2008. Ratface won the best trick contest on the tombstone at Potrero Park, San Francisco. I can't remember what he did... it was a long, fun day full of skating, filming, and Coors drinking. I'm capturing the footage right now. Video coming soon.

Jeremey

Editors Addition 9/26/08 for all y'all who find your way to this post searching for BART Tour 2008. Here's the videos:



High Res from Blip above... Lower Res from youtube below.

Tech to Gnar

TechCrunch is done. Next up, BART Tour.


That's right, Roughneck is at it again, annual BART Tour this Sunday. It kicks off at Potrero Del Sol Skatepark and ends in Berkeley.

Here's some highlights from the past:

2007


2006


See you there.

Day 3 Crunch Log: In Present Tense and Berry Flavors

Photo of me shooting (yesterday) from DotBen's Flickr. The rest of the photos are mine.

10:32 AM

It's the third and final day of TechCrunch 50, and I'm sitting up stairs on the media deck manning the Seesmic Studio solo. Whit and Giselle are using the VIU to shoot Giselle's swag review, so the studio is on break until the camera returns.


Here's bag o' swag from yesterday.

bag o' swag: tuesday
I just had a long talk with a blogger girl named Jennifer who is here promoting a friends start-up called Edmodo... I think. It's sort of like a Pownce for teachers, at least that's what she said. I'm not too sure what that means. She seemed cool though. She was in the demo pit on Monday, and today she's just walking around. How she came to the Seesmic studio was because she needed a place to set her bags and I guess Seesmic seemed like a safe place. We do have a pile of gear up here.


The floor looks calm this morning. I wonder if things will pick up in the afternoon, or if the peak of the conference has passed. We're probably going to break down the studio around 4 and then head to 330 Rich to set up for the Seesmic Party that closes TechCrunch 50.

I haven't yet formulated an opinion of all this. For Seesmic it has definitely been a big deal. It's important for both the company and the staff to be visible at events like this. Subtext to that is Seesmic's deep relationship with TechCrunch, so it was also important that we pour all our coverage resources into the event. However, aside from technical issues, the appropriate amount of coverage has been challenging because we've had to balance what we produce with what the Seesmic community is comfortable consuming. What we've learned is that they aren't too excited about seeing lots of coverage of a convention they aren't attending. I wonder if that will be such a problem when Seesmic has groups...

In any case, we had to scale back with posting, but not with production. And since we still have the microsite to populate, we aren't too sure how to handle the Seesmic timeline... but I'm confident all that will work itself out.

My experience here has been one of production facilitator and TechCrunch observer. I haven't met many people, because I've spent most of my time at the studio making sure our gear is in working order... when it frequently hasn't been. We need to invest in more than half a set of working gear... but enough about that.

When I have been on the floor, I've seen a lot of people trying to fund their ventures and those people are similar to Abby and I. Maybe not in the type of business they are running, but in needing money to get their passion project off the ground.

More than once it's crossed my mind that I should walk around pitching Jaded as a promotional video production company to anybody that needs marketing material for their website. There are two problems with that though. The first is that I'm here representing Seesmic, so I'm not sure how appropriate that would be. The second is that Jaded might be willing and able to produce marketing videos like we recently produced for the Green Bible, but that's not who we are. We are primarily in the business of documentary production. And that brings me to an internal debate that we've been having. It's obvious that we could make money producing that kind of work, and possibly even finance our passion projects through them... but when exactly would we be traveling the world shooting films if we were tied down shooting corporate gigs all the time.

Whit and Giselle are back from the swag review which means the camera is back. So I should prep the studio.

11:20 AM

Studio is set up. Mics are working. Live capture is working. Lets cross our fingers that everything doesn't crap out when it counts like it did yesterday.

1:12PM

Just ate enchiladas with the team, a guy from CNET, and one of today's presenters TrueCar. I had tiny cheese cake cubes for desert that tasted awesome. I also made it down to the floor and talked to a couple of companies of relevance to TeamJaded. The first was Five Sprockets who pitched themselves as a resource for filmmakers in all steps of production from Pre to Marketing. It sounded like a specified LinkedIn, but they claimed it was more. I asked them about helping filmmakers get funding, and they didn't have an answer for that... yet. Which brings me to Indie GoGo, who have set up downstairs next to the Seesmic booth. Their site is also a social networky kind of thing for filmmakers, but they are cognizant of the funding issue, and even have it highlighted...

hold up...

Loren Feldman just asked me to shoot his puppet interview shtick with the guy who owns Mahalo...

Back to Indie GoGo, the site has been up and running since last years Sundance and they claim to have an active and supportive community who is willing to help with funding. Their representative told me that filmmakers have raised thousands of dollars on Indie GoGo and some distributors are looking at it as a development pipeline. Apparently they were also at DIY Days, but I missed them. I'll definitely have to check it out.




02:10 PM

Headed over to the stage to watch presentations. Loic is on the panel.

03:15

Notable presentation. Footnote... Facebook for dead people.

Things are winding down for our production team. I'm about to break down the studio move everything over to 330 rich for the party.

Signing out.

Seesmic TechCrunch Update Day 2

Taylor Barr, Taylor Barr, I told y'all we made that guy famous. First he posts this video and wins our contest. Here's the team telling the world:

TC50 Winner!Congratulations TB!


And now he's in Wired. This JUST IN they want him to sing the national anthem to close this thing down tomorrow, seriously.
Photo from DotBen's Flickr.


Day two has been slightly different than day one. The first part of the day was chaos... We did a run through with our gear first thing in the morning, everything was working fine, then Loic walked over with Michael Arrington and all of our audio gear went kuput.


First one of our lav's, then our shotgun, then the actual channel 2 XLR input on our VIU. What made it even worse was that we were setting up for Rachael's interview with Ashton Kutcher when all this went down, so she had to interview Ashton and Jason Goldberg with only one lav between the three of them.


I had to ride the levels like crazy, but we made do.


Ashton Kutcher on Seesmic!http://www.blahgirls.com/

The aspect ratio on the first video was a CamTwist issue. If it could go wrong it has. But we are getting through it all, and still coming out with lots of content. Everything is working now of course. The rest of the day has been a lot more calm. We shot another interview up here in the Seesmic Studio...

...but we haven't uploaded it because we're trying to give the Seesmic Community a TechCrunch break. Thomas Knoll says thank you.


All in all there are some interesting companies presenting. I admire all the people who have made treks from places far from the Valley to pitch their companies here. I can definitely relate to them, maybe not on the Tech start-up level, but on the level of wanting to do your own thing and needing the help of money people to do it. Tomorrow I'd like to get out on the floor and chat it up a little more, maybe get the stories of some of these guys. For now, I'm celebrating the wifi and sharing pictures.

Photos for this post came from Giselle and Whit.

TechCrunched 50

I just got in early from the TechCrunch 50 Myspace party. Seesmic is covering TC50 for all three days of the conference, which means the production team is hitting the floor from every angle. This first day was definitely action packed and full of trouble-shooting all the little things that were bound to go wrong like lack of internet, final cut pro capture crashes, broken flip cams, and being really far from the VIP action (aka the subjects of our coverage). But in the end we pushed out some solid content, made Taylor Barr a celebrity, and I think Whit punked Ashton Kutcher.

Check out the Seesmic TC50 microsite for all the content I'm involved with. And check out my friend and coworker Whit Scott's blog, because he's doing a pretty good job keeping up with everything we're doing over there. The Seesmic blog is also a fine place for information.

Hopefully the wifi will be better tomorrow because I'd like to post from the conference. In the meantime I'm going to bed.

The Alchemist Live with Paulo Coelho

I’m not sure if you’ve ever read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, but chances are you have. It’s been on the New York Times Best Sellers List for over 50 weeks (that’s almost a year!). And it’s about to celebrate its 20th Anniversary. So the reason why I bring this up… for the past few months I’ve been working on a project that will culminate in an online event September 17th, 2008.

Here’s the lowdown:

It’s called, THE ALCHEMIST LIVE. Basically Paulo is going to talk to everyone, everywhere about The Alchemist. It’s a historic event because Paulo doesn’t usually talk about his book in this way. It’s going to take place on BlogTalkRadio – The AuthorsOnAir channel- so you can call in from your phone or listen online. There’s going to be a question and answer session with callers, and also a special guest (I’ll let you know who when the date gets closer).

The nitty gritty:

The Alchemist Live
September 17th, 2008
12 noon PT / 3PM EST / anywhere else in the world corresponding with those times!
Phone: (347) 945-6141
Website: www.alchemistlive.com

Here’s a promo video HarperOne produced with Paulo for the event:



Here’s a fun little countdown widget you can share, if you’re so inclined!

The Bridge to Funding or not

Over the weekend Abby and I watched a documentary called the Bridge. If you haven't seen the film, it's about people who kill themselves by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. More people choose the Golden Gate as their place to die than any other spot on the globe. That's depressing, but also intriguing so I understand why a documentary filmmaker would be drawn to the subject. However, this blog is not about the film or it's merits. I will say that it was beautifully shot, and very depressing. (watch it for yourself)

What prompted me to write this post were comments made by the Director Eric Steel in a featurette on the DVD. He basically said that after he read "Jumpers: The fatal grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge" in the New Yorker, he immediately decided to move to San Francisco and shoot a documentary about the subject. Next he bought "$100,000" in camera equipment and "learned" how to log tapes. Then he hired a significant crew of production people, and they staked out the Golden Gate Bridge from at least two locations for an entire year.

Wow. Ok. That's pretty amazing. He just decided to do that after he read an article in the New Yorker. And at the end of it, he had a pretty solid film about a touching issue with some amazing cinematography of one the United States most recognizable landmarks. Like I said, wow.

What I'm wondering is, how do you just afford to pick up your life, drop a hundred grand on camera equipment, and spend a year shooting a documentary? Who has that kind of money laying around? Who can immediately relocate to another city, take at least a year off from paying work, and hire a production crew of talented people?

If you imdb Mr. Steel you learn that he has produced Hollywood feature films in the past (Including Shaft), so he either had the money or knew where to get it. Good for him and his accomplishments, but that isn't the inspiration I was looking for after I heard him describe how the film was made.

Where does the money come from for filmmakers who don't have a Hollywood resume? Collectively Abby and I have worked in college radio, international cable television, major publishing, and cutting edge social media. We know a lot of creative professionals, but not any money people interested in backing documentary films.

What are we missing? ...because recently I read an interesting article in Mother Jones, and I'd like to relocate to shoot a doc on the subject. Anybody want to pass me a hundred grand? TeamJaded needs to make it happen.

Discuss.

Win a trip to TechCrunch 50

but you've only got a few more hours...

Win a TC50 Pass!

As some of you know I work for Seesmic.com during daytime hours. We're going to be covering TechCrunch 50 all next week and we're offering a free ticket to a Seesmic user who sends us a good reason to give it to them. If you're into it, sign up and send a video.