How did you decide to primarily shoot film? And how did Kodak get involved in the project?
The winter before we started filming I called up Kodak to place a big order of film, and ended up being connected to this dude Josh. He’s super cool, used to be the Think Skateboards team manager, and me and him just hit it off. He’s a rad photographer and makes super 8 films too himself, so we just connected right away. We shared all these past video references and were inspired similar things and he was down to help out.
From there they were down to give us free film. So at that point we were like fuck it, shooting film is the best, so if it’s not even a question we’re going to shoot as much film as we can.
And Vans was just on board. They started seeing the film and it wasn’t even a question. They were like, this is sick, keep doing this. Just do it. The combination of them being down and Kodak supporting it, was pretty dope.
What was the most challenging aspect of shooting on film?
In general shooting film is the same as anything else—you get to where you want to be, set up, and shoot it. But we had a couple camera malfunctions the first winter. We were shooting on old wind-up Bolex cameras [manufactured from 1930s to 1969], which don’t have an electronic motor, and one of the filmers’ camera wasn’t functioning in the cold—it was running slow. So there were a couple trips where we got footage back and it was all fast motion and it was like, fuck. But overall nothing was really lost.
The second winter we all switched over to ARRI SRII and ARRI 416s, which are a bit more modern, updated Super 16 cameras that run off batteries, and those things are just absolute tanks. They were really sick to shoot on because you would shoot and actually know what you were looking at and what the footage was going to look like. On the Bolex you look through the little viewfinder and it’s so hard to see what’s going on, and it fogs up so fast that you’re almost guessing what you’re filming. You’d go on a trip and kinda just crossed your fingers and hope that it doesn’t look like shit, pretty much.
And in the streets we shot a lot of digital as well too though, because a lot of that stuff takes a lot of tries, so sometimes if you knew someone was going to go to battle [with a trick] it was like, don’t even take the 16 out, it’s not worth it.