Personal and Professional Development

I thought I'd start off my personal and professional development posts with something relevant to why I chose to do the course. My interest in skateboarding and watching and making skate videos was what brought me to start studying digital media, and skate films continue to be an interest and an influence of mine. Editing a skate video can be compared to editing a music video in many ways, with sections usually being set to a song of around 3 minutes in length and with the visuals being linked to elements of the song, eg tricks being landed on the beats. Often as not though, the sections between the actual skateboarding contain the most interesting video/post production work, and this is what I'm going to look at now. Arguably the biggest skate video released in 2008 was 'Fully Flared', directed by Ty Evans, Spike Jonze and Cory Weincheque, which really raised the bar in every aspect: skating, filming and editing. One of my favourite sections of this video is the '6 square' section, in which the screen is divided into 6 boxes, each containing a different skater, in different locations such as London, Paris and Barcelona. We see them all apparently interacting with each other between their different boxes and geographic locations, throwing a pack of cigarettes between Paris and London, passing a football, and actually jumping from one box into another. Inbetween these parts the action in the 6 boxes synchronises with all the skaters peforming the same tricks shot from the same angles at the same moment. The squares containing the action rotate and move like cubes at the points where cuts are made between shots. The whole idea is very interesting, it's well thought out and executed, you clearly have to plan things very carefully to acheive the interactions between the squares, and I like the playfulness of the whole section.