Meant to be the hottest skate vid of my adolescence. Filmed from 2002 to 2003. It was honestly my very first big, ambitious creative project. I learned (or tried to learn) Final Cut Pro to create it. I spent some time at the Regina Film Pool with their editing room, but never got much further than trying to find sound effects for the slo-mo tricks we aspired to make over sets of stairs that didn’t exist in our town.
What I think I didn’t have, back then, was the capacity to grasp what I had, and accept that as a freedom from my own overbearing expectations. I didn’t have enough content to make a feature length skate film. So I forced my friends to have laboriously long sessions at all our favourite skate spots, until it wasn’t really fun anymore. And then I forced myself to try to turn it into something it wasn’t, in aforementioned editing room.
After all that work, nothing really came of it. But on visiting home last year, I found the DV cam and tapes we’d filmed it on. And I realized, that after all my time making videos as a travel blogger, I might be able to actually create something my younger self would’ve been proud of. I finally had the sense of how to make something into what it should be.
It’s not the Feet of Fury that I thought I’d make. But 15 years later, it’s at least something. It’s a little bit absolution for all the frustration I made for myself with my teenage ambition. And it’s also a model of how to do work, now: by letting things slide.