With its classic fish eye lens perspective, music selection, rider style, lines (tricks performed consecutively), editing, and production value, skateboarding video is an art form. Also, with the likes of Spike Jonze and Stacy Peralta, some of the most creative talents in videography and video production coming from this film genre, it’s no wonder there are several skate videos that are renown, even decades after their release.
Here are some of the best and most renown skateboarding videos if you’d like to watch them on YouTube, but truthfully watching them on YouTube really doesn’t do them justice. A few of these are so good they have been re-released on DVD or digital download, and you should definitely purchase them directly from the team / company that made them, if possible and still available.
- Alien Workshop ‘Memory Screen‘ (1991), and ‘Photosynthesis‘ (2000)
- Birdhouse ‘The End‘ (1998)
- Blind ‘Video Days‘ (1991) – Yes, that is Jason Lee.
- Bones Brigade ‘The Bones Brigade Video Show‘ (1984), and ‘The Search for Animal Chin‘ (1987)
- Emerica ‘This Is Skateboarding‘ (2003)
- Girl ‘Mouse‘ (1996), and ‘Yeah Right‘ (2003)
- Plan B ‘Questionable‘ (1992)
- Shorty’s ‘Fulfill the Dream‘ (1998)
- Toy Machine ‘Welcome to Hell‘ (1996)
- Transworld ‘Modus Operandi‘ (2000)
There are so many more really excellent skate videos out there. Frankly, it’s kind of sad that I even have to limit this list to these 10 or so, but I’d be here all day listing off great skateboarding videos, and that’s really not the point of this post. If skate videos are your thing, or even if they’re not, you may find it interesting to know that there is a group of archivists / preservationists that have a crowdsourced project to video capture and digitize all of the 411 Video Magazine (411VM) issues from VHS tape. There are so many awesome segments from that skateboarding video magazine that deserve to be preserved for future generations to view and enjoy, and thanks to these guys, they are now. You can join their Discord discussion group here, and/or follow Tim, whom digitized the majority of the 411VM VHS over at Archive.org.
– CPX