Surprisingly, I found an old film that I co-directed posted online—Cinematic Static. I made this with Damian Rodriguez (who has since become an accomplished editor, most notably of the Martin Scorsese documentary Pretend It’s a City about Fran Lebowitz). We shot it around 1997 and it chronicles the Austin skateboard scene of that time.
It’s sort of an experimental skate video shot mostly on Super-8 and Hi-8 and features many great skaters that are listed on this Vimeo page. We edited this on an old tape-to-tape video editor in the basement of the UT-Austin student TV station. I want to say we transferred all this stuff to 3/4″ tape and edited on that, but my memory is very fuzzy. I remember it used to air on Austin public access TV all the time.
Anyway, this was an amazing time to be in Austin. It was still small, still eccentric. I think this video captures the magic of that era and brings back so many great memories for me.