Daniel Wheatley has never made a bad video. Therefore it should come without surprise that his upcoming project, Blanket, has been highly anticipated here at the VP office ever since this 52 second teaser dropped earlier this year. With the video’s online premiere creeping closer, we got Daniel on the line for the inside scoop on the cast and filming of Blanket, as well as some insight into his past work with Lotties Skateshop and Baker.

Interview by Andrew Murrell

Do you think you're the tallest skate filmer ever?

(Laughs) That's a really good question. So far in skating, I have yet to meet somebody taller than me. I'm sure statistically speaking, I know I can't be the tallest person in skating. But filming-wise, for sure – without a doubt.

Nick Michel as seen from Wheatley’s perspective.

Do you think your stature affects the way you film? I’d imagine that you wouldn’t be able to film fisheye as easily, so you’d do long lens more. I watched Must Be Stopped the other day and there’s an overhead angle of Nick Michel doing a feeble grind — do those kinds of angles come to you more naturally?

I’ve noticed that filmer friends will tell me their backs are killing them these days. My back feels fine.

I actually try to film fisheye a ton. I try not to film long lens unless he situation calls for it, just because I feel like if you can film something well with a fisheye, it's a sign that you know what you're doing. Not to say that I'm the best at it, but I try to film fisheye as much as possible because it's just going to help things stand out from other people's videos, which tend to have a lot of long lens these days.

In terms of me filming things from above, it does go through my mind to try and use my height to help get an angle that someone else might not be able to get. If there's a moment or a spot where I can film something that I know that nobody else could film the same way, I definitely do that — especially fisheye. I filmed something more recently in Casper (Brooker’s) Baker part where he ollies over a bar, ollies this big flag gap, 360 flips another big flat gap, and then ollies off this huge wall. I'm was going down a bank as he was on these massive flat gaps. He makes them look small, but they're fucking enormous. That spot has only ever been filmed long lens as far as I know, because by the end where he does the ollie off, I was holding the camera a good bit above my head. That’s probably one of my favorite things I’ve ever filmed for the reason that no one would be able to film it like I did.

There's another one like that I filmed in LA for Must Be Stopped where Josh Pall wallies this wall into a bank and then drops down and frontside flips. That thing is well over my head on the other side. So I'm like, “Oh, nobody else can film this like this. I'm going to film it like that.”

In an age where there are really good fisheye filmers like Rye Beres and Ben Chadourne, it’s nice to have some sort of filming ability that might help something of mine stand out.

So, you initially went to school to be a teacher?

Yeah, I went to school to be a history teacher.

Did you get a degree?

Yeah, I got a degree. I went to University of Central Florida in Orlando, and that's actually where I met Grant Yansura. He was a year below me, and we had a Spanish class together, funnily enough. Growing up in Florida, especially for our generation, they really stressed going to school.

At that time, I had a loan to do a skate shop, so I was running this skate shop called Midtown that I had invested in, and I was going to school. I was 20 years old and my big game plan was to be a teacher. I'd have my summers off from teaching, I'd have my skate shop, and I’d travel in the summer to go skate, like we would always do as kids. Then right when I was graduating university, Sam Smyth called me out of the blue and asked me if I wanted to be the Dickies team manager. Literally the second I graduated, when I would have been going to take the test to get my teaching certificate. It was like, make 26 grand and be a teacher, or go get paid more to be the Dickies team manager. I was like, “Fuck yeah, Dickies TM.”

Could you see yourself teaching history in the future?

Maybe when I'm a good bit older. I feel like teaching would be the best way for me to give back. Teachers are a dying breed, especially in the United States.

How did you break into working for Lakai?

Smyth, again, just called me. “Sam Newman (old Lakai TM) is leaving. You're the guy.” It was crazy to get that call. I was simultaneously doing Dickies and the Crailtap brands – Girl, Chocolate, Lakai, and Fourstar for probably a year. Then I got fired from Dickies, and I was just doing Crailtap, with Lakai as my focus.

“Something kind of gnarly” from Dane Barker’s Lotties Part.

Was that Dane Barker part going to be a Lakai part?

So, backstory: Dane is from outside Seattle. My friend Dave, who does a shop in Seattle called 35th Avenue, asked me to hook up Dane with shoes. All of a sudden he just appeared in LA and he was really good, and was also good about texting really politely –“Hey, dude, I know you're busy. If you want to go film, I’m down.”

Any time I would have a chance, I would bring out Dane with the Girl or Lakai crews. I never thought he wanted to be properly sponsored at all. He would just always come out and film something kind of gnarly. Next thing I knew, I had all this footage of him doing some really heavy shit. I probably could have pitched it to Lakai to get it in that video that nobody saw, The Flare, which was all being filmed around this same time. But I knew they were going to try and sell that video, and nobody was buying videos. I put in all the work with Dane, and I thought I could maybe make him look better than the Lakai video could.

Not to big up myself at all, but I put a lot of hard work into that, and I had an idea for the footage. I pitched it to Mike Gigliotti to use for Lotties, his shop, because Dane was hanging at the shop so heavily. Mike ended up being down.

That was kind of your in with Lotties, right?

For sure. Mike and I met through Alex Olson. We weren't ever besties or anything like that, but we would see each other in passing here and there, and had similar friends. Dane worked at a coffee shop right around the corner from Lotties at the same time we’d become so tight. Dane would say “Hey, I'm getting out of work at two, meet me at Lotties.” So I just started hanging out at the shop super heavily, just to go pick up Dane. Mike and I formed a friendship through that.

In my head, I was like, “Maybe if I make something that Mike thinks is cool, and Dane thinks is cool, our other friends will think it’s cool, and then maybe I could turn this into more of a thing. Then hopefully Mike will be down for me to make another Lotties video.” That video part kind of set things in motion.

I know Mike was already doing his art beforehand, but in a way you helped cement his aesthetic through the videos.

I really appreciate you saying that. Mike's whole aesthetic is so strong and he's made such a name for himself. I don't want to take any of that credit obviously, but it felt cool to help contribute to that aesthetic by putting the videos together in a certain way. I’ll always be appreciative to Mike for letting me do my own thing. That kind of forced me to come up with a cncept of what a Lotties video looked like, and it’s why the video I just made probably looks the way it does. He never gave me any instruction or critique, which was really refreshing after making videos at Crailtap that had to be made in a specific way.

It never really clicked for me until now just thinking about it – without the videos, Lotties would be a really cool shop but pretty unknown to anyone who lives outside of Los Angeles.

These days, for a skate shop, a clothing brand, or a board company, if your videos are not being made well – and I’m not saying that the Lotties videos were made well, I don’t put myself or those videos in that category… but videos really are the vehicle to make an idea really become something. There's not a skate brand that exists in an accomplished, fully thought out way, that hasn’t had a sick video. You could have a good company, graphics, team, etc. but if you’re not making videos that people really fuck with, then you probably aren’t influencing people to the extent that certain video makers are.

Shops can definitely become bigger than their their physical presence because of their videos, and the skaters in them. I think most of us probably know this, but like a Coliseum or an FTC. I wanted to make my own version of an FTC video, because of the impact videos like Penal Code had on me. I wanted to wear an FTC shirt, not because I necessarily think they had the best graphics or board wall, but because Huf’s part that Aaron Meza had made. Lotties just happened to have some of the sickest graphics and a sick shop, and I was happy to contribute videos to go along with it all. To look back, it’s kind of crazy how well it all worked.

So you did Dane’s part, which led to the Lotties + Spitfire video, which led to Must Be Stopped.
What was it like filming for those? How did you curate a specific vibe for each video? What did you want people to feel when they watched?

Mike made my job so easy. It's like, if all of a sudden if you had Andy Jenkins or Marc McKee at your disposal. You just have this guy creating so much cool shit. He was making so much stuff all the time, and the shop itself was such an epic place to be inside. It had such a strong image, I needed to have that come through in the videos. Mike is funny. Mike is witty. Mike is pessimistic. There's just so much there, and our senses of humor are so in line, I wanted to make something that's going to show all that. Vibe-wise, I was trying to make sure people get the same feeling that I got when I walked into the shop when they watch one of the videos.

As far as a specific vibe for each video, I think I would try and use that feeling of being in the shop for all of them, but what would change each time is what it felt like to be out with each skater. Trying to make something that’s reflective of them, but through the lens of their relationship to Lotties and myself.

It was harnessing all of that, and then trying to put a little bit of a spin on what I learned from Meza. Working under Meza and learning to portray that Crailtap vibe – “Here's us, having fun. It's not all totally serious, but these guys also rip!” – that's just kind of stuck with me forever, and I wanted the videos to feel fun to watch in that same way.

The shop’s stance on cellphone use & Andrew Allen taking the mountain. Spitfire Presents: *Lotties Primetime*

I was actually about to bring that up: when did you feel your editing style develop and hone in on what it is now? Even as early as the Spitfire video, it feels like a video no one else was making the same way.

It's nice to hear that anyone thinks the things that I make could have their own look to them, especially with so much stuff coming out all the time. I think that we’d all hope to have something that would be identifiable as our own.

I never really used to think too hard about developing my own style, but whenever I found something that worked I would always stick that little editing trick in my pocket for later. I think it was really helpful to have to emulate Meza for years at Crailtap, when I probably would have come up with really bad ideas on my own. When Mike let me do anything I wanted with the Lotties videos, I had already learned some important do’s and don’ts.

Again, that lack of pressure from Mike not giving a fuck what I did let me experiment a little more. Working on enough videos over the years, I got tothe point to know how to gather inspiration from the videos you like without blatantly ripping them off.

These days, the one thing that goes through my head is “Jacob Harris does this, don't fucking do that. Benny Maglinao does this, don't fucking do that.” The dudes that are the best and the most popular, there's a reason why they're the best and the most popular: because they're really good at what they do and have their own style. Just avoid what they do. We'll have a little bit of crossover, because we all like so many of the same things, but just try to give everything enough breathing room so you don't feel like you're stepping on people's toes.

Do you have a favorite clip in HORSES?

The line through LA High with a switch hardflip at the end. Spanky can do every flatground trick. He hates playing SKATE, but would probably kill it in a contest – he has a seriously mean switch hardflip. He initially did that line without the switch hardflip, and a couple of months later I asked him if we could try it with a switch hardflip at the end. I thought it would really catch people off guard. I remember being super hyped that he was down.

I love being at that school and trying to think of a way to squeeze that place for all it's got. I guarantee that one day that place will not exist, and I want to feel like I took advantage of clocking every hour I could there. That, and it’s just the most fun place to skate flat, carve banks and chill if you don’t get kicked out.

What about in Can’t Be Stopped?

Nick Michel back lips this insane rail at the end of his part. I don’t even know why I threw that out there (for him to try), I had never even seen him do a back lip on anything but a ledge, and that rail is fucked. On the ground rolling up, you have to pop early before a big metal plate on the ground, and there’s a pole at the end that you could easily hit if you jumped off to the side the wrong way. When he said he was down to do that, I actually couldn’t believe it. I don’t think he could believe it either.

David Clark does a line at this fountain with a 50-50 wallie and a wallie to a bluntslide pop out fakie. It’s at a spot every skater in LA drives by on the daily, probably unknowingly because it honestly isn’t a spot. David’s bag of tricks is so obscure, and that paired with his untouchable style, he turned absolutely nothing into a seemingly incredible spot. I love driving by that thing and thinking of it.

HORSES was supposed to be a Lotties video, but it was released through Baker. The way I’ve heard it described was Spanky was really intrinsically motivated, doing it himself in a way.

Around the end of 2019 I had a couple clips of him that were really good. I'm sure I told him, “Dude, we have all this stuff, let's make it a Lotties thing.” He was down. I knew Mike would be down. At this time, Emerica stuff was, I don't want to say less serious, but he just didn't have to give the same kind of time to their projects during that era, because Jon Miner wasn’t there making large-form, really epic things.

I was finally able to keep all of Spanky’s footage for the first time ever, and I simultaneously had the time to really focus on just him. Spanky, in the last 7 or 8 years that I’ve known him, has been incredibly self-motivated. It wasn’t until this project that he had someone who is able to focus on just him, as opposed to a bunch of other skaters going in the same video. He was able to push himself the hardest for a long period of time consistently, not just when the filmer had the time to meet up and he just has to turn it on.

How far along was the project when it switched to Baker?
Would it have looked drastically different if it was a Lotties project?

It was meant to be a Lotties video, but then the shop closing happened probably 1/3 of the way through filming. That was just a bummer. At that point, Spanky was just like, “Well, fuck it, Baker part.” I think the only thing that would have changed about the look of the video is it would have had Mike’s art in it, and probably some more footage of us hanging at the shop to keep it in line with the other Lotties vids. There’s a close shot of a Lotties logo on Spanky’s polo at the very beginning of the part. I kept that in there as a bit of reminder to myself what the project was meant to be.

Was there a shift in his or your mentality when it became a Baker project?

I wouldn't say Spanky changed or anything like that. From the start of filming it, Spanky was in the middle of really hitting his stride. I would say it's his best skating ever, where his physical body, this brain for spots, and his ability to do tricks to do at those spots, were at this perfect overlap. I would also say, coincidentally, at the same time, the things that he likes to skate were also at their height of popularity in terms of the world understanding that style of skating.

When it turned into a Baker project, the one thing that changed for me was having five years of Mike G not looking over my shoulder. All of a sudden Spanky’s like, “Reynolds and I need to come over to your house and watch my stuff.” I was just like, “Okay, I could show you all the raw footage.” And he would say “No, no, I want to see what you're working on with the part, we need to see it.” I was just like, “Fuck, dude.” Stressful.

At Crailtap, I would have Meza or Mike Carroll, legitimately, over my shoulder, like, “Show us the stuff, show us your edit.” That was really nerve wracking at the time, and I hadn't had that feeling in a long time. I guess it just made me feel nervous again. I actually now enjoy having that feeling from having someone to feel nervous around. The pressure is good.

For the most part, that was how it went for almost a couple years. Spanky gave me a song list, and I picked out two of his and two of mine, but I knew that Annie Lennox song was going to be it from the second I heard it in my girlfriend’s car. I think because of the Baker vibes and that sort of stuff too, I knew how I wanted the part to look.

I wanted Spanky to look kind of like a superhero – I wanted the song to hit the way some of those really heroic Baker parts break down. I wanted a really strong part with a chorus that would get stuck in your head, and make you really feel almost like there's like an arc to the video part. They've achieved something, they've made it to that pinnacle of the best trick, and then it’s going to slow down and maybe it's ending and…”Oh my god, we're hitting you over the head again with another chorus and an ender.” That really gets you in that mindset when watching a part, that really sucks you in. It makes the skater you’re watching feel larger than life. I love that, it makes me feel like a kid watching a video. That's typically what I like to aim for when editing any of those larger form video parts I’ve made.

Towards the end of editing, this is kind of funny, I leaned into the fact that the video was called HORSES. It’s named that because Spanky’s daughter called skateboards ‘horses’. I just thought to use that literally, and that putting horses in the project would really give the thing a strong image. I went out and physically searched and found and shot all these wild horses. It was not easy to find wild horses to shoot. I would drive around hours outside LA through valleys and down small cutty highways looking for this specific herd that exists. There was a good bit more horse footage throughout the video because I was just so stoked on them. I just thought that visually it stood out so much more than anything else you’re going to watch in a skate video.

That being said, Reynolds is a pretty straightforward guy. He wanted a straightforward skate video if it was going to be for Baker. Which I get, Baker is this 100% skateboarding brand. Basically, he was like, “Way too much horse footage. Cut out a lot of the horses. It’s a bit weird.” I was like, “Yeah, yeah, I kind of like that it's weird. That’s the point.” And Spanky's like, “Dude, I trust Andrew with my life. If Reynolds says less horses, I want less horses.” So that’s what we did. I do wish there was still like a fuck load of more horses in there (laughs).

Minor disagreements in the edit be damned, *HORSES* came out amazing.

What were you doing for work during this era besides filming?

After I got fired from Crailtap, after I got fired by Mike Carroll, that's the best way to put it (laughs) I was in LA, in between jobs, and the Alltimers team came to town. Unknowingly, Pryce and Rob who ran Alltimers also run Palace in the United States. They told me “Hey, Palace is opening a store in LA in 6 months. You'd be a good fit for the store manager if you'd want to do that.”

Gareth and Lev, the founders of Palace, came to LA and interviewed me with Pryce and Rob maybe four months later. They said “Hey, we want to hire you right now. We'll put you on a chunk of what would be your salary, just so you don't take another job in between now and then, and you can go do some other work to make up the pay.” Sure enough, after those guys hired me, the store didn't end up opening for nearly a year and a half. That was how I had all the time and money to make Must Be Stopped.

Palace would use me as a filmer on trips, but they rarely needed real work done during that time. Then Palace opened in LA, and my whole life went from being a team manager and a filmer for nearly 10 years, to all of a sudden having this five to six day a week schedule where I lived in a fishbowl and filmed maybe one day a week.

Then the pandemic happened. Again, Palace paid us the whole time, but we didn't really work for about six months. That's how the last Lotties video got made and a good chunk of Spanky’s part did as well, because I was getting paid to not work, so I again had the time and money to go film. So, heavy shout out to Palace.

I left Palace in 2021 and started doing freelance directing and video work. I couldn’t do retail anymore, it was only ever meant to be a temporary thing. Managing your friends in a retail store was even harder than managing your friends as a team manager. But freelancing, once again, gave me the time and money to film and skate. I’ve been doing that since.

A *Blanket* session selfie with Judah Bubes and Shane Farber.

So how did Blanket come together? Is this your first “solo” video?

My first one since I was a teenager, I guess.

I figured out a few years ago when I was on the cusp of turning 30 that I knew I just want to keep making skate videos. Whether or not I could afford to it is one thing, but passion wise, I know that's what I want to keep doing. It took some self-discovery to have the confidence to say, “I can make skate videos because I want to.” I don't need to have a skate job that tells me I need to make skate videos, you know? I don't need to work for a brand to do it.

Blanket, it’s funny to use this thing I’ve just made up out of thin air and refer to it as something – it’s come about from my desire to keep making skate videos and the people I have access to.

I started dating a girl from London, coincidentally through working for Palace, so our time has become this natural 50/50 split between LA and London. I spent my first full Summer in London in 2022, and really tried to get in the mix as quickly as possible. I had known the Palace guys for a long time, and the Atlantic Drift guys as well, but honestly those two crews aren’t really out in London just stacking the whole time. Most of them have lived in London their whole lives, so they aren’t really chomping at the bit to go skate the same spots they’ve seen their whole lives.

Honestly, being in London that summer I realized quite a lot of the skaters here don’t really take advantage of this huge city. There’s so much undiscovered here. Not that I think it’s purposeful, the skate culture here is just different than it is in LA. There’s not as many skaters, its less competitive, and there isn’t really a need to go out and fix up a bunch of spots in the same way because things just don’t get as blown out.

That first summer I skated with Jamie Platt, Matlok Bennett Jones, and Conor Charleson a ton because no one else that I knew was really around and out getting it. I thought to myself, “If I could bring my LA friends here for a substantial amount of time, we could really get some stuff done.” Then the thought came, “Ok, next summer I’ll bring LA friends to London, and this winter I’ll bring London friends to LA to balance it out.” That became the idea for the video.

50% of your time in London means a lot of Tube time. Avi Malina, Mingus Gamble, and Shane Farber on public transit in London.

Who’s in the video?

The video has parts from Mingus Gamble and Matlok Bennett Jones, which furthered the idea of a half London, half LA video. I knew I wanted Mingus to have a part in this video, that was my main goal from the start. Whoever ends up filming enough during the course of the video, whoever really puts it down the most, and comes and links up the most and puts in the effort, that’s who ends up being featured in the videos I make, just kind of by default.

Matlok ended up filming some really sick stuff during the winter of 2023 in LA and the summer of ‘23 in London, which really bumped his footage into a full part. During any of these videos, it always involves a mix of who I can actually get to put in the time, who I enjoy spending my time around, as well as who gets along with everyone I’m around.

This video ended up bringing together a pretty cool random group of skaters, most of whom I’d never filmed before. It all came together pretty circumstantially. Judah Bubes I brought over from Atlanta because I was a fan. Shane Farber then joined in through being lifelong friends with Judah. Ron Parker is also from Atlanta, but now lives in LA and works at the Palace shop, he started meeting up as well. Avi Malina was brought in through him being so tight with Mingus. Cam Sedlick came from him being on the same life schedule as me, splitting time between LA and London. I re-met him at a wedding in London and we started skating together. Billy Trick came in through him being tight with Matlok. Spanky has been in the mix because he and Casper have become so close, and we were skating a lot. It just made sense for us all to skate together. Tom Knox came about because he’s the most productive dude in the world, and somehow makes time to skate with every filmer in London.

Josh Pall was someone I initially wanted to just get even a single trick from. It was super important to me to get him in there any way I could. He’d had a really shitty ankle injury 4 years ago that nearly took him out from skating all together, and somehow in this last year he’s filmed some of my favorite things I’ve ever seen him do.

I know you're trying to do right by everyone you film and edit with, but do you feel an increased sense of pressure to do right by these kids, especially since it might be their first part or their first exposure to a wider audience?

Absolutely. For me, the most pressure comes from knowing, say, Jerry Hsu filmed a trick for the video. Jerry's going to let me put him in a video. Jerry is a hero to me and to everyone else. In my own head, I need to make sure that this isn’t something that he's embarrassed by. I guess that's where the most pressure for me comes from: that a group of my friends are such high caliber skaters. Therefore, the entire video, and who’s in it, will have some kind of scrutiny from a wider general audience.

Another part of it comes from from how brutal kids are these days. Fuck, man. You know how it is. People will outwardly say “Dude, it's just for fun, that's so sick, good for you,” and everyone will give you props. The second you’ve got a dozen 20 year old kids around in private, they’ll fucking tear down everything that comes out. Everything, even the best thing! It’s terrifying (laughs).

Your favorite thing sucks, according to your pessimistic little 20 year old friend. I know everyone will be nice, but I at least want to have these videos for the guys I’m putting on this pedestal, or showing to this audience, to be good enough so that when it comes out all the kids in all the skate shops around the world won’t be like, “Dude, how fucking whack was that.” I guess that's where a lot of the pressure for me comes as well. Because kids, some of our friends even, are fucking assholes (laughs). I love them all to death, but they're fucking savage, man!

Conversely, something that takes the pressure off is that we're in that middle ground where it's not necessarily going to be the same audience as a Nike video. It feels the same as Lotties, where I was like, “Dude, it's a just skate shop video. We can make this however we want.” There's not the same pressure for it to be a big “real” company project.

Do you have a favorite clip in the new video?

It’s really hard to narrow any of these down because I hate leaving anyone out. Mingus has a trick in his part on a classic LA spot that was almost his ender. Mingus grew up around the OG Girl/Chocolate crew, and they set off the spot I mentioned in Yeah Right. Only a small group of skaters have ever skated it — some of the coolest tricks ever have gone down on it, but all the tricks that make the most sense to try have been done. I knew I wanted to film as much of Mingus at those OG spots for his part, so I was really pushing for him to get something on this particular spot.

Fast forward: he said he was down to check the spot out, but there was a 10-foot wooden fence erected in front of part of it that would have to be removed in order to skate it. Also, it looked like someone took a sledge hammer to it in three crucial spots, AND within a really busy al pastor spot had opened within a 10-foot radius of the spot — they’re open nearly every day of the week from noon until night. It would have been the easiest call in history to say, “Yeah, fuck that shit.”

Day one of filming, we met some friends there and I begin sawzall-ing part of the wood off to make it skateable and fixing all the holes from whatever BMXer used sledgehammers for pegs on it. We realized the the al pastor truck rotisserie had made it so the fence that you’re inevitably be touching the whole time you skate it was covered with three years of pork grease. You couldn’t touch it with a finger without having your finger look like it was dipped it in black paint. The ledge had the same issue: it was covered in grease to a point where it wouldn’t even grind. Then we realized the sidewalk is absolutely coated in years of grease as well, it was like an ice rink. I had to sit on some cardboard I found in the trash because the sidewalk was so gross.

Mingus battled this trick for a few days for three hours each time. Mingus is also super annoying in that once he figures out how to do something, or once he gets the confidence to actually try it for real, he can do it over and over again. At that point he'd spent three hours figuring out exactly what to do and not do. So when he did it, he did it three times. The amount of work that went in to get his trick, at a spot that felt like hallowed ground… it was a memorable one for sure.

I feel like most of my favorite things I’ve filmed have ended up coming from situations where I got to help in the decision making process of the trick my friend tried, whether it was helping with the idea for the trick or finding the spot – contributing in a way makes the day of filming feel more like a team effort than just turning up to point a camera.

Will the video release online first, then on DVD? Or a DVD-only release for a few weeks?

Online first. I just need to get it out. I had a classic hard drive crash the day I got to London. I had the file to show the video in London at the premiere. When I got here, the credits weren't finished — I'm working on that right now. I got here, and I was like, “I'm plugging the hard drive in, working on the credits, and getting it out this week.” Then the hard drive crashed.

Luckily, I had everything backed up, got the hard drive fixed, but now I'm a month behind. Everyone's like, “Where the fuck is the video?” I'm just like, “Dude, don't fucking ask.”

I've talked to a bunch of friends that do distributions. I'm just going to make a bunch of DVDs and send them to all my favorite skateshops for free. Any shop that wants one can have one, hit me up. My plan with that is to put all the Lotties videos, the HORSES video, etc. on the DVD just so skateshops have all the videos to play. I feel like skate things kind of disappear online these days.

Do you have an online premiere date for Blanket you’re aiming for?

I think it could be done and up in the next two weeks.

When the video comes out, it won’t actually be called Blanket. It’s more of a, “Blanket presents…” There's a different name for the skate video that you'll see.

So does that mean there's going to be more Blanket videos going forward?

That's the plan.

Daniel Wheatley on 'Blanket' (And the Rest of His Career)