James Sayres in Traffic's Third Shift + Yes, You Can Skate to Hardcore W/ James & Pat Stiener
Today’s a big day for two reasons. One, we’ve posted VP favorite James Sayres’ part from Traffic Skateboards recent hit Third Shift to our YouTube page.
Two, it turns out you CAN actually edit a video part to a hardcore song and have it truly work. We were wrong.
We sat down with James and Theories multi-hyphenate Pat Stiener (also the video’s editor! What can’t this guy do?) to talk about how they pulled it off.
So the song, It's Gorilla Biscuits, right? They’re not a band a lot of people skate to. How’d that choice come about? Is there any significance to that specific band?
Pat Stiener - Yeah. Well, I was with James one and we were just talking about his part, and we approached the fact after talking a lot about it, that we didn't have a song.
James was like "I want to skate to a hardcore song," and I just remember saying, "Okay, that's not easy to do and it might be really strange for Traffic." You can't just skate to a hardcore song by itself, unless you're... I don't know, it'd be really hard to do.
But then I knew we had this other song I wanted to use that didn't go anywhere as well, like the Dion song (in the part’s intro). So I thought they could possibly just go together.
James Sayres - I grew up working and skating for this shop called Bunger Sayville, and it was down the street from where Civ (lead signer of Gorilla Biscuits) has a tattoo shop called Lotus. I used to be scared to go in there and shit, just because it's like all the best dudes there. After I finally did start coming around, one of the older dudes who worked at the shop showed me the Gorilla Biscuits when I was 16 or something, maybe even younger.
It's kind of funny that ended up skating to it at all. Pat and I went through like a million songs, and then that one day we just like ran into each other, brought up that song, and it ended up working.
This band doesn’t get used in skate videos much. Case in point, they’re last significant usage was...a while ago.
So why that specific song?
James -We listened to that album a bunch, and I think I just sent it to Pat and he picked that song from the album and was like, "This one's sick."
Pat - I just listened to all the songs and listened specifically for songs with parts that slow down, it was a song that has tempo changes. Because if the song doesn't have those kinds of changes, you can't really edit to it. Or, you can but it's just going limit what you can do. You can't do anything exciting or it's just going to look like you just picked any random song. When you edit, you want single tricks then a line, or then something to happen. You can do that to a song if it has crescendos or if you can feel it building up or down, or just breaking apart and stopping. That's what we had to do for this one.
At that point we were like, "Here's the songs. Let's figure it out," and then we just started editing it right sitting there. All in the same day. I knew we’d have to get this out and try it out of our heads and to see if it works." And I was like, "Let's just go there right now, plug it in and see if it works.”
The line in question. And what a line!
What about the line with the back 360? That coincides with an interesting part of the song.
Pat - Whenever we've started editing to that song, I was like, "Oh, we should just put like hammers and crazy stuff right now", but it didn't work. I think John Valenti, the part’s filmer, put the pushing, in which is so fast that it works really well.
James -That clip was from the first flip Valenti and I filmed with him out of quarantine. Because it was like, we couldn't get him out for mad long. Respect to him.
He was staying in and, but and Pat and I were just skating together, like almost every day, just like cracks in the sidewalk, anything we could find. Just like dying, begging for Valenti to come out. We didn't have a game plan. We went down every street in Greenpoint. That’s why so much of this shit's in Greenpoint.
Ben Kadow has made skating to hardcore his ‘thing’ but for anyone else, it’s a challenge.
So it was really just that specific song clicking right away?
Pat- That's the thing, when he told me he wanted to skate to a hardcore song, I couldn’t think of how that could happen with the footage I already know he had.
I was going through the songs, picking the ones that had like good, slow sections. That one had that really good part at the end where it slows down and it worked perfectly. We did use a slow-mo trick, which was rare for us, but it works really well with the song, because you can hear the song slowing down. If you watch it, you can hear the song break down. The slow-mo really emphasizes the song breaking down.
I also remember when we were editing it was like, "Oh, let's cut it (the music) right before the varial flip.". But then after putting in the second angle, we cut it after that and it just ends, no song and it's perfect. It fit in perfectly.