Some maneuvers on a skateboard can objectively be referred to as…tricks. Nollie backside heelflip – that’s a trick. What about carving down a hill – can we call that a ‘trick’? What makes a trick a 'trick’? Ian Browning digs into it with auteur and master lensman of Atlantic Drift fame, (and curator of hippy jumps) Jacob Elliot Harris.

Do you think that a hippy jump is a trick? Or is it a means to a trick, like an alternative to an ollie?

I guess, if you have to deconstruct what a ‘trick’ is, i’d say it’s definitely a trick. It’s a means of interacting with various different types of obstacles. I suppose since it’s so adaptable, it doesn’t resemble a trick in a lot of ways. You don’t make contact with anything, but yeah, I’d say it’s a trick.

Sylvain Tognelli. wanted a horse, settled for a donkey.

If you were to break down a skateboard trick formula, it’s pop, do whatever trick, and then roll away. It’s a replacement for that pop factor. It seems like you guys have taken that to open up a whole other realm of spots that you can skate. Sylvain bounces his board off the wall, that’s a spot that you couldn’t skate with an ollie.

I actually did one today, and I could never do them. I was just like “this is super hard.” But I suppose there are other tricks that in a similar way can open up obstacles. Like a manual, for example, you can do a flatground manual without popping, you’d have to consider that a trick. What that can do is turn two painted lines on the floor into a spot, can’t it?

I think we approached it the other way around. When we made the Isle video, Sylvain and I really wanted to hippie jump a horse, we thought that’d be funny. We were looking at hiring TV horses or whatever, and it was just loads of money, just ridiculous.

But when we did that hippie jump episode, we did this trip to Palestine and there were just donkeys everywhere. We were just driving by one in a cab, and we got the cab driver to ask this kid if we could hire his donkey for five minutes. The kid kind of understood what we wanted to do, and we did that. We were making this edit for Isle, this Palestine edit, and we thought it might come across as culturally insensitive if we put it in that.

We were really hyped on it and were like ‘Fuck, what can we do with this? We have to put this out. Why don’t we see what else we can hippie jump?’. It all stemmed from there, it was more like we were looking for things to hippie jump than the hippie jump freeing us, in a way.

People are always sending Jaws pictures of crazy spots on or off of rooftops—do people bring you guys to gnarly hippie jump spots when you’re on the road?Or spots that lead into a body of water?

Definitely, Mike (Arnold) gets that stuff a lot. The hippie jumps episode was just kind of something we did, and it’s interesting to hear from the outside that that trick is now so closely identified with us. I do remember afterwards, everyone just wanting to carry on filming hippie jumps, just having that vision to be looking for spots to do them all the time. We were trying to not film them after, actually. I don’t think I answered your question though. What was it again?

I was just asking you if people show you spots that are specific to the stuff they’ve seen in previous Atlantic Drift videos you’ve put out.

Oh yeah, I get DMs all the time like ‘Check out this rainbow bike rail!’. That’s pretty sick. I’m always seeing strange contraptions about, and probably 10% of what I send is within the realm of physical capability of anyone. I think I’m just lost in these fantasies of like ‘Oh my God, wouldn’t that be good.’

Casper Brooker doing two ‘tricks’ at once.

Speaking of spots, I know you guys have done a lot of rigging of spots, like taping up phone booths or breaking the tail off a board. What’s the most production of that type you’ve put into getting a specific clip?

Oh shit. We tend not to Bondo spots or anything like that so much, I don’t know if that’s just because the actual Bondo isn’t that easy to get or if it just goes against some unspoken rules here, in London at least. For the Big Ben road gap, whenever we go there, we tend to tape up the phone booth there, it’s a classic English red phone booth - probably the most photographed phone box in the world. We’ve taped it up with caution tape just because from 9:30 in the morning on there’s a constant queue of tourists coming to take photos there. It’s not the hugest production, but it does feel pretty cheeky.

London, a lot like New York, is such a busy place. Most of the production goes into just figuring out how to do things, basically crowd control. That St. Paul’s video was so hard to do just because it’s so crowded, the production that went into it was just a lot of patience.

Is there a line for you where, because of production, a trick gets gimmicky? Can you overdo it on novelty?

That’s a line that’s difficult to figure out, you can only really see it after you’ve filmed something. If someone has to try something for a long time, then it can start to feel a bit dorky. Which is a funny thing for video, because whether someone does something in one go or a hundred goes, it has the same kind of spontaneity in the end.

I think if you have to force it too much, that’s when it feels gimmicky. For example, we had this footage of Mike rolling over a bin, a dumpster bin. That was very easy for him, that was sort of him dicking about, but he smiles when he rolls away – there’s something natural there, something sincere which shows the spirit in which it was done. If that wasn’t there, then I think we’d be like ‘That doesn’t smell right.’

This, despite being done on a dumpster, smells right. Mike Arnold with a wild one.

If he was drenched in sweat and it looked like he was relieved after trying it for an hour?

Yeah, exactly. There’s nothing dishonest about that, but that’s how it feels.

How do you decide on places to film new Atlantic Drift episodes?

That’s a funny one, I actually have a problem with this a lot of the time. You can look at a globe and there are so many places to go, but it’s a hard decision. I never want to go to a place that looks like it has that ‘exploration vibe’. The whole Patrick Walner thing, I never want the place to be the choice because of how it looks. I’m always looking for something a bit subtler than that. When we went to Hawaii and Las Vegas, those trips were a month apart. That was after we’d done the first few and we realized that we could go where we wanted to at that point because the series had been well received, so we were like ‘Fuck it! Where would be a ridiculous place to go?’. Those two sounded pretty ridiculous to us. If a place has a strong visual identity in some way, that’s a big draw.

Where would you film your dream episode?

For me, one of my top places to visit would be Mexico. I’ve never been there, but I really want to do a month-long trip and go to a few places there. That’s very achievable, I don’t know why we haven’t. Max Palmer had recommended Guadalajara and Mexico City. I just want to be there! It looks so good.

Rules of Skateboarding #14: Jacob Elliot Harris