We Thrive On Cold Winters

This was not filmed in Southern California. Tom Knox, alley-oop frontside 5-0 shove-it.

Interesting skate videos tend to come from interesting places. 

We end up watching a lot of videos from Vancouver, Montreal, London and, of course, Minneapolis. But why? 

There was a time when all skate videos (besides those you’d make with your friends) were made in sunny Southern California, and that’s what people knew of skateboarding. You know, that place where the longest rails are slid, boards are flipped the most times, and people who make money off of skateboarding tend to live. 

Once the making of skate videos was democratized, we started to see videos pop up from places not traditionally associated with skateboarding (i.e. places other than Southern California).

Yes, this is gnarly as fuck, but is it what we watch to get hyped and go skate? No, no it's not.
Chris Joslin, the biggest backside flip.

The change in scenery, the unfamiliar names, the less glossy appearance of the videos themselves — these each play a small factor in the popularity of regionally-made-yet-mass-appreciated videos. The cities mentioned earlier each have no shortage of skateable architecture,  however it’s our observation that the videos we enjoy most tend to come from places that have a unique unifying factor other than just having solid places to ride a skateboard.

Quite simply put: Weather has to make it too shitty to skate for much of the year.

For the (un)lucky skaters who live in these places, making a skate video is significantly different undertaking than it is for those residing in warmer places.

Tracking down a full length copy of North 2: Port Moody Blues just might be the best thing you can do for yourself this winter. Mike McDermott, bluntslide. 

One factor in this is that skating is just more fun when you’ve been snowed or rained out for the past couple months. Rather than focusing on going for the most flips / stairs / twirls, the skaters in these places look to have fun and make something they’re proud of in the limited time they have with dry pavement. VP favorites and Canadian classics North and North 2: Port Moody Blues  give us perfect examples of this idea — skating that's heavy on style and not too serious.

Filming flowers can be fun too.

Then there’s craftsmanship factor. Skaters being the obsessive bunch that we are, our time spent while prevented from skateboarding is used by the motivated among us to edit videos, design graphics and do other things that add to the quality of skate media. We could not imagine videos like Isle’s recent hit Vase coming out of somewhere where there wasn’t plenty of time spend rained in to fuck around with editing and motion graphics.

Rather than jamming out a video because there’s more skating to do, those in unfavorable skateboard climates have time on our hands to make what they make more interesting. 

Maybe not all skateboarding thrives on cold winters, but the skateboarding we like to see certainly does.