Growing as a person and growing as a skater – they’re decidedly different things. Becoming an ‘adult’, for lack of a better term, doesn’t necessarily go hand-in-hand with landing the banger of your dreams. In fact, these are usually the results of different paths taken at different times in life. ‘Usually’ being the operative, but not entirely crucial word here.

So…what does it take to do adult stuff and still create a skate video you're proud of? We decided to talk to friend Drew McKenzie about his recent video project Ponce City Maggot he made with his friend Collin Dubick, a project that came together despite its creators being fully involved in ‘adult’ pursuits. We felt inclined to ask some big questions.

How do you guys know each other?

Collin Dubick: We grew up skating together in Charleston, South Carolina in middle school / high school. We went to the same school, and Drew was one year below me.

Drew McKenzie: But we were both wearing ripped up Accels. And I think that was something that we bonded over. Especially as you do at that age, and especially in those days, in a Southern private school.

So you guys skated together. Are those clips of you guys skating from middle school/high school?

Drew: Yeah, over half a lifetime ago. I had a Hi-8 video camera with a clip-on fisheye that we would take around and I never even uploaded or edited the footage. It was always about just trying to collect footage in hopes to make a video together someday. So ultimately, Collin reached out to me when we started talking about this project last year and asked if I could find that. I dug around in my mom’s spare room, found the tapes and got them digitized.

Amazing. So it wasn’t in anything before this?

Collin: Nope. I thought it was lost. We went through it all together one night a while back—hours of footage over multiple tapes.

Drew: I still want to put out my sponsor me tape from that era.

Collin: Dude, you should.

So you guys know each other from that era — what got you wanting to do something now?

Collin: I mean, it started then. We always wanted to put together a video but it just never happened. And a lot of that was because we moved away after high school and never ended up living in the same place again. Drew has been in New York and I was in a number of places before settling in Georgia. Over time, because of work, other peoples’ schedules, and sometimes just not having friends around that skated, I got used to skating alone. Then in 2020, it was the only way I was skating for a while. And I figured it would be a good time to start filming again. It just never really occurred to me before then that you could film yourself, and I started having fun with it. Then I reached out to Drew after I’d been doing it for a while, and we started to put something together.

Was there anything you saw, or any thought process you had, that turned it into a reality for you?

Collin: I guess it was just realizing that it could be done easily. I’m not technologically savvy, so realizing that I could prop up a camera phone that I already had and press record.

Drew: I’m usually skating alone or with my little dog and girlfriend, who filmed most of my part.

I think that there are underlying trends in skateboarding, like it or not, about opinions on anything from self-filmed tricks to skatepark footage. But ultimately, there’s no disrespect in including whatever you’re hyped on. For instance, Collin and I have talked about such bias, like what do we think of skatepark footage?

I feel like that rule is changing a lot, too. Did you guys watch the most recent Palace video? Ville Wester’s part is like all skatepark footage.

Collin: Yeah, he skates that stair thing. I was thinking about that recently. I guess the question is: what’s your audience? I made the video for myself and a small group of friends that skate. So using footage I filmed at my favorite park in Kentucky is way more meaningful to me than public acceptance in the skate community — whether it’s cool or not.

Plus trends shift over time. There are plenty of wooden ramps in early skate videos. And in some of my first favorite videos like Tilt Mode’s Man Down, where it’s all woven in with street footage.

Collin inspecting his board pressing setup.

With those videos, that was part of the fun of it. It isn’t super serious in the way that a lot of videos right before that era were very serious — it was embracing a different spirit and having fun. Anyway, why did Jaundice take the form that it did? What does this video mean in that context?

Collin: Things just started to come together. I would send Drew clips and vice versa. I don’t think we’d really filmed much together for the better part of 10, 15 years. We live in different places, and when we’re back together, we skate, but only for the brief bit of time we have. So the only way to bring it together was to film in separate places, however we could, as our jobs would allow, and with the equipment we had.

Jaundice is a name I came up with a few years ago. Based on an alias (John Jaundice) I use on occasion. Plus it’s relevant to my line of work.

I started pressing and shaping boards a few years ago. I mostly make them for myself and Drew and friends — super small production– one at a time with a bottle jack press, shaped with a jigsaw and traditional hand tools.

Drew used to have a board company too—Corpse Corps Boards—all coffin shaped. I still ride one as a cruiser. That was part of my inspiration to start making my own.

Where did the animation come from?

Collin: Just messing around with claymation. When I was a kid, I used to do that stuff a little bit, like in pre-K with Play-Doh, as guided by teachers. Ponce City Market is a big mall in Atlanta in the old Sears, Roebuck and Co building. So Ponce City Maggot is just a riff on the name—something that came to me when I was skating one day.

Drew with a frontside 180 to fakie 5-0. Photo by Jeremy Patterson.

Who else is in this video?

Collin: From Charleston days, there’s one of our friends that we haven’t seen in years named Josef. He does a casper flip down a four stair. It’s from the Hi-8 footage. In some really crazy pants, too. Then there’s our friend Edwin from Orlando, friends from Kentucky and Atlanta, my late cat, my dad, and a trout someone sent me instead of a skate clip.

Tell me about your process. You’re selfie filming, your girlfriend is filming, and you’ve got a few different locations? How does it work?

Drew: Basically, we both have jobs and aren’t really mobbing in the streets that much together, at least these days. So oftentimes the way that I get clips in New York is to go on a walk after work with my board and a tall boy. And I would make it a mission to go to a spot I wanted to check out.

Other footage in my part came from a month I spent in Mexico City earlier this year, where I was working remote, but similarly would just walk through the plazas and parks to explore the spots there. If my girlfriend can’t make it to the sesh with me, I’ll just lean my phone on a water bottle. Collin has a tripod he uses now.

Collin: Yeah, that was a step up. It doesn’t fall over as much.

Drew: There’s one clip in Collin’s part where the car drives by as he drops in on a street vert wall and a car passes, blocking the shot (laughs). That was great punctuation on the part. I think it’s really fitting for the whole ethos of the video.

Did you do every conceivable flip out of a boardslide trick?

Collin: There are definitely some I didn’t. The ones I did though, I tried to keep together.

Especially impressive was the two different tricks at Black Blocks. There was the boardslide flip out one, and then the wallie nosemanual nollie varial flip. That was crazy.

Collin: Thanks man. That one was super fun to learn. It’s definitely a spot/trick combo where I got pitched over the ledge some in the process though.

Does selfie filming take the pressure off?

Drew: It takes the pressure off because I feel such guilt if I don’t land the trick quickly. Personally, I’d rather skate with my friends than force them to film a sesh. We’ve never had a filmer friend, you know, so someone would have to sit out for a while.

Collin: I don’t get to skate with friends all that often and when I do, I’d much rather skate than film. The quality of what you get isn’t the same as when you have a dedicated filmer and it seems unlikely that many people would want to make a video the way we did. But the goal here was to put it together with the means we had.

There’s a guy who put out a video in Atlanta, who I’m friends with, and he was like, “You don’t have a clip for our video!” I was like well, I’ve got this, and he’s like, “Is it stationary footage?” I was like yeah. And he’s like, “Nah, that’s okay man” (laughs).

The medium is the message, and the technology you use creates an aesthetic, creates a vibe. So the embrace of selfie filming creates a new vibe, and now I see that a lot on Instagram.

Drew: Selfie filming has an intimacy about it that you don’t see in every video. It’s kind of like a singer-songwriter sort of thing as opposed to a full band, and not everyone’s into that or is always in that mood. But especially with like Collin’s part, the static framing of the camera and then the intense trick selection had a great juxtaposition. It was somehow pleasant and soothing, and droney with the song. If it was filmed by a filmer or up close with a fisheye, it might just present in a totally different way.

Collin, have you always been flipping out?

Collin: Dude, no, I learned so much in the last three years filming this. I’d say 50% of the tricks, if not, like, 75% of the tricks that I did in this video, I’d never done before. So that’s been cool.

And I agree it takes the pressure off. I read what Ted said [in Skateboarding’s New Rules] and yeah, I’m not gonna feel bad in the same way trying the trick for an hour and a half. I can just keep going until I’m too tired or hurt or the camera dies.

Drew: Did you ever go Mark Suciu-style and try to do the reverse version of a trick?

Collin: Some stuff, yeah. I guess. I was just like oh, I did it this way. Now can I do it the other way?

Do you guys want to continue making these?

Collin: I don’t know. Maybe. Drew, what do you think?

Drew: This was all circumstantial, right? Like, the way it was filmed, how we put it together, the time we had to make it. I don’t see anything changing on my end to alter how I collect footage and skate, so until that changes, I’ll probably approach skating the same way.

Collin: I’m just stoked that we finally put it together.

Do you have bigger plans for making boards?

Collin: Not really. I might make a series of boards and do an art show with some billy clubs and baseball bats and toilet seats and stuff in the next few years. I think it’d be fun to release a big batch all at once. And then just keep making them for friends.

Embracing Friendship and Self-Filming with Collin Dubick and Drew McKenzie