Week 11

This week I got lucky when a surf shop near my house had a big sale with a skate-ramp demo. I didn’t have any idea, but the owner of Aqua Surf Shop is friends with Roger Mihalko, one of Gravity’s main team riders, and asked him to come skate in the demo. I spent the day eating hot dogs from the barbecue, listening to the live music, and filming the great skating that took place. I used a friends HD camera as well as my own Canon GL2 with a fisheye lens and cut the footage together the next day. I spent a few hours editing to an up-beat reggae song and came up with this video. Working with the high definition footage is fun, but exporting HD and regular DV in the same video is difficult. It took some trial and error, and I’m still not an expert, but I’m happy with the compromise between 4:3 and 16:9 that I achieved. Since the main rider in the video I made is a Gravity skater, I used the same graphics that I use at the end of the Gravity podcasts. I would have sent the video down to San Diego to be uploaded from Gravity’s youtube account but I decided I’d rather have it up on my own youtube page for now. An interesting note about youtube- this is the first time I’ve uploaded a video and noticed the “insight” options, there are many new features that let owners of videos see the times in which their videos are watched, what age group, what countries are watching their videos the most etc.