I grew up in Minnesota watching inline, skateboard, and BMX videos and was mesmerized by the little branded worlds they would create. I have stayed active in the inline scene for the past 20+ years putting out edits here and there but nothing too involved. Meanwhile, my work in the advertising industry had been evolving and maturing so I felt like the timing was right with my skillsets in both skating and story telling to bring them together.

Chasing Shadows 

As I kept skating and finding my legs again I found myself constantly thinking about the past and how tricks used to feel. How good was I? Could I still skate street? This is Chasing Shadows. A one year labor of love, filmed and designed in Los Angeles, CA.

You will see black and white footage from time to time in the film. That footage is older,  representing the past. Those clips are also some of the best tricks we have done and they are there as a sort of flash-back, sanity check.

Art Direction

I had developed a shadow look and feel and the font for the project. I put it all together and it was feeling a little too stark. So I played with adding a bit of light.
 

Iridescent Grain Effect Before and After

Typography In Use

Inspiration

For this project I thought a lot about light and shadow, past and present. You can really see that in my research and mood board. We filmed everything in Los Angeles so I looked at Los Angeles then and now that's why you see the Hollywoodland reference. When I pondered shadows I thought of the simplicity of black and white which lead me to discover early geometric art films by the likes of Marcel Duchamp, essentially motion graphics done in 1926, pretty fricken' rad.

Title Design Process

I came up with a technique to capture letters as shadow and got to work creating bold letters, inspired by the Hollywoodland sign. The apparatus I devised was pretty hard to balance, and aligning the letters was super tricky. I weighted fishing lines with bearings to keep a tug on each letter. And ran the lines through the cardboard, keeping letters straight with glue drops, uhg. All in all a pretty redneck job.