How Skate 3 Got Me Into Production

I decided to pop in my old copy of Skate 3 last night and tooled around with some of the cooler parts of the map. They had some really well thought out environments in that game, from real skateparks to a skateable stone quarry. I bought this game right around the end of 2010, when I had to take a break from engineering college and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. It wasn't circuitry and coding, that was for sure.

As I pulled up some of my old saved clips, I realized this was one of the first editing tools I had available. A part time college student couldn't really afford Adobe Premiere (I still can't and I'm about to graduate), so beign able to edit in house was amazing. I ended up making my first Youtube video with a hastily edited clip of my guy bailing off a huge ledge before flipping and landing in a perfect handstand, because the Hall of Meat system was awesome like that. I'm starting to realize that this may have gotten me started in television production, and got me back into school for a real vocation: making dumb videos. Or just good videos, whichever I have time for.

Blackbox made the Skate series as a much closer to real life simulation than the Tony Hawk series had ever been (despite venerable attempts in Project 8), and even included dumb little details like your camera being an actual camcorder with a wide angle lens, like a shredding Lakitu. The ability to create shot for shot stylized skate videos was a blast, and allowed me to experiment with creative processes, setting up shots, scrubbing footage and making the right cuts to create, at least what I thought were neat little promos. I balanced my time in that game, somewhere nearing 100s of hours as we speak, making legitimate attempts to skate and documenting every bad glitch and bail in that game, and boy where there some bad ones.

From there, I ended up applying to one of the biggest media and production colleges, and I now spend my days in a truck full of splitters, switchers and monitors, live cutting or post editing footage of just about anything from NCAA basketball games to interviews about arsons (yes multiple arsons, dumb kids), Also ended up buying a good old pine and grip tape and busting my ass learning to skate over the past few years. Honestly, between the two, these are the first few hobbies turned lifestyle for me. Often I would pick up whatever was trending and ride it til I got bored (looking at you Razer Scooters) and move on. It was a major change of pace to find something as simple as recording a sick trick and posting it to be a relaxing and creative moment, something I'm still trying to capture today.