Fiasco Skateboarding.com – A blog by Max Palmer

Here we go lads, a nice new/old edit for the bank holiday weekend. All the worthwhile footage we’ve gathered at the local between Summer 2006 and Spring 2009:

YouTube | Podcast

Yesterday was host to another great session at Emsworth, although slightly cooler than Wednesday, it was still a lovely day. This time I thought it might make a nice change if I were to get the camera out and film something, and that I did. Griptape and boards in one piece are overrated:

I don’t quite know what went wrong when one of the clips was sped up, but I can’t be bothered to sort it out.

So last Thursday Adam, Paget, Rob and I set off on the road to Skegness in my dangerously over filled car. Adam thought it would be a good idea to bring a full on holiday style suitcase with him, leaving almost no more room in the boot for anything else. With the parcel shelf half way up the back window, bags all over everywhere and the car looking like it had been lowered by a foot we set off on our 7 hour journey which was spent bullying Paget and listening to Biggie at full blast when stopped in traffic in a nice peaceful country village which we thought was the one out of Hot Fuzz.

The next couple of days were spent sessioning the plaza until close, rinsing Paget in the B&B, living off of Stella, Strongbow & Subway and spending too much money while out on the town. On Saturday morning we were once again woken up with a bang on the door by the B&B owner shouting “breakfast!” at stupid o’clock in the morning, I sat up and was greeted with a monster of hangovers and was not stoked about having to drive all the back, especially while Adam carried on the night before as he governed the stereo with dance anthems.

Here’s the trailer to my final major college project entitled “What Makes Us Tick”.

“A documentary about British skateboarding aimed at people who do not skateboard themselves, as to give them an insight into the somewhat alien subject”

Watch in high quality, turn it up and get hyped:

I thought that it would take me 10 minutes to get that online today after work, instead it has taken almost five hours due to QuickTime not doing what it’s supposed to, Squeeze deciding it doesn’t actually like any format of video anymore, and YouTube failing the upload for god knows what reason. So unfortunately I don’t have enough time to post up the other content that I had planned to tonight, and I’ve now got to work first thing tomorrow morning as well, stoked.

On Tuesday, after being kicked out of the only room where we can actually work due to a class of 14 year-olds coming to visit, our teacher decided that it would be a good idea to give 4 very immature teenagers a £2k HD camera to play with. After showing us the ropes, the four of us were dismissed outside to explore the big bad world of high definition. The word ’skatepark’ instantly sprung to mind. After marveling at the greatness of this little machine and getting some rather lovely looking footage, we headed back to capture. Capturing went well, and I managed to blag an external hard drive to take the footage home on, blissfully unaware of how incompatible HD video is with everything.  Instead of explaining them, here’s a list of problems I encountered:

- The footage would not play on my computer, in any application, and Google was no help.

-The footage would not play on any other Macs in my college apart from the Mac Pros, which were being used by another class today, so I had to get in there at lunch.

-Took about half an hour to find the right settings to convert the footage  so I could play them at home, without loosing the high definition.

-Took about 2 hours to convert all the clips.

-Logged out of the computer after the render to go to the car to get my iPod to use it as a hard drive, as all the college ones were booked out. Tried to log back in and remembered the footage is on my mate’s account, who had gone home and doesn’t have a phone that works.

-Had to wait half an hour to transfer it all to my iPod after managing to log in, then had to wait this again when I got home to transfer it all to my PC.

-Premiere Pro froze halfway through editing and I hadn’t saved it, had to start again.

-I finished editing at 8.30, and it’s taken me this long to get the right uncompressed HD settings to export out of Premiere, and the right settings for Sorenson Squeeze.

So after all that stress, here’s some HD footage of Mike King (who recently got his new website up) riding Guildford skatepark. Although this compression doesn’t really do the quality justice, HD cameras are definitely NOT overrated; the uncompressed files look amazing.

Or click here for a smaller version.

I do have some skateboarding footage that I thought I would get up tonight, but evidently not, so bare with me for that.

A short edit of Adam & Jak tearing Skaterham a new arsehole one cold December night.