A recent topic of conversation among friends of mine has been the relationship between the quality of filming in longboard videos versus the quality of skating. Compared to videos in the rest of skateboarding, it seems a little out of whack.

Lately it seems like every video opens with a slow pan over fluttering leaves, cuts to a skater walking up the hill, then like a time-lapse of a flower or whatever, and after 45 seconds the skater finally pushes into the hill and does like ten 180s. The colors are warm and there’s beautiful shallow depth of field with well-done transitions and all kinds of tasteful Final Cut effects to match the dubstep soundtrack. It leaves me nostalgic for poorly filmed videos of gnarly skating.

This video of Evren Ozan is pretty much exactly what I was looking for. There are no tricky camera angles or manipulated exposure settings to make it look like Evren is skating fast, no arty intro, no glide track shots or pans, and only one standup slide. Wex just strapped his camera to a motorcycle, followed Evren as he hauled maximum ass down his local hills, and edited the footage in iMovie.

And it’s one of the best videos I’ve seen in a while because the skating is amazing. Nobody skates as fast and as smooth as Evren, especially down those gnarly hills. It isn’t super action-packed and there aren’t a lot of slides; but given the roads he’s skating, the fact that he isn’t sliding, just holding on and railing turns at top speed and the edge of traction, is way sicker than any slide would have been.

I don’t get to see Evren skate very often. Dude has been dealing with some injuries and hasn’t been able to skate much in the last year; but more importantly, I just can’t keep up with the kid when he is skating. He’s just constitutionally incapable of anything but top speed; so it’s tough to get video of him through traditional means. Fortunately, someone’s got a motorcycle so we get to watch him do his thing.

Anyway, yeah. F*@king Evren Ozan, fully killing it. More like this, please. – Max