This one’s special. Ed and I have known each other since elementary school and grew up skating together in the same crew through middle school and high school. We’d all watch the new videos together, we’d skate together after school, and go on missions of the weekends together, it’s an era that I know means a lot to both Ed and I, as well as everyone else in the crew.

Since then, Ed’s done so much for skateboarding, specifically the skate scene in San Diego. He’s worked at Slappy’s Garage for a handful of years, and when he’s not there, you can find him out filming or shooting photos on just about any session. As you’ll hear about in the interview below, he’s dropped two videos this year, with the most recent one being “leaveurbodyleaveurmind” which just premiered on Oct. 25th. We dove into the process of filming and editing, how it is working on a video with a big crew, and got some insight on some stand out clips. Enjoy!

🌀: Your new full-length just premiered a few days ago and released online the day after. How does it feel to have it out there and see people reacting to it?

Ed: So, I put out another full-length earlier this year, and that was my first ever video. That one was very stressful and ended up being bigger than I thought it was going to be, as far as a bigger project. When this one came around, it didn’t feel as stressful because I knew it was more just for fun. There was a lot of footage that we hadn’t used in the initial video from earlier this year, that went into this one, and a lot of stuff from 3 to almost 4 years ago that just never landed anywhere. So putting this one out was really nice just because it felt like I was wiping the slate clean, basically a hard reboot for our footage, there’s no more old footage anywhere, no more lingering clips.

To answer the question shortly; it’s just a big relief because now I feel like I’m all caught up and can kind of go wherever I want from here.

🌀: Yeah, that makes sense. I was actually going to bring up the fact that this is the second video you’ve premiered and released this year. How have you and the whole crew been so productive?

I think a big part of that has to do with the fact that I work at a skate shop, so my job lets me almost prioritize the filming missions and all that. I can’t tell you how many times Jason (Carney, owner of Slappy’s Garage) has let me take days off super last minute, or let me get out of work and came in to sub for me, just made it happen so I can do the things that I want to do, because these are the things that I’m passionate about.

There will be days when everybody’s schedule lines up, but I happen to be working so I end up calling out, someone fills in for me, and then we go have one of the best sessions ever. Those are the days when it pays off. I think that’s why we remain so productive, because everyone’s hungry. On top of that, there are a lot of people in the crew, so someone’s bound to be skating any day of the week. When I’m not working, there’s always something going on, or someone down to jump down something. It’s just this ongoing thing, we all feed off each other and just keep the ball rolling I guess.

🌀: That leads into what I wanted to talk about, as far as Slappy’s Garage. You’ve worked at the shop for a while now, and I feel like you play a really big role in the San Diego skate scene. What brought this crew together? You guys roll deep…

It all started super long ago. This is kind of funny because when I was younger, I had a crew of people that I skated with. I wasn’t filming; I was taking photos for fun, but nothing else. But then you, the interviewer, ended up moving, and it kind of dispersed this friend group we had because some of us only knew each other through you. These sessions would go down every weekend, you’d be a big part in organizing all of them, so once that kind of stopped, I had to start looking for different people to go out and skate with. That kind of started with Evan (Gallen) first and foremost. I probably met him when he was like 14 and he was always down to go skate. As well as this other kid, Tate (Carew), so those two were my go-to’s. Their friends ended up jumping
in, we all became friends, and it slowly snowballed into this little group that we have of people that are just down to go skate.

You go to the skatepark with these people, and all the people at the skatepark know them, so every now and then we pick up somebody else. It’s never been a cliquey or exclusive thing, it’s kind of just “If you get along with everyone pretty well, you’re mellow, and you want to hit some street spots, then we can make that happen.” We’re always trying to get stuff done, and it’s always cool when there’s an extra person on the session to hype you up. It’s just one of those things where we try to be inviting to everybody, and I think that has a lot to do with why people are down to come out with us. So it just accumulates over time.

🌀: I didn’t really think about Evan and Tate being around since they were pretty young, but it makes sense because that age is when a lot of people are hungry to skate, and I’m sure the shop played a role in that.

Yeah I mean it definitely helped that I had a car because they didn’t, so they had no way of getting around without me. The skate shop was like the hub of where we would meet up. It always has been. It’s the place, that even as kids their parents could drop them off there and know that they would be fine. If homies have nothing to do, whether im working or not, they’ll go hang out at the shop. It’s just a solid meetup spot that’s made a lot of other things happen.

🌀: After being in SD last weekend for the premiere, I was just talking about how much I love that the shop is the real meet-up spot, it’s amazing. Back to your video, right before the premiere, I was talking to Horgey and he said that he didn’t know what song he was skating to and he hadn’t seen his part yet, but that he trusted you. Do you tend to edit that way, more on your own, or does it depend on the skater?

It depends on the person. Horgey was a special occasion, he specifically didn’t want anything to do with it beforehand, he wanted to be surprised. But, for example, Miles had seen his part like 40 times over, just because he’s one of those people who’s a little more picky and wants to make sure he’s satisfied with what’s being put out. That just kind of makes me want to try harder because I want it to be my vision, and obviously I’ll put my foot down if I disagree with something he wants to be done. But, I’m definitely more of a person that is stoked to show people progress, and I want people to see the work that’s being put into something. But, Horgey specifically didn’t want to see his part, everyone else was pretty familiar with what they were about to put out.

Also, I feel like I get tunnel vision sometimes when it comes to editing. There will be specific things that I just completely miss or don’t even notice, and when someone else watches it they kind of snap you out of that and help you adjust, focus, and remember all of the things you want to be doing.

🌀: Yeah, I think tunnel vision is the best way to describe it. Sometimes you’re too close to the project and you kind of forget about the big picture.

Yeah, especially with bigger projects like this, 30-35 minute videos are really long and sometimes you lose sight of what’s going on so you kind of have to take a step back or have somebody else watch it.

🌀: On the topic of editing; I know how much music means to you in general, and I think that everyone would voice the importance of it in a video. What’s your process as far as picking songs?

That also depends on the person and the vibe of the footage. I can never really pick a song unless I have all of the footage put together, because the footage itself tells me what the video is going to sound like, if that makes sense.

Horgey’s part specifically, I feel like the music that I used for him was an encapsulation of his personality. Miles’ music felt like what the skating looked like. It’s difficult because it’s such an open-ended thing, you can go in any direction in a skate video. But, it’s also my favorite part of editing because I love to put music on top of things and see how it works out. It’s my favorite and least favorite, just because it adds the pressure.

🌀: That’s really sick. I thought it was cool that there was a mix of genres and the songs all felt different. Sometimes a video can lean heavily towards one genre or style of music, and not that that’s bad, but I thought your mix was cool.

I think it depends on the video too, Spite (Ed’s first video of the year) was a little more serious, so I wanted the songs to be more lined up and in tune with one another. Whereas this one was kinda whatever, I didn’t want it to be too all over the place, but I didn’t want to feel like it needed to be anything, it could be whatever it wanted to be.

🌀: Definitely. One thing that I really liked about the video was the spot-based montages. The video starts with the gap section, then later there’s the DIY quarterpipe section, and then even later there’s the manny pad/bank section. Did you set out to film a ton of clips at these spots?

The first spot kind of became a running joke on sessions because when we’d find ourselves not knowing where to go, everyone would just be like “should we go there?” and overtime I just realized that I had all this footage on this spot, and it’s not even necessarily the craziest spot ever. It’s literally one of the most perfect gaps, it’s almost like a skatepark gap. There was a reason why so many people had so many tricks on it, you know? That one I got stoked on because instead of just throwing all these clips in everyone’s sections, I realized we could just do an opening section with that.

We just had a really big crew at that DIY in LA, a lot of people ended up skating and a lot of tricks were done, that one kind of happened naturally. This all came to be because WKND Skateboards and Grant Yansura are really sick and they’ve done that in the past, where they do sections of the whole team sessioning a spot. I’ve always really liked that and I wanted to give it a shot in this video, because I thought that we could do something similar.

🌀: Yeah, and to quickly go back to the size of the crew. Having so many people probably helped make that work out. It was really sick.

Yeah, it just depends on the day. Some days you end up with 10 homies and other days it’s just you and 2 homies. That was just one of those days.

🌀: Yeah. I want to talk about the spots you guys skated. There was of course some recognizable SD spots, but there were also a lot that I haven’t seen, or haven’t seen much of. Are you spending a lot of time lurking around for spots, or are different people in the crew doing that?

It’s definitely a group effort. It’s funny, a lot of the spots that we get are from one of the other guys who works at the shop, we call him Tones. He’s a substitute teacher, so he’ll drive all over the city subbing for different schools and whatnot, so he’ll send me random locations of things and be like “Yo, you guys should check this out.” He’s always been like that, which is really cool. On top of that, I do a lot of driving myself, I’m always on the lookout for whatever’s new. We’ve gotten lucky plenty of times, but everybody else in the group is good about it too, they’re all just as hungry as they were before.

🌀: That’s pretty amazing that Tones’ job is leading him to spots that often.

Yeah, he was just telling me about some curved ledge that’s at some school that’s never been skated the other day.

🌀: Wow, he’s really coming through. Let’s go back to Horgey real quick; I’m hyped on his part, he skates with this loose but controlled style. I want to hear about the session where he did the Back Tail Bigspin and Back Tail Backside Flip on that steep bank-to-table kind of spot. How did that go down?

That spot is really cool, it’s 20 times harder to skate in real life than it looks in videos. It’s almost a wallie, there’s a big crack right before it, and like you said, Horgey has that controlled but loose style, which is perfect for that spot. You need to be loose to get up the ramp, and then you need to be in control to do the trick.

He Back Tailed it I want to say first try, and then Back Tail Bigspinned it in like 3 tries. The 2 bails he did the splits, and then he made it. There was a bunch of people on the session still skating it, so he was still rolling around and then started trying the Back Tail Backside Flip, because he did the first trick so quickly. He flipped one first try, didn’t land it or stick it or anything, but he flipped it and was like “Oh yeah, I could probably do this too.” and ended up doing it so good. It was ridiculous, in my opinion, probably one of the hardest tricks that’s been done at that spot.

🌀: I was surprised that he had two clips on that spot, and for the second one to be Back Tail Backside Flip done that perfectly was amazing.

Yeah, he’s a trip because a lot of the times you think he’s going to fall over, but he’s still rolling away.

🌀: He’s hanging on. I know that Kevin (Love) was on a lot of these sessions and filmed some second angles. What’s it like working with him? I know how amazing of a skater he is, but on top of that he’s just really knowledgeable when it comes to filming it seems like.

For one, I couldn’t have done any of what I’ve done without him, cause he’s shown and taught me so much about cameras, angles, how to have your colors, and just so much important groundwork for videography, he’s helped me out with all that. He’s really good to have on the session when someone’s trying a trick, because 9 times out of 10, Kevin’s already done that trick on a similar spot, so when people are trying to figure things out, it’s really nice to have him give you a little bit of insider advice. These guys all know what he’s accomplished, so they don’t ever second guess it. He’s a crucial person in the crew, he’s necessary, everyone looks forward to seeing him and filming with him. Not to mention, he has an Extreme, any Extreme footage you see in the videos is him filming, or me borrowing his lens.

🌀: That’s amazing, he’s the best. Let’s chat about Miles. He closed out the video with a 3 song part. He skates super fast and seems like he’s down to try anything. How is it filming with him?

It’s kind of crazy. He moved down here about 2 years ago, and before then he had never filmed any street skating, ever. Everything that we put out for this video is the first glimpse of what he’s capable of. It’s been wild just because a lot of the spots we’ve taken him to are his first time at those types of spots. Most people take things slow when they go somewhere for the first time, he’s the complete opposite.

He’s the dude that’s going to go faster if he’s unsure of something. It’s been really cool filming with him, the only thing now is to figure out where to take him that will challenge him still. This video checked off a lot of the boxes, and now we just gotta find gnarlier and gnarlier stuff for him to skate.

🌀: Speaking of gnarly spots, I remember a while back you showed me some attempts of that Boardslide that turned out to be his ender. How many times did you guys go back to that rail?

That one was a hard one, we almost were completely over it, just because it was 6 sessions. Every time we would go, he would get to the end and put his wheels down, but the first 5 sessions he either got too smoked in the process, as you can see in some of the attempts in the video, or we didn’t have enough wood. You can’t really tell from that angle, but there’s not that much concrete rollaway, so you have to put a bunch of wood down. There was a few times where we didn’t have enough, or the wood was at the wrong angle, or he stuck it at the wrong angle. He boardslid that thing so many times, if I had to guess, maybe 300 times, and it never lined up. The day that we actually said “Fuck it, this is the time. This is gonna get handled today.” We got Carney to bring the shop van, he brought wood from his house, we brought wood from the shop, we had metal signs, we had everything and more. You need a curb ramp to skate it, you gotta figure out the balance with the wax, we would always bring a big crew for support, it was just a whole mission every single time.

That last time it only took him about 10 minutes, which was ridiculous. But, I think by that time he was just so used to how the rail felt.

🌀: Wow, even though he had gone back so many times, I still wouldn’t expect a trick like that to go down quickly on a session. Was that towards the end of filming for the video?

No, we put the video out on October 26th and that was probably the end of May or June, so it had been a little bit. There were definitely a few tricks that we wanted to get in this part that didn’t end up working out, but they’re gonna be in the next one I guess.

🌀: Yeah, I feel like everyone deals with that, but that’s what the next one’s for. There’s one more clip of his that I want to hear about, he Wallied through a tree. First off, what an epic looking spot, even finding that is crazy. Did he find that spot himself, or how did that come about?

This one’s gonna come back around to Kevin, we were at a rail that I was hoping somebody would skate, we were with Cory and Miles. Miles wasn’t feeling it, and Cory wanted to skate it but his toe hurt, or something random, and Kevin was roaming around the area and was like “Guys, I forgot, there’s this spot here, Miles you should Wallie it.” And we go over to look at it and all of us are like “Dude, that’s not possible, you’re gonna rip your shoulder off.” And Miles was like “Yeah, I don’t know if I really wanna try that.” But he started Ollieing through it, and apparently one of the Dern brother’s had Ollied through it for Instagram, and Miles was like “It’s Ollieable, I’ll throw some” He slowly got more comfortable, started going faster, and ended up Wallieing it like six times. The two that we used in the video were two separate one’s, but he did it a handful of times just for fun. It was a really crazy one.

🌀: I actually wanted to mention the two angles, with how cool of a clip that was, I was hyped that there were two angles. It just looks perfect, the way that wall shot him right through the tree. Not perfect in the sense that it would be easy at all, but just such a crazy spot.

That’s one of my favorite clips, I’m so stoked it worked out. I think the long lens angle from the back is essential just because you get to see how tight it is, and the fisheye you just see the whole thing through and through.

🌀: It was really sick. Again, congrats, putting out two full-length videos in one year is quite the feat, regardless of who you’re skating with. What’s next now that this one’s out, is that even in your head yet?

Oh yeah, for sure. I’m working on a couple video parts with some friends for their board companies, and then I want to make a Washington St. edit. Just a montage-style video with a bunch of people at Washington St., towards the tail end of this video we ended up spending a lot of time there, so I got really stoked on that. There’s always a local or two there, and most of them are friends of ours, so it’d make sense to put something together. I just want to put of videos of different parts of San Diego, with different people in San Diego, just keep the hype going. Aside from that, just another street video, but I think I’m kinda done with 30 minute videos for a little bit, I’m going to try and keep it around the 15 minute mark from here on out.

🌀: Sick! Yeah, it’s probably more fun and a bit less stressful that way. Looking forward to all of these projects, but I also want to enjoy the videos that you have put out this year, cause they’re really sick.

Hell yeah, thank you.

🌀: Thanks for taking the time to chat about it all!