THREADS ‘Foot­notes’ / Alex Rose interview

Our goal is to get to ten full-lengths.

We’ve also had five addi­tion­al videos by indi­vidu­als under the Threads monik­er. Ben Schmidt made My Front Stoop, Vacant Street Blues, and Cros­sov­er. Josh Shupe made Con­jure. Chris Thiessen made Old Earth.

Q: About the first videos cov­er­ing up a lot of U.S. ter­rit­ory and work­ing as a net­work. Was the ori­gin­al idea influ­enced by Josh Stew­art’s Stat­ic series per­haps (the first one in par­tic­u­lar)? Because on paper, the descrip­tion reads like a more ‘tech’ ver­sion than what he was doing at the begin­ning; the same ambi­tious endeav­our that is mak­ing an under­ground scene video of a nation­al scale, but with mod­ern com­mu­nic­a­tion and file shar­ing tools that would make team­work now more pos­sible, if not logic­al, than before, when solo or isol­ated pro­jects organ­ic­ally just made sense.

A.R: That makes sense to com­pare to Stat­ic- in the scope of a nation­wide inde­pend­ent video. I would just say that the goal is dif­fer­ent in that we want con­trib­ut­ors to feel a level of own­er­ship. People have the oppor­tun­ity to work togeth­er on the edits, music selec­tion, etc. It’s hard work and a lot to ask of people to fore­go their indi­vidu­al vis­ions, so we want them to feel that Threads is theirs.

The his­tory; It star­ted with Creasy and I work­ing with a core group of skaters from Atlanta and Ten­ness­ee, which worked so pro­duct­ively that we wanted to incor­por­ate more scenes and con­trib­ut­ors. We had Mar­shall Nich­olson in Flor­ida, Chris Thiessen in Cali­for­nia, Ben Schmidt in Bal­timore — and Josh Shupe and Bry­an Reyn­olds here in the south film­ing and work­ing in the stu­dio with us to make these elab­or­ate videos that covered a lot of U.S. territory.

Those types of videos were really fun to work on with every­one. Spir­its were high and there was a lot of intern­al buzz from the rap­id pro­gress we would be mak­ing towards our goals. It felt like that kind of inde­pend­ent and col­lab­or­at­ive effort had a ton of steam at the time, not only in our crew but in skat­ing as a whole. Even though Creasy had moved to Cali­for­nia we were as close as ever and the momentum car­ried us until about Think & Thank, around the time that Cov­id had set in and the world was try­ing to adapt to the uncer­tain­ties of the situation.

We always kept skat­ing and film­ing with our friends and set­ting goals to include spe­cif­ic people, but some of the col­lab­or­at­ive exper­i­ment star­ted to show cracks. People who were key parts of the series star­ted show­ing interest in doing their own videos, and com­mu­nic­a­tions fizzled or it was under­stood they would put their efforts into their own pro­jects. I think that’s com­pletely under­stand­able, skat­ing is a finite thing, and every­one has their own goals. It would both­er the people who were still focused on Threads, but of course we all respec­ted and appre­ci­ated our friends who wanted to do their own thing. The rad part about it — every­one’s solo stuff was so good. Ben came out with two videos on his own that are some of my favor­ite videos ever. Thiessen star­ted Free Travel and made videos with oth­er brands, apply­ing the tech­niques we developed togeth­er with Threads and grow without the bounds of a big video. I think that time peri­od was a bless­ing in dis­guise for Threads, because as of recent — people are com­ing back into the pic­ture again, with the same enthu­si­asm as when we ini­tially real­ized that the whole is great­er than the sum of its parts.

Get­ting older makes it harder and is a great­er sac­ri­fice of time and effort than when we all star­ted on this togeth­er, but it makes it even more appar­ent that we need each oth­er if we’re going to con­tin­ue in this dir­ec­tion. It’s more import­ant now than ever to have patience with the pro­cess and give every­one their space to express themselves.

Foot­notes was filmed dur­ing a time when Threads felt truly small. A real­ist­ic goal was to get full parts from three people: Her­bert Brown, Alex Reed and Edgar Hernan­dez — with the hope that the core crew could stack enough foot­age to jus­ti­fy a full-length. That all developed stead­ily at home, but along the way, a few big things happened for the video and Threads as a whole.

The coolest part for me per­son­ally was recon­nect­ing with Nick Turn­er. Nick is from the gen­er­a­tion of skate­boarders before me, and he’s from our homet­own, Chat­tanooga. He’s a legend in the South­ern U.S., and he just so happened to be skat­ing a lot dur­ing Cov­id times, so get­ting a bunch of clips with him there was amaz­ing. Now we talk and fish togeth­er a bunch, which has been a blast. The segue to Andrew Edge and through­out Myles Wil­lard’s part all ref­er­ence Nick Turn­er and the Ruin Skateshop crew’s video Nou­veau, that Matt Creasy made in 2004. That video is really import­ant to all of us; I think every­one should check that one out, it’s one of the most endear­ing videos ever in my opinion.And the spine ramp is here in Chat­tanooga. It’s this skater from Flor­ida, Pete’s, ramp. He invites a lot of people to skate it often — online he is @mini.onthemountain if you want to see more of it. The loc­a­tion and house is amaz­ing, and it reminded me of the Elli­ot Skate ranch ramp in G&S Foot­age so much. Not just the ramp, but the energy of every­one drop­ping in on each oth­er, like Doug Smith’s part in that video, where he’s dodging people and doing lines. I always thought that part was so dope, so it incentiv­ized me to use that stuff. It was also a con­veni­ent segue between Alex Reed and Warner King’s parts.  I knew we had to include ramp stuff in the video because we want to show people’s styles and how they really skate. It would be a dis­ser­vice to have Alex and Warner in the video without show­ing that side of their skat­ing, because they really rip on transition.