Josh Stew­art: Stat­ic VI

25 / 10 / 2023 / Interview

Hard to know what to ask the god­fath­er! — Brett Nichols

Stat­ic IV and V were sup­posed to be your final videos. What changed? When did film­ing offi­cially start, rel­at­ive to the last videos? Talk us through how you were pulled back in. 

Man, they really were sup­posed to be the last videos. But a few things got to me eventually…first, I star­ted flow­ing Brett Wein­stein with some The­or­ies stuff, I think he was like 17 at the time. And then when we went out to skate with him in Chica­go, I had strangely nev­er been there before, and the city cap­tiv­ated me. It’s like a clean­er, less chaot­ic NYC with lots of rad archi­tec­ture. And Brett had such a well-developed sense of how to read spots and put lines togeth­er so that kinda got the spark ignited. It often comes down to a skater and a city cap­tur­ing my ima­gin­a­tion. And at the same time I had found a couple of songs that were haunt­ing me and I was like “I can’t just waste these on an online edit. This has to be in a full length”. And then I star­ted skat­ing with John Barag­wanath a lot in NYC after he moved up from Miami. And he had some ser­i­ous Nate Brous­sard vibes to his style, aside from just being such a like­able dude. So it wasn’t a plan at all, but just some of these awe­some ingredi­ents star­ted fall­ing into place and I felt like we could maybe make a short­er Stat­ic pro­ject. but soon enough, it had morph­ed into yet anoth­er big opus and I was back in the trenches.

How was the pro­cess of mak­ing this video dif­fer­ent than pre­vi­ous projects? 

Definitely…This was the hard­est video for me to make in my life. My job is just so over­whelm­ing that it’s really dif­fi­cult for me to get out to film until the week­end. And  then when I DO get out film­ing, my back is a wreck for a few days after. So it just took much longer to do the film­ing needed for a big pro­ject like this. And I also was just put­ting too much pres­sure on myself. It took almost 6 years to fin­ish, and with it being the last Stat­ic video I felt that it really needed to be really thought­ful with lots of sur­prises and cre­at­ive con­cepts. But when you force your­self to be cre­at­ive, you kind of blank out. That’s not how cre­ativ­ity works. So I really struggled with this one but even­tu­ally I tried to just treat it as it’s own stand-alone pro­ject and hope that people just appre­ci­ate it for what it is. But there are cer­tainly a lot of nods to the his­tory of the series.

As the stat­ic videos developed, I noticed shifts in the B‑roll you cap­tured. IV and V focused on sub­way scenes and street vendors, and you also intro­duced ambi­ent sounds you would record. Are there any new themes or dir­ec­tions we can expect from Stat­ic VI?

Yeah…thanks for noti­cing that. Hon­estly I have to give Steve Brandi cred­it for spark­ing the ambi­ent sound obses­sion. He bought a little voice memo record­er and was record­ing sounds on the sub­way and it was so haunt­ing it really inspired me to make sound a sort of subtle star of IV & V. And man, as you prob­ably know, when mak­ing a full length, find­ing your angle and/or theme is so tough but when the 4 – 5‑6 train concept clicked in my head for the last video it felt like I had dis­covered lost treas­ure. It just all fell into place and I was so stoked and con­fid­ent on the theme so I would spend hours and hours on the trains late at night with my Bolex just shoot­ing and exper­i­ment­ing. But mov­ing into VI, I knew I had to change it up. I always want each Stat­ic video to have it’s own unique tex­ture, theme and feel, which is get­ting quite tough at this point. For VI I man­aged to get a cast togeth­er from all dif­fer­ent regions of the US. That was on pur­pose but not yet part of the theme. But as we all know, the US has taken such a weird turn over the last 6 – 7 years that 1/2 of the way through work­ing on this video I star­ted want­ing to some­how make that a subtle theme. But it’s really tough to do that without mak­ing it too dark or depress­ing. I don’t know how people will react to it, or if the theme will be that appar­ent to most people. But trav­el­ing from NYC to Chica­go to New Orleans and Bal­timore, it just kept rein­for­cing the theme to me. And there are a few little new title tech­niques and title reveals that I did all in-cam­era which were a lot of fun to do. People will prob just think it was all After Effects or they won’t care at all, haha. But I’m proud of them. I per­son­ally always respect it when oth­er film­makers put in the effort to do some­thing dif­fer­ent or a prac­tic­al effect. Even if it doesn’t work per­fectly, I still am hyped they tried. So I always wanna do my due dilli­gence to go the extra mile and try some dif­fer­ent ideas. Even if they flop, I’m stoked I tried.

When cap­tur­ing anoth­er city for a par­tic­u­lar skater, you’ve always done a great job show­ing their envir­on­ment in 16mm. I’m sure there’s lim­ited time on some of these trips and there’s likely a draw to just film skat­ing. Is this pro­cess spon­tan­eous or is there some degree of plan­ning to cap­ture a skater’s city? 

Thanks for the com­pli­ment and, again, thanks for noticing…yeah, it’s always kind’ve a go-to for any new part I’m work­ing on for a Stat­ic video to try and cap­ture the skaters loc­al envir­on­ment. But instead of like, shoot­ing the icon­ic build­ings or sky­line, it’s more about try­ing to con­vey the feel­ing I get in that city. It’s mostly spon­tan­eous, like, a reac­tion to how a cer­tain space or a view is mak­ing me feel at the time. Or maybe how the light is hit­ting a cer­tain scene. But I really enjoy that part of the pro­cess, it’s where I feel like you can really inject your own style into a video. And some cit­ies are so inspir­ing, that I’m as excited to shoot b‑roll as I am to shoot skat­ing. Lon­don, NYC, DC, Chica­go and New Orleans have all been examples of cit­ies that I fell in love with and just couldn’t stop shoot­ing b‑roll.

On the top­ic of travel, was there much of it for this video? Self-fund­ing is nev­er easy. I saw in the trail­er you made it to New Orleans with Jordan Tra­han, which I’m excited to see. 

Well, com­pared to some of the pre­vi­ous videos where we went to like Cairo, India, Par­is, etc this one was quite tame. But the line-up is pur­pose­fully built around skaters from all around the US, so we traveled to each skaters city a bunch. Split up dur­ing dif­fer­ent film­ing trips, some­times for The­or­ies or for Pic­ture Show or whatever. So some of it was fun­ded by me per­son­ally and some by The­or­ies of Atlantis. So that made it a little easi­er. But you know how it goes, you always end up spend­ing way more money than you’ll ever make back but it’s still worth it.

Care to speak on the crew for this video? How did you select the skaters you wanted involved? There’s always a nice mix of ages, styles, and regions. I assume there’s some thought put into that? 

I kind of touched on a lot of this already above. But I could say that the line-up mostly happened organ­ic­ally with sev­er­al of the skaters kinda fall­ing into place without me try­ing. But then like with Bri­an Powderly, I hadn›t met him but I saw some foot­age of him around 2016 and just was like «Wow». His style was SO unique and so rad. I›d seen his foot­age before but it hadn›t clicked before. And I just knew, this kid HAS to be in the video. So I basic­ally cold-called him about it and he came on a little film­ing trip with us and he›s such a rad kid too it was just a per­fect fit. And then the last addi­tion to the line-up was kinda the same situ­ation. I knew the Stat­ic line-up just really needed one more part with someone that was being slept on. And at the time we were talk­ing about someone to add to the Dial Tone team and Jordan Trahan’s name came up and it was just like “DUH!” He was such the obvi­ous choice for the last piece of the Stat­ic puzzle. And thank­fully he was super down to be involved. Every­one else was years along at that point but I think every­one agreed that he would really add some­thing to the video. Since then he’s become much more well known and cel­eb­rated. But hope­fully this part cap­tures him in a way that show­cases him in a way people haven’t seen yet, and becomes the part he’s remembered for Regard­less, I’m super proud of it and it’s a super import­ant anchor in the Stat­ic lineage.

Spot selec­tion is a hall­mark of a Stat­ic pro­ject. Did you find your­self doing much spot search­ing for this video? How do you bal­ance your aes­thet­ic goals with the spot desires of the  skaters involved? 

Man, hon­estly, with my body this much of a wreck and so little time to film, being as picky about spots as I used to be isn’t a lux­ury I can afford. Thank­fully, I’m film­ing with guys who have good taste and by focus­ing on cit­ies which were, at the time, under-exploited, we were able to dig up a lot of rad stuff. Chica­go, Bal­timore, New Haven, St Louis and espe­cially New Orleans. Tech­nic­ally, New Orleans is not a great skate city. There are BARELY any “spots” but I’m soooo stoked we made the effort to film most of Jordan’s part there because it has such a stronger impres­sion I think than if we’d just filmed it all in NYC or whatever. I think that cre­at­ing a vibe and a feel­ing is far more import­ant than think­ing up the wild­est combo trick on some wacky spot. Every­one is try­ing to outdo each oth­er with the insane level of invent­ive­ness with their spots, like build­ing some sort of skate­board­ing ver­sion of a Rube-Gold­berg device. And yeah, it’s shock­ing and enter­tain­ing, but there’s still some­thing that sticks with me longer and feels more mean­ing­ful when it’s just genu­ine skat­ing from a skater in his/her own envir­on­ment and a style makes you feel some­thing, without for­cing or flaunt­ing it.

Is this really the last Stat­ic video?! What does that mean for you as a film­maker? Will you con­tin­ue to film and edit for The­or­ies brands? Can you keep the antique cam­er­as going?! 

Haha.…yeah, I know I’m the boy who cried wolf. But I just don’t see how I can pull it off again. This one had me like on the brink of insan­ity and then my back got so bad that I couldn’t film or skate dur­ing the last 4 months of fin­ish­ing the video. My girl­friend has been hav­ing to put my shoes and socks on me lately, it’s got­ten so bad. But also, these videos just con­sume my soul. I live the video and it’s all I think about. Ima­gine obsess­ing over one thing for 7 years straight? And my iden­tity has got­ten so wrapped up in it that I take it much too ser­i­ously and if I can’t fig­ure out new con­cepts and achieve the feel­ing I want it to con­vey I like base my self worth on it. It’s not healthy. I mean, I do think some people have to suf­fer to pull some­thing out of them­selves that feels mean­ing­ful. But also, I feel like the audi­ence for the Stat­ic videos is quickly dimin­ish­ing. There’s so little appet­ite any­more for full lengths that are meant to be stud­ied and re-watched. Nobody has patience. Yeah, there are still film­makers doing full lengths but so many of them seem to move on as quickly as the audi­ence does. If you don’t treat your work as mean­ing­ful and import­ant neither will your audi­ence. Yeah, I’ll con­tin­ue to work on pro­jects for The­or­ies and oth­er TOA brands but I real­ist­ic­ally don’t know if I can film any­more unless I find a mir­acle cure for my back. But, as a “film­maker”, I will def­in­itely feel unful­filled without hav­ing that big long-form pro­ject in the works that I obsess over. So who knows. I would love to try my hand at nar­rat­ive film pro­jects, music videos, or some­thing like that. But in the back of my head I’d feel like I was betray­ing skate­board­ing some­how. Haha.