consolidated skate videoIn all forms of publishing, you can tell editors are throwing filler at you when the content gets review-heavy. Reviews are easy to churn out because they doesn’t require much legwork or for anything newsworthy to happen. “Journalists” just pick a product and pull some thoughts out of their asses, and turn them in as a story.

Austin Skate Notes’ reviews are a little different. Nobody’s getting paid over here and I’m not even getting free stuff. In fact, for every story I write, I’ve got to sacrifice my own time and such to do them. So for me to publish a review of something, the subject has to have inspired me to do it. The other day, I was pretty ticked-off about the Hot Chocolate video, so up went a review. This Sunday morning, I’m putting fingers-to-keys in order to express my thoughts about my reaction to another new skate video– Consolidated’s Behold.

Consolidated’s past video releases have been known for their strong skating, chaotic editing and low-fi production values, which has helped cast it as an “anti-hype” company. With Behold, the company has obviously laid down some money for professional editing and third-party footage. They haven’t gone bezerk with it, though. The skating is the strength of Behold and the production is limited to doing what’s necessary to present it to the viewer in a clear and interesting manner. No drama bullshit. Just great skating.

Behold is culminated from skate sessions all over the world. Most are in America, but there’s recognizable footage from Ecuador, Japan, and Australia. There’s a lot of great super 8 work from Rick Charnoski and Coan Nichols. Some clips look like they were sourced from 16mm as well. The camera work is consistently good in this video without any shots through those annoying fisheye lenses that make your tv screen round with black corners.

One of the things I was glad to see was all the skatepark footage. I hear a lot of people criticize shooting photos and video in skateparks. In San Antonio, for instance, Carter Dennis installed benches in a city park for people to skate and some kid complained to him that they looked too similar to skatepark benches and he didn’t want to shoot his ’sponsor-me’ video there for fear a potential sponsor would mark him off. It seems that the Consolidated folks don’t give a shit if that kid marks them off for skating skateparks in their video. I recognized parks in Arizona, Japan, Australia, Quito, Oregon, Maryland, and Washington.

The video is also a good testament to how versatile their team is. In addition to skateparks, they also ride fullpipes, pools, ditches and all manner of street spots. The street skating is especially strong when they’re riding stuff that’s pretty damn difficult to ride… like where you have to snap an ollie to get onto something that you then have to snap another ollie off of. One of the coolest examples of this was where there was a jumbled pile of concrete slabs and a guy ollied onto one slab, kickflipped off the edge, and landed on another slab at another angle.

Standouts? Steve Bailey, who needs to wear a helmet, ripped everywhere. Jub, from the first Black Label video, was great. Most remarkable was his backside lipslide off a 7-ft ledge. He was riding on top of the ledge before the lipslide. Two cool clips of Pete the Ox. Danger does a McTwist on the big wall at Burnside. Oh yeah, there’s more Burnside footage in this than any other video I can think of. Karma Toschef had a cool part as well. Alan Petersen skated to Napalm Death and rode huge steel fullpipes with an elbow. Would have liked to have seen more footage of those pipes…

So bottom line, how good is Behold? Well, I’m pretty turned off to Consolidated as a company since I found out their decks are made from the same wood, glue, and concave as those World Industries Walmart boards (They’re made in the same factories in China. The only difference is the graphics and perhaps dimensions). My mood was also really brought down in the video when they killed a rodent with a pellet gun. It’s just not that fun to watch humans hurting animals, which doesn’t fit in with how fun the rest of this video is. So in spite of those two things, I’m still compelled to say this is an excellent, must-see video. That’s how good it is.

Links:

Consolidated Skateboards
San Angelo teens arrested for beating a dog with a skateboard and video taping it.