[ JAPANESE / ENGLISH ]

Photos courtesy of ASICS Skateboarding
Special thanks_ASICS

VHSMAG (V)：　How did A Guided Tour come to be? What sparked the concept?

Jacob Harris (J)：　I can’t really remember how the idea came about but the team is pretty diverse and so are the locations we filmed in, so I think we naturally felt that there needed to be some framing device to make it feel coherent. Usually things like that are really artificial, so why not make it extra artificial? It feels like ‘wellness’ and ideas swirling around that word have become a strange sinkhole for a lot of cultural flashpoints in ways that are surprising and hard to understand why and where they overlap. It's an interesting time where there are a lot of people that feel that they’re in some kind of urgent psychic predicament and a lot of people are happy to try and sell them some remedy and the remedies are often a lot dumber than the original problems. Somewhere in that valley of cultural trash there’s something funny and uncanny I reckon.

V：　How did you balance what the brand was asking for with what you personally wanted to express through the piece?

J：　I don’t know that I wanted to express anything in particular—it really felt like time to make a strong video for ASICS in terms of skating. Naturally I always want to play around visually and I’m given a lot of space to do that with ASICS so it didn’t feel like it’s much of a balancing act to be honest.

V：　Were there any particularly memorable sessions or moments?

J：　Two sessions come to mind especially—when we skated the indoor double stairs all in a row, it was something like 2am and Victor did this incredible line. It’s such a strange echoey and clinical environment made of fake rocks but there’s an eerie silence hanging over the whole place. The unadulterated joy that me and Vic experienced when he landed that was such a pure and rare victory and it just felt especially good because you’re flying through this tiled tunnel totally walled off from the rest of the planet. A very good natural high kind of moment.
　Another session was just seeing Jaakko do his last trick in Okinawa. It was such a shocking thing to witness that it kind of reset everybody’s brains when he did it, which was quite out of the blue too. We were in this beautiful and strange concrete dock with these kids all dressed like greasers or something just causing trouble and it was all so surreal and fun.
　Big shout out also to rowing a boat out to an island in Helsinki where there was a DIY sauna on our last day of the trip. We just drank beers and made a fire and had a wicked time celebrating a great trip—it was light until like 1am at that time of year.

V：　What defines a “good skate video” in your view?

J：　Anything that makes you feel something.

V：　Your work often carries a cinematic or even poetic quality beyond documenting tricks—what elements do you intentionally focus on to achieve that?

J：　Thank you, I don’t know what I focus on. Whatever grabs my attention. I suspect that there are a lot of similar things that grab my attention though—maybe you could call them preoccupations but I’m not sure what they are exactly. I think I’m pretty deeply interested in authenticity, and so within the built environment wherever the complete artificial collides with the natural, and how we fill these spaces as largely spontaneous creatures, tends to catch my eye.

V：　Are there any rules or instincts you always follow when filming skateboarding?

J：　There are habits developed over years I think, which is probably bad—laziness essentially. But you just want to make the thing look good and energetic in the end and this dictates a lot of decisions.

V：　When editing A Guided Tour, what aspects were most important to you?

J：　I feel like there's a real battle for attention at the moment so there’s always this tension between wanting to build atmosphere through visuals / sound whilst not wanting to lose the broad audience. I’m definitely quite self-indulgent compared with some other editors and I’m constantly battling with this tension—so I definitely try to make the skating really work for people who might not be fans of the everything else.

V：　How did you go about selecting music and building the structure?

J：　There’s something organic about it and something confected. You see what footage you have and which clips are speaking to each other, then you try to build some scenery around that and hope it can stand by itself. Music is just a case of you have a feeling of what sort of thing is going to be right and then it’s a bit of what falls into your lap. Then there’s the legal side of music—that restricts choice a lot and causes a lot of headaches.

V：　What did you find interesting or different about working with ASICS as a brand?

J：　They’re really interested in detail. They’re really interested in doing things right according to skateboarding culture. Their archives are amazing and they have such an amazing history to draw on. Drawing on the cultural differences between Japan and the US / Europe can definitely be fertile ground for ideas too.

V：　What impressions or inspiration did you gain from filming the ASICS riders and working with the brand team?

J：　All of the riders are completely different people; from legends like Gino and Brent to young guns like Shay, Akwasi, Evan and the new European additions like Victor And Jaakko. I couldn’t point to anything in particular but being with a diverse group of humans is always a constant lesson in people and what makes them tick.

V：　Are there any filmmakers or films that have influenced you creatively?

J：　Too many to mention. Peter Greenaway.

V：　How do you envision the evolution of the skate video genre going forward? And what do you think your unique role in that future is?

J：　I really have no idea, it seems like it’ll be in the hands of whatever young people respond to and how algorithms are tweaked. Hopefully there’s always space for long form videos, but it seems fairly likely that guys like me will be out of business sooner or later.

V：　Are there any specific visual expressions or concepts you’d like to explore after A Guided Tour?

J：　Nothing specific, maybe just a riff on the wellness ideas I mentioned earlier. I don’t mean to outright critique anything that helps people so hopefully there’s some sincerity that can be taken away from whatever it is—the tone sits somewhere between joke and sincerity but basically it’s just meant to be silly.

Jacob Harris
@jacobelliottharris

A London-based filmmaker celebrated for his distinctive visual language and editing sensibility. With acclaimed works such as Vase and the Atlantic Drift series, Harris has earned recognition for his ability to blur the boundaries between skateboarding and cinematic art. His latest project is ASICS Skateboarding’s A Guided Tour.