Skateboarding
Skateboarding
Rodney Mullen Is Back With a 'Revolution'
Skateboarding's most influential icon is set to release his first video part in over a decade.
The godfather of modern skateboarding just finished editing his first full video in over a decade. The project wrapped recently in New York, where Rodney Mullen spent the past two months working with photographer Steven Sebring. Four-minutes long, the edit demonstrates a combination of the legendary pros early freestyle roots with his present-day "stanceless" approach. Tricks range from 540 fingerflip variations and pogo-flips, to a kickflip-underflip and a switch nollie laserflip that will redefine what we think of as "switch."
"It’s almost done and I could not be happier," Mullen told RedBull.com the day before he flew home to Los Angeles. "But I don’t want to say much more."
Widely considered one of the best and most influential skateboarders in the world, back in the day Mullen pioneered most of the sport’s fundamentals, including the flat-ground Ollie, the kickflip and the 360 flip.
The new video was shot in "4-D" by Sebring, an award-winning photographer, filmmaker and creator of what he calls the "revolution system," a silver, 24-foot igloo-looking dome that is best described as "a camera you go inside of." That is, the subject (Mullen) stands in the center of the dome and is shot via 100 surrounding cameras from every imaginable angle. The captured data can be presented via photographic stills, virtual reality, interactive studies, 3-D-printed sculptures, or, in this case, a motion picture. The result is a gorgeously seamless stream of maneuvers, a piece of unique media that appropriately matches Mullen’s unparalleled level of technical ability.
Mullen started filming in Sebring’s Manhattan studio in 2014, and late last month was finally wrapping things up. Mullen, Sebring and the editor Daniel Olshansky sat in webbed chairs at a wide polished desk. On the desk were two big monitors, a pair of pulsating white speakers, and everyone’s respective iPhones. Mullen sat locked in on what appeared on screen, wearing a worn George Harrison T-shirt.
The result is a gorgeously seamless stream of maneuvers, a piece of unique media that appropriately matches Mullen’s unparalleled level of technical ability.
One monitor, open to an editing program, was full of smaller windows of different colored lists and graphs, while what looked like an EKG bounced to the music at the bottom of the display. The other monitor was open to the video, to a ghostly, frozen frame of Mullen in a truck stand, an early '80s freestyle trick of his invention. Filming and sequencing the tricks were done, and the three were working out final details before the video was cleaned-up in post-production.
"Here? Like this?" asked the editor, clicking and dragging across the screen.
They were parsing a scene transition, the few frames between the end of one maneuver and beginning of the next. Mullen leaned forward and his hair brushed his shoulders.
"Hmm," he said. "Mmm," he sighed. "Yup. Right there."
"OK," said the editor. He clicked the mouse to play the whole sequence. Watching, Mullen leaned back, then suddenly jumped up and whacked the side of the desk.
Mullen whistled, quickly limping over to the tall window, pushing away, then sitting down again. "That’s great. That’s it. Yes. Yes."
Mullen’s last full video part premiered in Almost’s 2004 edit “Almost: Round Three,” with team members Daweon Song, Chris Haslam and a 13-year-old wunderkind named Ryan Sheckler. Around this time, Mullen’s right leg began seizing up. Doctors said it was scar tissue and the inevitable fusing of the bones resulting from decades of asymmetrical skateboarding — riding with his left leg forward and his right leg back. He eventually removed the tissue himself, an incredible story he tells in his highly viewed TED talk.
Watch: Rodney Mullen's TED Talk
All the while he kept skating, determined to erase the stance that caused the injury. As his stanceless approach improved, Mullen found he could land tricks he’d long deemed impossible. On May 10, 2008, he landed a goofy nollie laserflip, inscribing the date on his board next to the words "MADE IT."
Since Round 3, he’s released a minimal amount of footage: two five-second clips, a 90-second video and in 2014 a short promo for “Gracias LA,” for his musician friend Ben Harper, who also scored the part. Through the years of recovery and even beyond it, few have even seen him skate, even privately, until now.
Sebring said the post-production on the video wraps this week. From there, the footage will go to LA, where musician and longtime skater Dhani Harrison (George Harrison’s son) will write the score in collaboration with Mullen. For many devoted skateboarders, one of the most anticipated video parts in the history of skateboarding is scheduled for a July 11 premiere on Vogue.com.
