Mini Video 38 – Entertain Me from Josh Ellis on Vimeo.

Originally posted May 10, 2007.

This is a biggie!  I think this is when we finally hit our stride, and for lack of a better term, the “classic” wiskate video was born.  I’d rank this one in the top 5.  Kind of silly, kind of serious, great cast of characters, and the song rips!  A recipe for success.

Originally posted March 29, 2007.

My grand idea is already falling apart. I thought it’d be easy to to look through the archives and find a bunch of great photos.  Then the “awesome” anecdotes that go with them would come rolling in like the waves on the sea. Alas, the reality isn’t so nice. Back then we didn’t wield cameras all day long like we do now. Or perhaps not much happened between the last one (end of February), and this one (end of March). I’m coming up dry.

This video does feature my favorite manual trick I ever filmed.  Danny did a great one.  I’ll usually straight up refuse to even try to film a manual.  Not my cup of tea.  Solid ending celebration too.  Russ reused the gorking out for his weirdo video segments he had on Fuel TV.  Remember Fuel TV?  Wow, what a time to be alive.

I hope the next one goes better.  Until then, heres several photos without any skateboarding whatsoever.  Actually, the site used to rarely feature skateboarding, so maybe it is perfect.

I do have these photos of digging out the polejam from the snow. Freeing it from it’s icy prison. Allowing us to express ourselves freely on our skateboards. But no photos of us skating it.

Originally posted February 28, 2007. Get it, Valentines Day, Love?? So clever.

I’m having a hard time even thinking of anything to say about this one. It seems several of the clips came from the same sessions as when we were filming Beez 3, so it has a little bit of a beezy edge to it. I think some of the clips do even appear in Beez. It’s been awhile since I watched. I’m old, I can’t remember anything.

I do believe that this vid, and the following one were kind of just a mish mash of things I had filmed in the previous months.  I had no project in mind to use them for, so I just kind of threw them together with this stupid song.  None of this stuff was intentionally filmed to be used as a so called “mini video”.

Here are some period appropriate images from this moment in time:

This was indeed the time period of the Beezing. This mini video was made just as we were filming the outro to Beez 3. I have an incredible amount of photos from “behind the scenes” from the infamous Deer Wizard/Johnny 5 scene. Some favorites are below.

Mini Video 16 from Josh Ellis on Vimeo.

For true completionists only!

On the same Hi8 tape that I found “Gone Wild”, I also found this piece of ancient wiskate history, thought lost forever.  This was a weekend trip to Minneapolis in Y2K (we survived) where we skated such illustrious spots as the two stair in front of my girlfriends’ house and the old 3rd Lair.  Surprise guest appearance by Chad Benson doing a nollie hardflip stinkbug fakie.  I’m not sure how he came into play, but I’m glad he did.  Also starring myself, Mark H, and Boban.

This was the first mini video to use music.  Quite an evolutionary step.

This is the first(ish) complete edit I ever made. I thought it was lost forever for a long time. Earlier this year when the ‘rona hit I spent a bunch of time capturing some old Hi-8 tapes, and by miracle(?) this video was on one of the tapes.  This is essentially unseen, because in those olden days there was no way to easily share a video of this length via the internet.  It was functionally impossible.  The reason I thought the video was lost was because it was transferred onto some unlabelled VHS tape, which has since gone missing.

The whole thing is completely embarrassing.  I suppose something you made twenty years ago should be.   I did choose the song as a joke, I remember that much.  It is sort of a compilation of a lot of the footage from the earlier Mini Videos that were posted in the early days of the site.  These actually are lost for good.  Let’s say contains footage from Mini Videos 1-15.  Plus additional content.

This was edited using a program called Ulead Video Studio Pro. It was an unsuccessful competitor to Adobe Premiere. The only reason I used Video Studio was because it came with the video capture card one needed back then to get video clips onto your computer. Yeah, you needed special hardware to get video onto the hard drive. Uphill both ways in the snow, etc etc.

Congrats if you watch the whole thing, it’s pretty painful. Featuring the antics of Ben Vance, Pat Gaynor, Mark Heiderich, Greg Lutzka, Boban, Pat Forster, Jon Bunch, and Nate Heilberger.

Here are some period appropriate photos that exist in the same timeline as the above video: