DC Shoes

Ciaran O Connor

What I did:

Got to flex the muscles with the Canon 550D and a tidy f1.4 50mm prime for all sorts of shallow depth of field splendor, along with a spot of Cinema 4D & AE to beef up the logotypes and titles used by DC in their Skateboarding Is Forever campaign and video release earlier in the year. I’ve skated several pairs of Trues and Matches over the past year or so, great shoes altogether, particularly the Match. Durable, don’t wear down too fast, skate well, look cool.

How I did it:

Clamped a DSLR onto the front of my filming board, which still shook like a mad yoke. Probably would’ve looked a little smoother had I owned a GoPro at the time, but didn’t, so couldn’t. Then shot the men skating, interviewed them about the shoes, all the time trying to make them at ease in front of the camera by talking and joking with them, which I think worked for the most part.
Back then, Premiere Pro couldn’t really handle DSLR footage, so I made a shitton of low-res, half-sized proxies, edited the projects with them and when it was locked down, perfect and awesome, did a batch replacement with the original full res footage to export back to AE for grading. Proper recently old-school way of doing an offline -> online edit.

I’ve been skating since ’89 and filming skating from ’99 or so, shooting some of the UK’s & Europe’s best up, down & all over the country for various board companies, magazines, shops and independent releases. Doing something like this with DC was a natural extension of working on the 2009 Big Push (below) and the Motive video, which also featured the 3 gents here, so it was a pleasure to do something a little different to the “standard skate video”, which is often just a montage of insane tricks shot with fisheye with a tune over the top. Equally, knowing them well enough to encourage somewhat convincing performances, for want of a better word, was a big help.

Sorted.