Held in an arena in Portland, Oregon, in 1987, this video of AFA Freestyle Masters was the first video I ever directed. Getting the job of producing this video is another thing that pretty much changed the course of my life in the BMX world, though I didn't realize it until months later. Unreel Productions editor Dave Alvarez and founder Don Hoffman shepherded me through the video production process, because I didn't have a clue what I was doing. I haven't seen this video since about 1988, I just stumbled on it on YouTube.
The riders in the intro are: Ron Wilkerson, unknown, Darren Pelio (?), Mike Loveridge, Mike Perkins, Kenneth Evans, Jason Parkes, Rick Allison, Dave Vanderspek (with skateboard), Dave Nourie, Martin Aparijo, and R.L. Osborn (not counting the mugshots of riders watching).
This video has all of the pro flatland runs, start to finish, with no cuts. Basically, it was cheaper to do it that way, to not edit the runs. Plus , we didn't pay for the edit time at Unreel, ($150 to $200 an hour or so then), we couldn't take forever editing this. I think we edited this video in two eight hour edit sessions. The pro riders, in order, are: Robert Peterson, Josh White, Dave Nourie, Rick Allison, Ron Wilkerson, Martin Aparijo, Fred Blood, Dave Vanderspek, Chris Lashua, Pete Agustin, and R.L. Osborn.
I was at the Oregon contest, mostly as an AFA roadie, but also as a rider. What I remember most from this contest was that Oregon 1987 was the contest when scuffing took off, thanks to the backyard, the backwards on the back wheel scuffing trick, which came from out of the San Francisco Golden Gate Park scene. I think Tim Treacy invented the trick, but I can't remember for sure.
But that was the trick of the contest, everyone was trying to learn it in the jam circles around the contest site, and at the hotel at night. The first scuffing trick I know of was one Oleg Konings did, as far back as 1984, standing on one peg, on the side of the bike. Of the pros at this contest, only Robert Peterson did a single scuffing trick. But that one trick, the backyard, caught fire at this contest, and began to change freestyle forever. It started with a whole range of one wheel, forward rolling tricks, while scuffing. Soon after, came the popularity of the hang 5, the whiplash, Kevin Jones and the locomotive, and the trend towards one wheel scuffing, and later gliding tricks. So while there's not a single backyard in this video, that was the big bit of progression that happened at this contest.
Another phase of riding changes was the trend toward linking tricks together that was gaining popularity in early 1987. R.L. Osborn was one of the first pros to begin linking tricks. He also did the backwards grip ride at the end, a mind blowing trick for that time period. As far as the linking went, several other pros were still in the: do a trick, ride a bit, do a trick, ride a bit, format. That had been the standard until then. In the intro, you can see an amateur rider, who I think is Darren Pelio (SE uniform) linking several tricks, and also Kenneth Evans (white uniform) also linking several tricks. That was another rising trend at the time. Soon they merged, with the scuffing and gliding, one wheel rolling tricks being linked together. As far as riding goes, those were two big trends at this contest.
Another thing at this contest was the ever revolutionary Dave Vanderspek, always ahead of his time, using a skateboard in his run. You can hear the crowd cheering, we all loved it. The judges, unfortunately for Dave, didn't like it, and Dave placed at the back of the pro pack, getting 7th or 8th I think. After we got back to California, Dave called the AFA, trying to figure out why he didn't place higher. Since I had ridden up in the Bay area for a bit, I wound up on the phone with Dave for maybe 20 minutes, trying to explain that I didn't know why the judges didn't like the skateboard addition to his routine. He got more people cheering than anyone, but judging was based mostly on doing the most popular tricks well, not touching down a foot, and a little bit of originality. For what it's worth, Dave's crazy bike/skate run later got featured in the Vision Street Wear video Mondo Vision, which sold about 40,000 copies, and no other BMX flatlander got featured. In the long run, Dave Vanderspek got far more coverage from this contest than anyone else.
The one other thing I remember from this contest was that the parking lot had a couple of levels. There was a big, wide ramp up to the higher level, kind of like a flyout jump, but for cars. As the main AFA roadie guy, I got sent out in the rental minivan to run errands, several times, on the day or two before the contest. The parking plot was completely empty then. Every time I hit that ramp a bit faster, and finally hit it at 50 or 55 mph. I'm pretty sure I got the minivan completely off the ground. So that was memorable for me. I may have just topped out the shocks, but I think I got a couple inches of air. If so, that's the only time I ever jumped a motorized vehicle.
It would be hard for today's riders to even imagine the BMX freestyle world of the 1980's. No cell phones, no Instagram, no social media at all, no internet, and only a handful of people owned their own video cameras, mostly big VHS ones, personal computers were just becoming a thing, the revolutionary Apple Macinstosh had only been out for 3 years. One of them might have 6 KILObytes of memory, if you had an external hard drive. A kilobyte is 1/1,000th of a megabyte. None of those desktops could edit video, they were for word processing and simple games, the "desktop publishing" revolution was just getting going. Back in those days, when we went riding, we just went riding. Nobody was shooting video or photos, unless you were doing a magazine photo shoot. We didn't document our sessions, we just rode.
In 1987, when I produced this video for the American Freestyle Association (AFA), only BMX companies made videos, riders didn't make their own videos. The only rider-made freestyle videos I'd seen before this were some 5 minute clips edited by New York rider Carl Marquardt, Eddie Roman's school project, the 15 or so minute version of Aggro Riding and Kung Fu Fighting, and the Gork Video, which BMX Action editor Gork made, all from 1986.
In the mid 1980's, professional video cameras cost $20,000 to $50,000, and the equipment. To make a video of anything back then, from an industrial training or promotion video, to a local TV commercial, to a BMX freestyle video, you had to hire a professional video production company. One early BMX video cost $40,000 to shoot, edit, and produce. Then you had to get the VHS tapes made, about $3 each, and design and get boxes printed, and then ship out the orders. The BMX Action Trick Team/magazine video, Rippin', came out in 1985, and was produced in a full documentary style. That's what the video crew knew how to do, make short documentaries. The BMX Plus! video, Freestyle's Raddest Tricks, also came out in 1985, in more of a live TV show style. That was the first video I bought, and I watched it 7 times the day it came in the mail, twice while balancing on my bike in the living room through the whole video. Seriously. GT Bikes made GT-V in 1986, and only a handful more videos came out before 1990.
At that point, the first skateboard videos, , and Powell-Peralta's The Bones Brigade Video Show (1984), and Vision's SkateVisions (1985), had only come out a couple years earlier. The whole concept of making skateboard and BMX videos was just being invented. The natural idea was to make a "little movie on video," with some bad acting, and often some goofy comedy bits. There was no standard way to make a BMX or skateboard video yet. So different people were trying different ideas for several years.
The cheaper way to make videos was Wayne's World style, by producing TV shows for a local PBS channel, where you got to borrow cameras and editing equipment. You had to produce a TV show to air, but you could also work on your own ideas while you had the borrowed equipment, or make a home video out of your public access show. That's what Don Hoffman, who later formed Unreel Productions with Vision Skateboards did. If you're an Old School BMX freestyler and don't known who Don Hoffman is, you should. Don made videos like this, which also aired as local TV shows on PBS, before making videos for Vision Skateboards, Sims Snowboards, and Vision Street Wear. He started BMX and skateboard videos in about 1984, before the other companies got into the game. In this short clip, you can see Don Hoffman on the left, Bob Morales, who started the AFA, in the middle, and, of course, Eddie Fiola on the right. Don was actually the biggest pioneer of BMX videos, having made 7 or 8 PBS shows/videos by 1987, of most of the ASPA/AFA skatepark contests.
Bob Morales hired me to be the editor of the AFA newsletter, American Freestyle, in late January of 1987, about a month after I got laid off from FREESTYLIN' magazine because I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy. For the ballin' amount of $5 an hour (CA minimum wages was $3.35/hour then), I became the editor/photographer of the monthly newsletter that went out to about 3,000 AFA members. But the AFA was a tiny business, consisting of just Bob, his sister Riki, and me, when I started. So I also answered phones, put heat transfers on T-shirts, helped fold and address all 3,000 newsletters, was a roadie at AFA contests, and did anything else that came up. I went from a few months of sitting in an office without much to do most of the time, to doing all kinds of different stuff every day.
About three months into working there, Bob walked into the back office where I worked and asked if I wanted to make a TV commercial for the Austin, Texas contest. He learned he could buy local spots on MTV for $25 each. Since I had absolutely no idea how to make a TV commercial, and since I worked for Bob and new he expected me to do it anyway, I said, "Sure." There was a huge, "We'll figure it out as we go" attitude at the AFA, DIY all the way when it came to anything new. "How do I make a TV commercial," I asked. "Call Don Hoffman at Unreel, he'll tell you," Bob replied. I had no idea that 30 second conversation in 1987 would lead to me producing 15 BMX, skateboard, and snowboard videos, working on about 10 Vision videos, and working on over 300 TV episodes of about a dozen different shows. But that's how life works, sometimes little conversations or incidents lead to a whole new direction in life.
For the 1987 AFA Freestyle Masters national series, Vision Street Wear clothes were a sponsor. Part of the deal was that they would send a cameraman to each of the six contests around the country. For the Oregon contest, that was an Unreel producer/cameraman named Gary Langenheim. He had worked mostly on surf TV shows before Unreel. The deal with the video footage was that both AFA and Vision/Unreel could use any of the footage for commercials, home videos, or whatever. So I called up Don Hoffman at Unreel, and he said to come over the next day, and they'd give me VHS copies of all the raw footage, window dubs, as they were called. There was a box in the picture when the videos played, a "window" with rolling numbers. That told me the time code. I would watch the videos at home, and write down the time code of each shot I wanted, then make a list of all those shots. When I did that, they told me to come back, and they'd set up a session to come in an edit the video.
Luckily I rented a room from a guy who was an ex-video editor himself, so we had a cool TV and VCR set-up, which made it easier. So I spent a few nights and part of a weekend watching all the footage, maybe three hours of total footage. But when you pause the video to write down the numbers, it takes much longer to "log" the footage. I went through all the video, and wrote down everything interesting, the best riding, and also face shots and crowd shots (cutaway shots), and the start and end times of each pro rider's run. After about a week, I had that done, and called up Unreel again.
They scheduled an edit session with their video editor, a techno wizard in the form of a 25-year-old guy named Dave Alvarez, with long, straight brown hair, Vision board shorts, and a different tie dyed shirt every day. They led me back up to Unreel's $500,000 Betacam edit bay (similar to this), which was capable of editing broadcast TV shows. The room was in the back, on the second floor, of the Unreel offices. It had about a dozen monitors (TV screens), and two banks of VTR's (pro caliber VCR's), which cost $5,000 to $20,000 each. There were two really nice office chairs on a linoleum floor, then a bar type thing behind them. You could step up, and there was a big, black leather chair and couch, so other people could watch an editing session. That room blew my mind, and intimidated me. I felt like I was on the bridge in Star Trek in there, except the lighting was always low.
For the intro, Dave picked some music, which I think he and another guy named Dave had created and recorded themselves. It was either that or canned music, which in the 1980's was usually kind of bland, electronic music, that video producers could buy, and use in videos as much as they wanted. You could get seriously sued for using popular, copyrighted music in those pre-internet, pre sharing economy days. Canned music was used in a wide variety of home videos in those days. I remember hearing some of the same music used in a BMX Plus! video also used in multiple porno videos.
Anyhow, Dave introduced me to what he called "fancy news editing." By laying down the music track first, he could then play me a short piece of the music, and say, "I need a shot that looks like this sounds." I'd go through my log sheets, to a shot that was about the right length, that I thought would fit the music, and tell him the time code. Dave would pull up that shot, and fit it over the music, so that the beginning of the shot, any movements, and the end of the shot, would all fall right on beats of the music. This takes much longer to do well, than just chopping shots together, but it flows and watches much better. That was one of the first video editing tricks Dave Alvarez taught me.
It was really fun sitting there and directing a video, shot by shot, in that crazy edit bay room. Dave and I got along well, and only argued about the length of the shots. As a video editor, he wanted to "keep the video tight," and get out of a shot as quick as possible. That makes the video flow better, and not seem to lag. But as a BMX freestyler myself, I wanted to extend shots, to show that the rider actually landed the trick and rode away. We argued quite a bit at first about this, and wound up splitting the difference much of the time. He'd make shots a tad longer than he normally would have, but they would show the landing of the tricks, not just a really quick shot mid trick. Actions sports videos actually did change how videos and TV shows got made later on, bringing our views as riders and skaters into account. Things like shooting with a fisheye lens close-up, to get the full body in a shot, and riding skateboards or rollerblades with a camera, next to someone to get shot, and many other things became more popular from all their use in 1990's BMX, skateboard, snowboard, and other action sports videos.
In the edit bay, Dave and I spent most of the first day just editing the intro of the video, and the second day we edited the rest of the video, because they were much simpler, cuts edits, and because the pros flatland runs were 4 minutes long, with no editing during the runs. This made this a pretty simple video to edit, from Dave's standpoint. There were minimal effects, and long segments, so the editing went quick. "Effects are an excuse for bad editing most of the time" Dave taught me.
When we got to the credits, I was actually surprised when Dave told me I was the "director." In my head, a director was someone like Steven Spielberg or George Lucas, spending months or years making big, complicated movies. But Dave explained how it worked in home videos. The executive producer was one or more people who paid for the thing, or ran the company that paid for it. They often had nothing to do with actually making the video. The producer was the person in charge of actually making sure the whole project got done. The director was the person who actually picked what shots went in the video, and in what order. The editor was the person actually at the controls, editing the video clips together. So, for the whopping sum of $250 that I got paid to be the producer and director of this AFA video, I was both producer and director. It sounded way more prestigious than it was, but I was cool with that.
After we finished editing the show, Unreel made a duplication master, that's a high quality copy of the original master tape, so they didn't wear out the master tape every time they made copies from it. Everything was edited on actual videotape then, digital video editing was still a few years away for the high end TV shows, and about a decade away for prosumer video. Since the AFA only sold a few dozen of this video, and the ones that followed, Unreel made us a few copies when we needed them. I went over Costa Mesa and picked them up, then we'd ship them out at the AFA ourselves.
Home videos generally cost about $30 each then, so even after paying me and paying Unreel for the video copies, there was a good profit in it for the AFA. Selling 40 to 60 of each of these contest videos, made the AFA maybe $500 to $1,000 bucks on each video. That's not huge by video standards. But money was always tight at the AFA. Bob Morales didn't take much of a salary from the AFA, if any at all. He actually made his living then mostly from creating ads for several BMX companies, and his other business ventures, like Mor Distributing, and Auburn Bikes.
So that's how I wound up being one of the first actual riders to produce and direct a few of the early, if not that popular, BMX freestyle videos. I ended up doing six videos for the AFA in 1987, one each for flatland and ramps, from the Oregon, Texas, and Ohio contests. A couple of the clips from those videos made it into Mark Eaton's Joe Kid on a Stingray BMX documentary, many years later, in 2005. The shot at 2:18 of Matt Hoffman in that trailer, and the following shot of Kevin Jones doing a locomotive, were from the AFA videos I did. I had nothing to do with Joe Kid on a Stingray, but it was cool to see a couple of those AFA videos survived for over15 years, and that Mark used a couple shots from them.
I mentioned at the top of this post that Dave Alvarez was a techno wizard of an editor. I'm not just saying that because he made this video, and the next 5 I did for the AFA, look really professional. Local TV new personality, Chuck Henry, ended up stealing Dave from Unreel Productions in late 1989, I think. Dave went to work at KABC, editing Chuck's news magazine show, Eye on L.A.*. In his first year of editing in Hollywood, Dave Alvarez won an emmy for his work, so he really was, and is, a top notch video editor.
So that's the story of the first video I produced and directed. The Oregon Pro Flatland video led to those five other videos for the AFA, and then to getting hired to work at Unreel Productions in December of 1987. Beginning as a guy dubbing videos for different people at Vision and Unreel, I wound up becoming an decent cameraman, and working on a whole lot more home videos and TV shows, over the next 8 years. That 30 second conversation with Bob Morales, agreeing to make a low budget TV commercial, changed the direction of my working life.
As of the late summer of 2023, I'm doing most of my new writing on Substack, a platform designed for writers. Check it out:
*This isn't one of the shows Dave edited, just one episode available on YouTube. But there is some skateboarding in the end of that episode linked.
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