Chris Underwood of Thunderwood Skate, the man who brought you last year’s excellent Bru-Two, a film showcasing East Coast skaters and skate spots in glorious HD, is working on a followup, and it’s shaping up to be just as awesome as his last film. While Bru-Two was an all-HD video production, Underwood and his crew are taking a different approach with their new film, shooting the whole thing on Super 8mm film stock–which is much harder to get these days than it once was. Due to rising film and transfer costs, Underwood is returning to Kickstarter to raise the funds necessary to finish his new project, and you can help!
Chris Underwood of Thunderwood Skate, the man who brought you last year’s excellent Bru-Two, a film showcasing East Coast skaters and skate spots in glorious HD, is working on a followup, and it’s shaping up to be just as awesome as his last film. While Bru-Two was an all-HD video production, Underwood and his crew are taking a different approach with their new film, shooting the whole thing on Super 8mm film stock–which is much harder to get these days than it once was. Due to rising film and transfer costs, Underwood is returning to Kickstarter to raise the funds necessary to finish his new project, and you can help!
Street View, the latest film he’s working on, is not just a documentary of skate culture. The film’s title is based on the use of Google Maps’ Street View program by skateboarders when scouting out a new city, as a tool with which to find the most likely landscapes and urban architecture on which to do skate tricks. After showing his previous film to viewers who didn’t make up the typical skate-film audience, he found that many of them were just as curious about the architecture that provides the setting for a lot of street skating as they were in the skating itself. Therefore, Underwood shifted his focus a bit, to make his new film focus on the interaction between skateboarding and urban architecture.
The addition of more documentary and travelogue elements to a film focused on skate footage explains the shift in tone conveyed by the shift in media–from HD to Super 8mm stock. Underwood filmed a great deal of Super 8 footage at the same time that he was filming HD footage for Bru-Two, and hopes to raise funding for more film stock through this Kickstarter project. He also needs to accumulate enough funds necessary to pay for the time-consuming process of hand-transferring the Super 8 film using a flatbed scanner.
If you contribute to Thunderwood’s Kickstarter campaign, there are a great deal of rewards available, many of which are related to Bru-Two. Copies of that film, on digital, DVD, and Blu-Ray formats are available, as is a deluxe, full-color hardcover book, produced during the filming of Bru-Two and consisting of still photos shot by Underwood during Bru-Two‘s filming. The book is available with any pledge of $75 or more, and digital downloads of Street View, once it’s complete, are available to anyone pledging $25 or more. Due to high production costs, Thunderwood has made the decision to release Street View solely in digital formats, in order to avoid the additional cost of having to produce physical units for sale. However, this just means that contributors will receive their digital copies of the film that much more quickly once it has been completed.
With a deadline of next Wednesday, March 6, at 7 PM, Thunderwood’s Kickstarter campaign for Street View has raised less than half of its $2000 goal. Anyone interested in urban architecture, independent film, or East Coast skate culture should understand exactly why a project like this needs to be supported so that it can come to fruition. Help Thunderwood reach their goal and bring Street View to the world by contributing to their Kickstarter campaign. On top of everything else, you’ll be credited in the film, and that’s awesome, right?
