Dave Caddo – Pattern Language
This week’s a bit of a Last Of The Mohicans alumni special in terms of our main releases, starting with this brilliant new Dave Caddo section by Matt Schleyer, and leading up to new parts from Ross Norman and Danny Renaud (courtesy of our friends at Politic)! So yeah, get stuck in, then read some of Dave’s insights into what it was like to comb the streets of New York for this project, and why they decided to call it Pattern Language:
‘This video part is about showing a range of spots within NYC (where it’s entirely filmed aside from one clip in Long Island), but also about showing that spots repeat and are similar. Early on while filming the part I got a line at a new black marble plaza in the Bronx. The buildings surrounding the plaza are old and only one or two stories, but it’s a new spot and its black marble is pristine. I thought it would look cool to then also have footage of that similar black marble in midtown, where it’s surrounded by huge glass buildings designed by famous architects. Similarly I got a clip in a playground on a small hump bridge with metal pipes on the side in the Bronx, and then remembered that there’s a bigger version of that same type of bridge in a playground in Brooklyn… It’s kinda cliche these days for an NYC part but I also gathered up a range of cellar door spots.
I always liked when you got a broad sense of the environment from a skate part. I think Rick Oyola did it best in his part in Eastern exposure 3. There’s a whole section of the part that’s different styles of pole jams and the backgrounds all look like they’re in close proximity to each other. You see that Philadelphia is teeming with pole jams. You feel like you could go there and just push around and do flip tricks in the street and then hop up on a curb and do a pole jam block after block. But if you know street skating you know that’s somewhat of an illusion. Rick Oyola was able to create that illusion because he spent a lot of time sussing spots and skating around Philly. He was able to find all these similar styles of skate spots and compile them into one video part. The part is saying something other than look at how good I am at skating. I never thought of making a video part the same way after seeing that part. And then of course I was also influenced by Bobby Puleo who is a master at that same type of craft… They showed you patterns in the architecture. And it’s a language spoken amongst street skaters. I like to speak that language too.’
Thumbnail image by Cole Giordano.
