Kirk Dianda & Rob Dyrdek:
Takin’ It to the Streets
“There’s this great skateboarding spot in East L.A.,” says renowned skater Rob Dyrdek. “Fifty kids will be skating there. Then the cops show up. Half the kids scatter around the corner — and the other half run to their Porsches!”
What the cops don’t realize, says Dyrdek, is that half those scruffy skaters are pros earning huge endorsements. “They dress the same as the neighborhood kids. They skate in the same illegal spots. The difference is, when the pros get kicked out, they drive their sports cars back to their million-dollar homes.”
Skateboarding has moved to the streets for good. The sport that started in swimming pools in the 1970s and went to the vertical ramps of skate parks in the 1980s took its action to the urban environment in the 1990s — and that’s still where the hot tricks fly.
Kirk Dianda’s digital timelapse rig — a Canon EOS Rebel hooked up to his PowerBook G4.
“Our sport is so absolutely misrepresented,” groans Dyrdek. “As a pro, the first thing people ask me is, ‘Do you know Tony Hawk?’ and ‘Have you skated in the X Games?’ And the answer to both is yes. But they have nothing to do with our sport today.”
Skatable Architecture
Of the 13 million skateboarders in the U.S., very few emulate the X Games. The vast majority, says Dyrdek, take it to the streets. “They ride in the urban plazas and schoolyards and business parks. That’s where the sport was refined, and now it’s the standard by which the entire sport is judged.
“Pick up any skateboarding magazine — the photos are of guerilla-style skating on private property. My sponsors don’t care if I go to the X Games. What they care about for their ads are the tricks I do in the streets.”
Hot young skaters hoping for endorsement deals strut their stuff at favorite urban venues. “That’s how you get noticed, to turn pro in this sport,” says Dyrdek. Once pro, they stay on the streets. “We don’t go to some training facility because there is no such thing. I’m 31 and everyday I run from the cops, just like the kids do.”
Radical New Design
The world of street skating is fraught with problems. As vandalism-leery municipalities skateproof urban venues, it’s increasingly difficult for kids to practice their moves. “As the years go by, they come down harder and harder on us,” says Dyrdek.
And he feels that cities have invested in the wrong solution. “They figured out that they had to build places for kids to skate,” says Dyrdek. “But they think we want the X Games. So they spend all this money, and kids don’t go. Skateboarding has evolved into a pure urban phenomenon, but skate park design did not evolve with it.”
For a decade Dyrdek has dreamed of the solution: a radical new design modeled on the urban environment. And in June 2005 his vision came to life with the opening of the Skate Plaza in his hometown of Kettering, Ohio.
“It’s not a skate park,” insists Dyrdek, “but a park that people can skate in.” A beautifully landscaped public space built with funds from Dyrdek, his sponsor, DC Shoes, and the city, it’s open to strollers, picnickers, concert-goers. “The ultimate goal is to coexist with people,” says Dyrdek.
A Flick on the Fly
Now, the story of his project has been documented in “Groundbreaking: The Story of the First Skate Plaza,” a 30-minute educational and fund-raising DVD created by DC Shoes filmmaker Kirk Dianda with the help of Final Cut Studio and his mobile PowerBook-based editing suite.
Dianda relies on his Macs wherever he goes. “Everyone in my department has a Power Mac G5 and a PowerBook for travel,” he says. “We have fully functioning Final Cut Pro edit bays in the office and we use our laptops to capture and edit footage on the fly.
“We wouldn’t have been able to do this project without our Apple tools,” adds Dianda. “First, because it was all digital, where Apple has become the standard. You don’t think twice about it: it’s the easiest, the best, and what we have always done.”
