“If I search among my memories for those whose taste is lasting, if I write the balance sheet of the moments that truly counted, I surely find those that no fortune could have bought me.”
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The video above is from the Salinas Longboard Festival of 2008. It is anchored in our memories and in Spanish longboarding history as a very special year; a year of changes, of evolution towards new horizons. It was our coming of age, our last summer of innocence. Suddenly surfers like Alex Knost and Mitch Abshere, who were invited by Vans that year, opened our eyes. They surfed our waves like we could do only in our dreams.
It was also the year where our longboarding culture, the Spanish Longboardism, cutbacked into the avalanche of social media, and things changed forever. Our small and familiar community grew and expanded.
With this video, I wanted to get back a feeling that is tattooed on our hearts, that memory of times when everything seemed to be easier, of times that where more naïve, easier, simpler… 2008 was a good year. It was a good festival, and this is how I remember it.
The video is a curious example of slow cooked ingredients: the footage used for the clip comes from the longer edit I made that year. Shot on mini DV (it was the pre-hd era for me) encoded to some obscure and forgotten .AVI codec, and stored on a 500Mb hard drive, then recovered, deinterlaced, and reencoded to a workable codec… it is the equivalent of a cured and aged wine.
