I have been skateboarding for almost my whole life, and I have so much respect for the sport. I also see it as an art form that is always pushing the boundaries! When I saw the video TENGU: God of Mischief Roof Skating directed by Colin Reed, my jaw dropped! I lived in NYC for many years and never thought about skating a roof top.
This video is so awesome you can’t just watch one time and it should be said that no one was hurt while creating TENGU: God of Mischief Roof Skating…Here is some of what Colin had to say about his work.
And then, it’s hard to find spots. You can’t just go walking around. We’d scout for potential spots by riding the elevated trains all around the city. But it mostly involved a lot of trial and error, and what you might call illegal activity. We had a few tactics: we’d wait for people to walk into buildings, just catch the door before it closed (or hit all the buzzers and hope someone got annoyed and buzzed us in) and run up to see if we could get on the roof from the stairwell. We’d jump and grab the bottoms of fire escape and climb up. And we’d ask everyone if they had roofs we could get onto to check out. Many attempts at getting onto a roof or finding a spot were fruitless, but just as often we’d finding something unique and exciting.
Finally, of course, it was dangerous. There were some close calls where people got terrifyingly close to falling, and a few boards were lost off the edge. (But we always made sure no one was walking on the sidewalk or street below before we tried a trick.) And we had to run away or hide form the police a few times, too.
available on DVD HERE!
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