Where are you from, and how did you begin to be be skateboarding cameraman?
I'm from the Czech Republic, Prague, capital of beer. I first started in '97, filming my first video called Black Rabbit, featuring a small Petr Horvat...
I was skating, injured myself and was out for a while, so I wanted to do something round skatebording...
What material did you use for filming? editing?
I used my 3cdd Panasonic camera, and sometimes its cinelook mode, basicaly just dv format and (Adobe) Premiere for the edit. I'm using a PC...
But in the video there is a lot of different footage from variaty of filmers, so basicaly a lot of different camera brands were used...
You are taking pictures as well. What does photography bring to your filming?
Its good! I realised how the composition should work much more when I started shooting photos...
How did this CREME project come about? Did you get the occasion to film around Europe?
Luke van Unen from CREME, after talking to Tomas Vintr with whom I've been filming a lot, asked me if I could put together this video and go on tour
with them to film. He's seen my videos and loves Conecho Negro 2 (black rabbit 2), so we agreed and started working. Luke is a great fella to work with,
a motivating guy, so we worked on a concept and made it happen. He did a lot work on it too.
I travel a lot in general, with Czech brands all over the Europe, so traveling is one of the best things about this job.
Any anecdotes or stories during the filming?
Filming with Rodney is always funny! Stealing a windsurf sail from a beach and using it on his skateboard... and afterwards running away from
the German owner on Mallorca was sick!!!...
What is you next video project? Are you only focus on skateboarding or do you also do some personal project?
My next videos are Black Rabbit 3, it's what I'm working on for 2 years now, a small tour video for CREME, soon the next Trailer Trash, Czech dc
tour in Barcelona for the DC king of Barcelona, just came back from there...
Besides skate videos I sometimes work some commercial stuff. I did a few videos for Vodafone Czech, and some for Czech music tv, and other stuff...
Filming Brian Adams for Tereza Maxova foundation was funny thing to do.
Any advice to tell to the youngens who want to start this passion?
Yeah, you can do a good video with the cheap stuff too!, it's more about the creativity and skills, so dont be afraid...
And I think that skateboarding is getting too much stress on some spots - it feels like competition even when you just skate flat tricks for fun...
I hope this will be over soon and people will chill more...
Have fun!
Cau.
David Chvatal
(Check out the promo video
here)