This video came out in early spring of 1989, and was the 7th BMX freestyle video I directed or edited.
When it came time to put the first official 2-Hip contest season video together for the 1988 season, Ron Wilkerson called me up and asked me if I wanted to edit the video. Yeah, that surprised me, too. But to put it in context, this happened in early 1989. Eddie Roman, who I credit with really starting the rider-made video movement in BMX freestyle, was still working on Aggroman at the time, so he wasn't really known as a video producer yet. I had been working at Unreel Productions, Vision's video company, for over a year. I just got tapped as the Unreel cameraman that spring, after our old cameraman, Pat Wallace, moved on to a better job. Pat's the guy who shot all the contest footage in this video.
I had produced six videos for the AFA in 1987, and then got hired at Unreel. So from Ron's point of view, I was a rider and a video guy who could do the job, and work cheap. Cheap was $500 for logging hours and hours of footage, picking the best shots, and then editing it all together on Unreel's S-VHS system and getting a duplication master tape made. My bosses at Unreel were cool with loaning me the S-VHS edit system to do a side project, which was way cool of them. I think it took 3 or 4weeks of working nights, after working at Unreel during the day, to get this done. Ron got music from Bob Haro and the The Bohemians to use in the video. When I ran out of that music, I recorded myself drumming beats on a phone book and a little metal can full of thumb tacks. Hey, it was a low budget video, I was on a deadline, and it worked.
The intro part with Kevin Martin calling Ron, and then carrying the ramp pieces, was their idea, and the 2-Hip crew shot all those parts, and gave me the footage. I didn't really like the idea, but they did, and it was their video. The biggest thing to explain about making a low budget BMX freestyle video in 1989 was that nobody had really done it yet. Mark Eaton had made Dorkin' in York, which was really sketchy VHS footage of incredible riding by Kevin Jones, Mark, and the York crew. The riding was insane but the video quality sucked. Like all of us, Mark was working with no budget, and in his case, two VCR's to edit it. I hadn't see that video at the time I made this one. Eddie Roman was working on Aggroman, which was like a super low budget BMX and Kung Fu movie, shot on video. That came out soon after this video. The "real" freestyle videos of that era were the BMX company sponsored videos, which cost tens of thousands of dollars to make. The main ones were the BMX Plus videos, and GT Bikes video GT-V. Those were all shot and edited on pro level equipment, but by people who were industrial video producers, not freestylers. They had great technical quality, and good riding, but they also had guys wearing leathers and helmets to ride flatland.
There was no playbook for us low budget guys at the time. There was no standard way to make a low budget freestyle video then. This was one of the first rider-made videos ever. So it it kinda sucked in a lot of ways, but the riding was great for the time period. AND, this video had the first 2-Hip Meet the Street contest in Santee, California in it. Street riding competitions were brand new when that footage was shot, and a lot of freestylers watched that section over and over, and then headed out to street ride in their towns.
Unlike the AFA videos I directed, which sold about 25 or 30 copies each, this video sold a few hundred that first year, I think. Also, it was watched by most of the freestylers around at the time. Originally we called it 2-Hip: The '88 Adventure, but it got tagged 2-Hip BHIP sometime later, and 2-Hip just kept selling copies of this video for years, when people ordered T-shirts or other things. Then, for the 1989 contest series video, Ron Wilkerson asked Eddie Roman to make the video. Eddie was his normal weird, creative self, and made an awesome video called Ride like a Man, in early 1990. That's when the low-budget, rider-made freestyle movement really got going.
When I finished this video, I got Ron Wilkerson the master tape, and a duplication master (so he wouldn't wear out the original when he got copies made, and he gave me a check for $500. My little sister was heading off to college soon after that. So, being the good (and stupid) brother that I was, I got a money order for $500, and sent it all to her. She's been a teacher in North Carolina for many years now. Here are the remaining segments of the video, except the street part, I'm going to do another blog post about that.
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