Assessment 2: Noticing Change
Located in Alexandria Gardens, the heart of the Melbourne Central Business District, Riverslide Skatepark is the city’s “biggest and best skate facility”. Bringing together skate pros and people of all ages and skill levels since 2007, the park has since become an iconic street landmark encompassing the nostalgic past of skateboarding as an underground subculture. At its core, Riverslide is reminiscent of skateboarding’s evolving nature from a sport, once replete with roughed-up masculinity and obscurity, to a mainstream sport that is now, more than ever, a widely accepted subculture of Melbourne and of the rest of the world.
Home to a wide breadth of individuals who all embody different ethnicities, ages and social backgrounds, Riverslide serves as a cultural site bringing together a community who look to the park as a place of acceptance, camaraderie and, in essence, a place of galavanting and belonging. Indeed, it is for this reason that Riverslide remains as a central facet of upbringing and identity for many locals, tourists and, for people like myself, a place for those who reside on the outskirts of the city and deep within the inner suburbs.
Yet, before this sentiment of comradeship, and the need for brother and sisterhood emerged as one of skateboarding’s core values, the culture itself was often met with public abhorrence and concern; particularly from those who dismiss the sport as a site for troublemakers engaging in juvenile misdemeanours and delinquency. In its initial years, Riverslide Skatepark was often looked down upon by a public driven by their preconceived notions of what skate culture represents. Indeed, it is these connotations of criminal, immoral and anti-social behaviours, associated with skateboarding, that usually took precedence over the culture’s genuine advocacies for diversity and support across all aspects of character, including race, age and gender.
To further explore the changing nature of Riverslide Skatepark and – contrary to earlier popular belief – the overwhelming support that accompanies it, I plan to interview locals who frequent the park, employees of the park’s accompanying café and even those who are not regulars of Riverslide Skatepark. Through the eyes of seasoned skaters, I am able to get a retrospective look at the park’s rich history and the developments that the site has seen since its establishment. After visiting the park, I spoke with one of their employees who had inadvertently shared some of Riverslide’s physical changes and briefly revealed how the site has grown aesthetically. In the beginning, the park, which hosts a variety of skating terrains including a selection of ramps and half-pipes, started off as only a foundation of brick and cement intended as the park’s actual skating ground. However, as time went on, an architectural trend seemed to form and every couple of years, the park would undergo a vibrant makeover that saw the skating obstacle course painted over in one bright uniform colour. Kenneth, the same employee I spoke with, went onto describe the ongoing trend, its consistency and how this has, in turn, become a unique ritual of Riverslide. Starting out as the cement’s natural colour of grey, then to a bold shade of red, then green to its now distinctive blue, Riverslide is eager to constantly renovate and freshen up the park’s aesthetic. Perhaps this is a cheeky ploy to have locals and spectators return to enjoy the updates made to the park.
When filming this documentary, I am eager to have my shooting style reflect the free-spirited nature of the skatepark as well as the different, but equally interesting, personalities that occur in this space. This will include handheld tracking shots that follow the skaters as they skate along the varying terrains of the skatepark; a decision put forth in order to showcase the raw talent and often cut-throat nature of skateboarding. In addition to the carefree atmosphere that I would like to convey, I am interested in capturing the street grime and grunge-like feel of the park, the literal blood-shed from shredding too hard and the determination to land the trick. To do this, I will shoot close-up footage of different artefacts built throughout the skatepark, zoning in on the street-art, graffiti and the contrasting garden-surroundings of the park to highlight the gruff nature of the sport. When conducting interviews with the skaters and spectators, however, I plan to incorporate a mixture of mid-shot angles set up on a tripod during moments of dialogue, so as not to distract from the message being communicated by the interview subject.
Through this documentary, I will convey the shifting perception surrounding skate culture, one that involved the initial but wide-spread belief that skateboarding is a sport more invested in rebellion than community and acceptance. In addition to the changing public bias placed on the culture, I am especially interested in exploring the increasingly diverse pool of people that come in and out of the park. Indeed, Riverslide Skatepark, one of Melbourne’s largest and most well-known skate facilities, has evolved drastically, not just in the sense that it has seen seen its fair share of physical renovations, but also its growing reputation as a space accepting of all people, from different walks of life. Hosting popular events from teaching kids to skate, to competitions sponsored by street-fashion giants like Vans, to having a girls-shred day, I thought it fitting to make the film’s tagline: skateboarding is not a crime. A sentiment that, now, people are slowly coming to terms with.
Link to video here
