Digital Video magazine — April 2012
Stacy Peralta’s ‘Bones Brigade’: Revisiting the Grit and Glory of 1980s Skate Culture

The Bones Brigade was the skateboarding team of the 1980s — a profoundly talented group of outsiders who became the most popular skateboarding team in history. Filmmaker and legendary skateboarder Stacy Peralta documented the team’s rise and implosion in his award-winning 2001 film Dogtown and Z-Boys, which chronicled the rise of the modern skateboarding industry.

Peralta’s newest film, the emotionally charged Bones Brigade: An Autobiography, picks up the story where Dogtown left off, using archival footage and moving first-person accounts from Brigade members Steve Caballero, Tommy Guerrero, Tony Hawk, Mike McGill, Lance Mountain and Rodney Mullen, among others, to chronicle the personal histories of the Z-Boys and the origins of the Bones Brigade.

Concerned about making yet another version of Dogtown, Peralta was initially resistant to the idea of Bones Brigade until the Z-Boys themselves prevailed upon him to tell their story. To avoid repeating the gritty, black-and-white back-alley look of Dogtown, Peralta and his crew built a lavish, beautifully lit interior set for interviews, which were shot with the Arri Alexa. Motion control photos, behind-the-scenes footage and time-lapse sequences were captured using the Sony EX1.

“I had shot a number of commercials last year using the Alexa, and it really blew my mind. I couldn’t wait to use it on a feature-length project,” Peralta says about his choice of cameras. “The Alexa is simple to use, and I love how it interprets light and the depth of field that can be achieved with it. If you don’t have all the lighting equipment you want, you can still get a pretty fantastic shot. I was really, really pleased with it.”

Rounding out the nearly 150 hours of interview footage were 450 hours of archival footage in a variety of formats. “We received all sorts of media, ranging from 8mm and 16mm to Betacam SP, 3/4″ U-matic and VHS, along with newer footage on DV and Digital HD Media,” says assistant editor John Oliver, who was responsible for organizing the nearly 600 hours of footage for the project. “We had nearly every NTSC format you can think of.” (Read full story…)