Recently I caught up with Gabe Cruz; Video Production Supervisor for the Braille Skateboarding YouTube Channel and the dude behind the Braille Army Channel! On the podcast we cover a whole load of topics, including how Gabe got involved with the team, Lance and Carlos leaving, the ethos behind what they do and a whole load more, but here’s a run down of the work that goes on behind the scenes at Braille!
What is the process for coming up with video ideas?
Believe it or not, it actually doesn’t take too long. Every Tuesday, I usually go into the Braille House, take a seat in my office and we have a little brainstorming session for like 30 minutes. I come up with more of the conventional based ideas off our analytics; what has done well in the past, and try to replicate those. Then I go, okay guys, I really need it today, hit me with everything you got. Suddenly one of their eyes lights up and they’re like, Gabe, I got it! And then they just give me one of like the craziest ideas. A few weeks ago Uzi was just like, what if we just soak a skateboard in bleach for 24 hours? What happens? So we did that, turns out the video did well and then we have a series that we can do. The creative workflow is very organic, it’s just whatever we we have fun doing, if it’s something we’d enjoy, I feel like the audience would enjoy it as well.
How about the amount of background work that goes into producing the videos and getting the Braille House set up for them?
Yeah, the main production goes into keeping the Braille house in filmable order. Making sure it looks nice and we keep it clean because we have a lot of skate lessons and visitors coming throughout the week. Then it’s mainly, is it lit nicely? Getting our garage door open so we get a lot of nice natural light! That’s why we painted it recently to make it look nice on camera. The thing about our videos is that we have a basic idea we want to introduce and bring the audience with us on our journey of trying to do a kick flip, or take it down the Braille drop. We always want to have some kind of end game when we start these videos, but really, unless it’s sponsored we try to keep it as script free as possible. Sometimes we’ll have a sponsored video and these people are like, what are we doing? And we’re just like, well, we have this board and we’re going to skate it and that’s about all we know, but that’s the beauty of Braille Skateboarding. We always go to Aaron like; we have this sponsor script, just do whatever you feel is right. Just say make it funny. Make it yourself and people they get. I don’t know if you saw the Christmas tree video but that’s another fantastic example of me just going, hey, we’re skating this Christmas tree, I don’t really know what else to do with this so let’s take it up a notch. Then we shot it 110 miles per hour through our roof.
Has there been a video that’s gone too far, or where you’ve decided you can’t do that again?
Oh, definitely. There have been some ideas that we’ve come up with him and we’re just like, no, we definitely can’t do that. I will reveal one thing we did that we decided not to post the video. We did a video with these professional roller bladers. They’re all really, really good and one of their specialities was skating behind cars. So we filmed this video of one of them skating behind a car at like 150 miles per hour. Then he also did it on the freeway at one point and we got all the footage. It turned out fantastic. I was looking back at it and I’m just like; I don’t know if we can promote getting out of your car on the freeway going 70 miles per hour and skitching on rollerblades. That was terrifying watching that. Nigel and I both had cameras during that instance and both of us were like I don’t know if we can really watch this and I don’t know if we should promote it. So that was one of the ones that was a little sketchy.
How important is it to Braille to be giving the right image; something like deciding not to put out a video when you’ve taken the time to record it?
Oh, it’s it’s one of the most important things for us! Skateboarding has kind of a bad view to the public eye sometimes. There’s some people that go out there and give us a bad name, fighting security guards, refusing to get kicked out. Our main thing is that we just want to make good videos getting people into skateboarding. We don’t want to promote going out there and and fighting people and just being a jerk on your board. We just want people to go out there and have a good time. That’s why we keep all of our videos strictly family friendly. We try not to cuss or do any of that stuff. If we go out street skating and we get kicked out, we go “Okay, thank you guys, have a good day and we’ll see you next time”. It’s always been just about the fun of skateboarding, not about being cool on a skateboard or any of that stuff. I mean, a lot of the boards that we’ve skated, we’ve looked like complete idiots. It doesn’t matter because we just go out there and we’re just like, if we can kick flip this that is going to be amazing and people would love that. It’s all about the fun with us, we just want to get people on a skateboard, introduce them. Really pushing getting full complete skateboards on our website now, so they can get ‘Skateboarding Made Simple’ and then they can get their own skateboard right here on one platform.
How do you work on building and keeping a community?
We look for these kind of opportunities! Anyway to give back or be good to people I think is our big MO. Throughout everyone, even the smaller film team or our biggest supervisors, it’s always; how can we help the community? So doing a podcast I think is another great way to get skateboarding word out to a different audience. That’s why we’re so excited to get into any different area that we possibly can, which is why recently we’ve been doing more rollerblading, BMX, scooter and literally anything that we can do. I know we’re called Braille Skateboarding and our ultimate goal is to teach people how to skateboard, but if we can also show that as a society skaters and scooterers don’t have to hate each other; you don’t have to hate the BMX kid at the at the skatepark, you know? We just want people to be better people and if that means getting on a skateboard, fantastic that works for us! That’s why we try to be so professional with everything we do. If we get an email from a fan, we make sure we email the fan back. Then we’ll copy and paste it into a group chat. These are the messages that we get from fans every single day. So we want you guys to know that you’re doing really good for our community, you guys should keep it up because you know, here we’re making a difference right here. So it makes us feel great.
How important is it for Braille to expose a variety of skating levels and styles to audiences?
Yeah, that’s a big thing for us too! You know, we get a lot of hate on the internet about our skate team. And a lot of people look at us and they’re like, oh, Aaron Kyro? He doesn’t even deserve to be Pro. Fetty and Nigel? They’re not even great skaters. Carlos was easily the best skater on your team and now he’s gone. So you guys, you’re trash. Gabe shouldn’t even skate. So we get all these comments about how our team isn’t the best, but I think that’s the beauty in it. If we had a team full of insane professional skaters who all wanted to do these crazy tricks down the stairs and down the Braille drop, I think it would get boring. If you’re a new kid learning how to skate; I know I was, I was watching these tricks from the Revive guys thinking, “Wow, that was the most amazing trick I’ve ever seen, but I feel like I can do it if I really tried.” We just want people to know that skateboarding isn’t always the easiest thing, it can get really difficult, can get sweaty, can get bloody, you can get angry doing it, but that’s the beauty of it! If you’re passionate about it you just go out there and you put your heart and soul into it. Sometimes you don’t succeed, but that’s okay because then you just rest up and you go out the next day! We always just want people to have a way to progress with us and see us getting better on our board so it motivates them to go out and get better or even just pick up a skateboard.
I wanted to touch on was some of the awesome guests collaborations you’ve done on on Braille. How much work goes into actually organising something like that?
Not as much as you think. Aaron and Carlos were really good at finding people that we thought would work good with us. So basically, we just find our person that we think would like what we do, or would be a good showcase of talent or be kind of inspiring. Really it’s just as simple as finding an email or source of contact and seeing if they’d be down. If they are it’s as easy as seeing when they can get up here, get them a hotel and it’s all history from there. It’s usually pretty easy just because if someone doesn’t want to be associated with us, they don’t. If they do, they will. That’s the really cool thing, that if people want to be in our videos they’re usually super down for it. A really good example is Manny Santiago, when he came to skate our warehouse he was like the biggest pro we’d ever had. So we weren’t sure what to expect as none of us had ever met him and Manny turned out to be one of the best human beings I’ve ever met in my life. A lot of times you know you skate with someone and like their really cool but it’s really hard to find that one skater that just motivates you. Manny was one of the most inspiring skaters to to watch and just skate with because he was such a positive force of energy and such a motivational presence. So yeah Manny was amazing, Joey B was really fun to be around and we’ve been working on getting him up again. Andy Anderson is also a fantastic human being. If anyone ever has a chance to meet Andy Anderson his life is just on a different spectrum. Like he just goes out there and he just loves the world and he loves skateboarding. His skating is a treat to watch, some of the stuff he does is just so mind blowing.
Why would you recommend people pick up a skateboard?
It’s a really good channel of passion and I think if you’re kind of in a tough spot with your life or don’t really know what to do, it’s really way to teach yourself perseverance, ways of pushing yourself that other things don’t really make you do. Progression. Having to learn how to kickflip I would literally just try it over and over and over for hours and mess up over again, but it was that learning curve, those months I spent, I feel like it fortified me as a person, being able to put that much effort into something and not succeed. It’s the failure in life that really makes you learn. So that’s why that’s why I like skateboarding so much because when I escape 95% of my skating experience is not landing tricks. So it’s that 5% that you strive for, actually landing it, that really makes it all worthwhile. The best way I can describe it, is that it’s just a beautiful way to work on yourself and to come to terms with, you know, things aren’t easy life isn’t always going to be sunshine, easy roads and people just carving the wet for you. You really have to fight for the things that you’re passionate about and I think skateboarding is a really good way to do that.
Why learn to skate with Braille? Why should people listen and take your advice?
The first reason is that Aaron is one of the most fantastic teachers I’ve ever seen. A lot of tutorial videos you see online are very basic and they don’t really explain the intricacies of skateboarding. Aaron just bought a brand new slow motion camera, films 2000 frames per second. We have not made one single video with it yet. All Aaron has been doing is filming himself doing these tricks and analysing every single frame of what his feet are doing on that skateboard to figure it out better so he could then say it in a video and help people learn better. So Skateboarding Made Simple, our tutorials, all this stuff that we put up on the internet is the most comprehensive and detailed! Aaron has spent hours upon hours studying it, trying to help people learn the best way. So, in terms of it being honestly the best tutorials, I think that’s the case. But I just think that that Braille, the YouTube channel and all of our platforms, I just think it’s a really good way to learn how to skateboard just by being able to put yourself next to someone and be able to grow with them. And that’s that’s what it’s all about.
Some final words from Gabe!
If you can subscribe to Braille Skateboarding, that would be fantastic. Pick up a skateboard, learn how to skate. If you watch this podcast, go ahead and DM on Instagram at @GabeCruz01 and let me know what you thought. And tell me if you learned anything from this podcast and if you have any questions definitely feel free to ask me.
If you’d like to listen to the full conversation with Gabe Cruz, you can check out Promote the Hell Out of It! on all the usual podcasting platforms and YouTube, you might also enjoy the episode with Carlos Lastra, pro-skater and ex-Braille Skateboarding team member.
Co-founder @kitschinc and @wearefoodscouts. Musician and spoken word artist🎸@larkhilluk & Chicharrero. Podcast Host and Producer: Promote The Hell Out Of It!
