How is skate video transformed when it is produced in Twitter?
This is followed by his signature trick: the no comply shove. #Brunswickskate
— Nethaniel Rochester (@NateRochester5) April 22, 2015
Errol rolls his way over to a car park ramp where he hop manuals the platform and drops off the edge. #Brunswickskate
— Nethaniel Rochester (@NateRochester5) April 22, 2015
He then pops the front wheels off the ground and drops down two sets of gutters. #Brunswickskate
— Nethaniel Rochester (@NateRochester5) April 22, 2015
Firstly Errol runs and jumps onto the skateboard to generate speed. #Brunswickskate
— Nethaniel Rochester (@NateRochester5) April 22, 2015
You will often find him skating his local street spot in Brunswick, where we has a favourite run of tricks to do: #Brunswickskate
— Nethaniel Rochester (@NateRochester5) April 22, 2015
Errol is a local Melbourne skater, he lives in the inner north and skates street the majority of the time. #Brunswickskate
— Nethaniel Rochester (@NateRochester5) April 22, 2015
To experiment further with notions of applying skate video to different online tools and services in order to produce a potential transformation of skate video form, I extended its production to a service that eliminates the presence of imagery and sound all together. To produce a skate video in Twitter, the producer is restricted to the tool/medium of text.
To create this sketch I wrote a scripted version of Errol’s skate sequence. The narrative script was similar to the text used in the Cowbird sketch, however via Twitter there was less emphasis on the story telling aesthetic and more of a focus on creating short and sharp announcements. This, in conjunction with a constraint of 140 characters per post, meant that the communication of narrative was premised on short snippets of only the most important information involved in the narrative structure. Thus, a disregard for aesthetic ‘fluff’ is raised in replacement of direct simplistic communication. Therefore the non-narrative aesthetic appeal of skate video, predominantly formed by the use of visual relationships and music is removed. Meaning the narrative form becomes structured around an explicit portrayal of content.
Furthermore, the functionality of Twitter is strongly premised upon the use of #tags to form relations between ‘Tweets’. By using a consistent #tag (#Brunswickskate) across each ’tweet’ involved in the sketch, skate video is portrayed to the audience in a potentially disjointed nature. Moreover, each individual element (‘tweet’) of the skate video can be separated across the web and therefore not presented in association with the other pieces of the narrative. However the affordances of the #tag enable the audience to discover the associated segments in order to form a narrative. Finally, due to a lack of visual and audio material, the audience is restricted to create their own visual version of the content, which is a powerful affordance of text media. Therefore the ‘skate video’ becomes a hybrid collaboration of produced script and audience imagination.