COMMONWEALTH

Commonwealth is a short skateboarding promo, commissioned by Warwick District Council. It’s a sort of summary of the last 5 years of The Terrible Company, with hints of what’s next from the video side of the blog. 

The Backstory

At the start of July, I was put in contact with Warwick District Council by friend of the blog Joe Wallace. They were on the lookout for filmmakers from the local area to create short films about sports that could be shown in the centre of Leamington Spa and Warwick during the 2022 Commonwealth games. Initially bother Joe and myself thought we could package up Franchi$e and have that be part of the running order, but ultimately the brief for the film was:

• It had to be roughly 4 minutes long. 
• Music had to have copyright clearance. 
• It had to be family friendly. 

If you’ve watched Franchi$e then you know it doesn’t really fit any of those criteria. It’s 30 minutes long, it features a fair bit of swearing and weird, cynical commentary, and it features not only music, but archival footage with zero copyright clearance. Johnathon Branston from WDC loved it though, and said he would use it as a “showcase” of what I could do to get the council committee on board (no pun intended) in hopes I could then make something that fit the brief, and represented the local skate scene. 

I’m gonna be honest and say I had a hard time getting this thing down to the time limit. It runs over the time allocated in the brief by 45 seconds, but WDC seemed fine with it. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Swampy and Los Savages, who kindly let me use their music (in particular it is incredibly rad to have skateboarders who have been heavily part of the local scene on the soundtrack to this promo). 

This promo ends with a very short sneak peek/teaser for the new Terrible Company full length video Ghostface: a video that has been a very, very long time in the making. If you are curious what I’ve been hacking away at since September 2019, stick around until the end of Commonwealth. And stay tuned for a proper trailer at some point in the future…