Making your life worse for 20 years
2 years ago I did 3 videos designed to remix all previous Terrible Company videos into a bit of a “Best of” collection. Why did I do this 18 years into the blog’s lifespan and not 20? The answer is that this was in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, and I was bored and wanted something to edit. The 3 videos that were made ended up pretty long, and if you watch them back now they definitely drag a bit if you are looking for a punchy, concise history of what this blog is about.
Enter The Terrible Company’s 20th Anniversary Spectacular. This takes the previous 3 Best Of videos and condenses them further into a sharply edited 45 minutes of the purest, bestest footage of 15 people, with a healthy dose of rad bangers from our many, many friends too. This is a definitive celebration of 20 years of The Terrible Company, all the fat trimmed off, with the very best tricks from Cov legends past and present.
This was originally designed to be screened as part of Go Skateboarding Day at Fargo Village, celebrating 20 years of the blog in collaboration with Project No. 5.
Why did you make this?
It didn’t feel right to let the 20th anniversary of the blog go by without a proper video of some kind. The 15th anniversary coincided with Shredventures Into The Unknown and Franchi$e, and whilst they are not the best videos I have ever made, they are still better than nothing. Unfortunately I dug myself into a bit of a hole by releasing Ghostface last year, but after 3 years of production that video couldn’t sit in the oven any longer.
So, what better way to celebrate 20 years of doing the same thing over and over by… Doing something I already did, again. The Terrible Company’s Greatest Hits, Now That’s What I Call The Terrible Company, and The Terrible Company’s Bootleg Collection condensed 18 years of videos into something more bitesize, but I knew I could do better. All 3 of these videos still clock in at a rather hefty length of time, and after Ghostface I knew I could pace things in a better way.
I went about re-visiting the more bloated and bulky parts from the archive trilogy and started hacking away at them. In some cases I smushed parts together, so there’s now a series of double parts scattered throughout. The aim was always to try and get each section down to 2 minutes, or maybe 2:30 at a push. The goal was keeping the pace fast – keep things moving and keep things energetic.
What is new about this compared to the archive trilogy?
The archive trilogy sort of focused on individual skaters, whereas this video mixes things up a lot with joint parts, montages of locations that are important to the blog’s history, and some little nods to what’s going on in Coventry right here today. The archive trilogy was really concerned with preserving the past, whereas the 20th anniversary spectacular is about celebrating a milestone and the impact The Terrible Company can still make in Coventry skateboarding in 2023.
I understand that this doesn’t really mean a lot, and I have a tendency to overthink these things, but The Terrible Company was never just the work of one person. This is a beast built off of the efforts of many, many people, and this video acknowledges that way better than the archive trilogy. TLDR: I made decisions with this video in a vain attempt to stay relevant, please watch it.
Oh, this video also features some clips taken from Ghostface, the only video that was not represented in the pool of footage used for the archive trilogy. I didn’t use the absolute best footage from the video (just some specific great tricks), so definitely still watch Ghostface.
If this is a better version of the archive trilogy, should I bother watching any of those?
I ain’t gonna tell you what to do. Do what you like. What I can tell you is that the archive trilogy contains expanded versions of the parts here, and decent sections from those who only crop up for cameos in the 20th anniversary spectacular. You decide whether you want to spend your time watching more stuff I edited, I’m not your Dad. I’d treat the 20th anniversary spectacular as a Director’s Cut of the archive trilogy. Both versions are still valid, which one you watch is personal taste.
What is the deal with the motion graphics you’ve used all through this video and the rest of the content for the 20th anniversary?
Well, glad you noticed, let me talk to you about a little graphic design thing called a visual identity.
One of the things I have always tried to take seriously is to brand my skate videos with unique visual identities. A visual identity is like a branding toolkit that can be used by a company, product or event (or in this case, a collection of related content on a skateboarding blog) to create a cohesive visual style that is easily recognisable, and can be used to tie together items that might otherwise seem unrelated.
If you have ever bought any of the Greggs Primark stuff, you might spot that all of that gubbins has a consistent use of blue with the yellow squares from the Greggs logo, as well as the word mark. That is partially a visual identity of Greggs to tie all of these random ass clothing items together so people see it and instantly go “Ah, that’s made by the sausage roll people”.
Visual identities have been a staple part of Terribleco videos since the very first video I made, and honestly it was something I always analysed and looked out for in other skate videos. I’m a fan of the whole package of a skate video, and the consistency in how the title slates and overall visual motifs look is part of that. Ever since I saw Girl’s “Yeah Right” or Emerica’s “This Is Skateboarding” I’ve been fascinated with how the logo treatment and graphic design on the box art followed through to the motion graphics. My pet peeve with any visual medium is when there is a lack of consistency in the visual identity, so obviously it’s something I take super seriously.
For the 20th anniversary of the blog, there are a few visual touch points.
- Punk zines of the 80’s and 90’s – monochrome photocopy effects, halftone printing artefacts, sticker effects
- TV graphics from the 90’s – Top Of The Pops, Channel 4, The Word, Shooting Stars, Games Master
- Scrapbooks
- The graphic design history of the blog itself, which often referenced old/warped TV broadcasts, with chromatic aberration (which is where the blue and pink comes from in the Terribleco colour palette)
- Through my day job I also had been absorbing a ton of reference from hip hop videos and graffiti artwork – so some of that influenced the style as well.
The tone is counter cultural, subversive, daft, loud, raw and punchy. The idea was to make all of the 20th anniversary stuff into a living punk rock zine scrapbook crossed with the Top Of The Pops Top 10 countdown. Broadcast television crossed with a sticker bombed toilet door you’d find in an indoor skatepark. These two worlds of slick, well edited visuals combined with the dirty and raw tone of your average skateboarder. Terribleco has always tried to make shit look good, but never forgetting to stay relatable to your average skateboarder.
Can you tell I do this shit for a living?
Did you hire the “movie trailer guy” for this?
His name is Don, and he doesn’t seem to like skateboarders (or me) very much. Don is an AI voice from a tool I used to do the trailer for Ghostface. During the early stages of planning this video I decided to try something really different for a Terribleco video and have a “host” connect the different parts. Don’s segments are heavily inspired by 3 things:
- Johnny Rotten in Flip Sorry
- Max Headroom
- Graham Norton commentating the Eurovision Song Contest
At The Terrible Company we make daft videos. They are very silly. They are very tongue in cheek. Don spends the runtime of this video serving up spicy banter and pointing out just how nonsensical skateboarding is. He insults people’s nicknames, he takes potshots at skateboarding’s flaws, and he sure as hell loves to shit on me and The Terrible Company. He even hires a co-host 2 third of the way through the video without consulting me. I do not recommend you hire him.
However, if you do want to hire Don for your own video project, simply download Descript.
Are you going to make another one of these for future milestone anniversaries?
No. I don’t think so. That would be overkill. This is your lot for looking back. Everything from this stage onwards is new stuff. I closed the book on many chapters of this blog with Ghostface last year, and this video celebrates everything that occurred in those first 20 years. Next up, we’re going to be looking at the future… whatever that means.
I’ve also really expanded the 20th anniversary celebration out across this whole year with a lot of self-referential blog posts that document a lot of information and anecdotes that weren’t previously accessible. Definitively, if you want a history of The Terrible Company, that exists in long form now – there is no need to re-visit in this format ever again.
The plan from here on out is to really commit to a proper reboot of Terribleco, and nothing communicates that more than saying goodbye to full parts from people like Chris Mander, Joxa or myself. Now more than ever I truly understand what makes these videos what they are, and there will always be a presence in the background from myself and my closest skate buddies who have spent almost 20 years bringing you Coventry skate videos, but I now fully understand that you can get that feel with a new crew in front of the camera.
Why do you always post these long, boring blog posts with your videos?
Wow, that hurts. The truth is that I think skateboard videos lost something when they made the transition to online only. I miss the days when a skate video came with more than just 30 minutes of skateboarding. DVD packaging, booklets with extra info, stickers, or other little trinkets like fucking skate dice (thank you Flip for adding this to the Extremely Sorry DVD). These blog posts have always been my way of trying to provide something like that.
If you made it this far, you’re one of the rare people who reads all of these things in their entirety… So, thanks? Much love x
The Terrible Company 