End Search, Deadline, Illustrated, Trip Tape, No Bicycles, Shimmer… Nobody does the video part quite like Ty Morrow. With his signature blend of raw power matched with finesse, a discerning eye for setup use, and the determination to get every detail perfect, each time Ty drops a video part, it’s like a having gift bestowed upon BMX. And his latest masterpiece for Eclat, which debuted last week, ticks all the boxes—all while being filmed during some of most tumultuous times for both Ty, and society in general.
From trick selection to camera formats, and so on… How has the process of filming a video changed or evolved for you over the years?
My first camera was a Hi-8 that my friends and I lugged around our neighborhood and tried to film a video with when we were around 12. We didn’t have access to any sort of editing software so we tried to film everything in order and closed it out with rider interviews that promoted the video. All on one tape [laughs].
We had absolutely no clue what we were doing, but it opened up a window of opportunity to get into something I’ve now spent nearly 20 years of my life pursuing. In that time, it feels like I’ve filmed with and been filmed by nearly every camera commonly used to create BMX and skate videos. From my first “real camera”, an open-box sale TRV-950 to a gimbal-stabilized GH5s to an iPhone 12 that is nowadays arguably “just as good” as a real camera in terms of “quality”. The fact that anyone with a smartphone can film, edit and even make the music for a video is pretty surreal when I think of how the journey of my life around a camera has evolved. The formats have been endless, but the goal has always been the same—being a part of a video my friends and I can look back on and be proud of.
Trick selection is something I’ve always had a little bit of a challenge with. I don’t barspin or tailwhip much these days, but will pull them out when the setup is calling for some sort of combination doing one of the two tricks as an add-on. The way that I look at most tricks these days is setup based. Finding the perfect setup and doing what I feel is the perfect trick for the setup is what I get the most satisfaction from. That logic has led to a lot of lines and combination-based filming as opposed to one-trick wonders.
What are your thoughts on the insatiable appetite for daily video content on social media and the effects it has on the long form video part?
Nowadays the idea of a full-length video is nearly a laughable proposition to most BMX companies and it’s a real shame. Luckily the video part is still hanging on by some strong threads thanks to the few still willing to put their clips aside for a few months. Instant gratification is cool and all—it boosts your ego when people like your post and comment, but the memory is gone as soon as the viewer scrolls to their next favorite rider’s post. It seems a lot of pros have lost sight of separating the level of riding they do for Instagram and what they put into a real part.
The idea of my work being scrolled by and watched in some shitty little box just doesn’t sit well with me. My sponsors want more from my Instagram and tell me to “just post chill stuff”, but I genuinely don’t want to. I didn’t chose this sport as my career path to do things I don’t want to do so I stick to what I believe in—filming video parts. I still post on the gram from time to time if I find something I like. Most of time that’s only if I feel whatever I’m posting won’t interfere with the ideas/tricks I have in mind or have already filmed for whatever video part I’m currently working on. Being that rider I previously described that cannot be differentiated from video part to Instagram feed is my worst nightmare.
With that being said, I enjoy making fun little edits with the homies and everyone getting some fun shit for the gram when we go out to ride together. It’s the idea of that content being some sort of obligation that bothers me. Especially when that content is seemingly more important to a brand than what I was originally sponsored by the company for (making video parts). Luckily Eclat, Fiend and Vans are pretty lax when it comes to this topic, which is probably why I still have sponsors, but it’s a problem across the board that is probably only going to get worse before it gets better.
I’m not an influencer, I do not want you to watch my Instagram content and immediately buy said product I’m promoting at the time. I’m a professional athlete that needs the right stage to perform to my greatest capabilities. Anything less isn’t worth it to me. I’m extremely critical of everything I put out and can’t deliver sub-par content to keep sponsors happy. Sorry guys!
Video part projects like this can consume a rider for months at a time. How important do you think it is for brands, like Eclat, to support long term video parts?
I believe it’s extremely important. Eclat has supported my vision since day one and I genuinely appreciate it. Video parts are a staple of time and something that people go back to watch and remember year after year. Being associated with that memory as a brand is priceless in my opinion. Knowing the brand supports someone the rider watching the video really likes is naturally going to draw them to buy their product. It also creates a sense of loyalty to the brand because they know the rider they like trusts their products and gives them the support they need to keep producing new parts.
The filmer / rider dynamic has to be solid when diving into a video projects such as this. It seems like things really click with you and Calvin Kosovich…
Calvin has been somewhat of a godsend when it comes to the last few years of my career [laughs]. Prior to meeting him the only person I really trusted filming me was Tony Ennis. Tony and I moved to Cali together and were filming in NC and FL for nearly a decade prior to that. The first VX clip I ever got was filmed by Tony and from that point on we kept at it. After a few years in San Diego I really wanted to move to LA and no one else in my friend group felt the same way so I made the trek to Long Beach on my own. Tony and I managed to film No Bicycles during my first couple years in LA and it was awesome. Tony’s dedication to the project and willingness to take a train from SD to LA every couple weeks was a true testament to how important it is to have a filmer with a mutual level of trust and respect. Every time we got together was a good time and the content seemed to come naturally despite how stressful and scary certain tricks might have been. What we got out of all that time and effort was something we’ll both remember for the rest of our lives: a Nora Cup. As awesome of an experience as this was, we knew it wasn’t practical and something would have to be figured out for future projects and that’s where Calvin and I started working together on our second project.
The first project Calvin and I worked on together was Vans Illustrated. I can still remember the first clip I filmed with Calvin. I got a call/text from Dak, who told me they were filming in La Canada for a new Vans video and invited me out. I drove up from Hollywood and met up with them. As soon as we started filming I knew Calvin had a similar style to Tony and I instantly felt comfortable. After watching that clip I knew we were going to have a dope experience filming together. Vans had another filmer for the project and we never really clicked when it came to filming. I don’t want to knock his talent, but his filming style really wasn’t for me and I frankly viewed him as a photographer more than a filmer. Lines were pretty much out of the question with him behind the lens and I knew this was going to be a huge problem for me. I can’t limit my tricks based off of the filmer’s capabilities, so I made it a point to film my entire part with Calvin. A couple trips and some fun times in the streets of SoCal lead to my part being finished in time for the deadline. Since Calvin filmed my entire part outside of some second angles, he also edited it. Everything came together and I was stoked on what we ended up with.
Calvin went back to Australia for some time due to his visa expiring so I was back to filming with Tony for No Bicycles. As soon as Calvin was back, he moved five minutes from my house and we instantly started filming my first Eclat part and welcome to the team content. From that point our friendship and comfort filming together has grown and grown. Calvin trusts me behind the lens and I trust him behind the lens. That sort of combination is extremely rare in our industry and I’m forever grateful to have met and become friends with him. We’ve spent so much time driving around and hanging out together over the past few years that I can proudly say he’s now one of my best friends and an awesome human to be around outside of BMX.
I’ve always been a bit of a filming nerd and care a lot about the look of all the content I put out. I don’t feel it’s worth the risk of not having the clip come out right filming with someone that is sub-par to what you’re used to and know looks good. Sometimes this limits my ability to go out and get content, but it’s the way I feel comfortable and am able to produce the level of content I want both in front and behind the lens.
The riding scene in LA has been changed a lot over the last year or two. Who were some of the frequent homies you rolled with while working on this?
It’s changed drastically. Pretty much everyone I used to ride and film with on a regular basis is gone. For this project the only person I went out with any sort of frequency was Andrew Castaneda and he’s got a full-time job these days so those sessions weren’t as frequent as they once were. I met Pat Freyne last year and we seemed to hit it off pretty quickly. He’s an awesome rider and he gets the process of filming a video part and has similar values behind the ideology of what we love to do. On top of that, he’s Australian so him and Calvin already had an established friendship which was an instant voucher for me. Another somewhat regular in the last year has been Brandon Begin. We live pretty close and on the weekends he wasn’t filming for something of his own, we’d meet up on occasion. TrevMags [Trevor Holotka] is another homie with a full-time job and limited availability for appearances, but he’s amongst my new friend circle and someone I really enjoy having around filming or not.
How long did you work on this video and were there any setbacks?
I can’t tell you exactly when the first clip was filmed, but it was something around six to nine months, depending on how you look at it. The initial setback for this project was coming off of a six-plus month injury. I fell in Australia trying to over crank a gap to rail and landed on a broken bottle of glass hiding beneath some leaves on the landing. A couple weeks after I got home from Australia, I felt something sharp near the site of my stitches. I recently had them taken out so I thought there could be a left over piece of stitching coming to the surface. After further inspection, I realized it was a piece of glass! Luckily, my mom was in town visiting at the time and she got to work on it. After some prying and squeezing around the area and lots of agony, this 1/4” piece of glass popped out of my elbow like an ingrown hair! The hole and site of my stitches healed up so I finished filming my Vans Shimmer part. Towards the end of filming, my arm started to feel weak so I took a couple weeks off assuming my arm never had the proper chance to heal.
When I started riding again, things weren’t the same and I began to adjust my riding to experience less pain. This is something I’ve grown used to over the years so I didn’t think much of it at the time. Weeks later I could barely grip and a small lump had formed on my elbow. I assumed this could be some form of tennis/golf elbow and tried some exercises. Nothing was working so I went to a general doctor who told me the bump on my arm was likely a lipoma.
Untrustworthy of the Doc’s opinion, I went to a chiropractor who suggested I get an x-ray. The x-ray revealed I had a small fracture at the end of my elbow. I talked to my physical therapist and he suggested I go to an orthopedic surgeon he trusted in Glendale. I scheduled my appointment and met with him a few days later. We talked about the sequence of events related to my elbow including the lodged piece of glass. After his own x-ray, an ultrasound and some feeling around, he said he thought there could be another piece of glass in there. From the right angle, you could actually see the glass in the x-ray clear as day! He told me the only option was a surgically removing the glass so we schedule my appointment for the next week.
The fracture in my elbow wasn’t your ordinary hairline fracture either; it was a spiral fracture. Spiral fractures are pretty rare and usually only happen in athletes under immense amounts of strain. With that knowledge and seeing how deep the glass was in my arm, we came up with the theory that my muscles started firing incorrectly around my elbow with caused strain on my tendon. So much strain that my tendon literally twisted and cracked my arm.
No wonder I couldn’t grip! Once the surgery was done, it was a matter of waiting for the spiral fracture to heal. Due to their complicated nature, the average four to six weeks of healing time was extended to eight to ten weeks with the chance of it taking up to a year for my arm to be back to “normal”.
After a few stressful x-rays, the fracture healed enough to start light physical therapy. As physical therapy for bad injuries usually is, the first few sessions were somewhat discouraging and really kicked my ass. At the same time, I was extremely motivated to get back on my bike and fought through it. My last couple appointments were cancelled due to Covid so I stuck with the regiment of exercises they gave me and got back to riding slowly, but surely after being cleared by the doc.
Getting back into the groove after this one wasn’t easy. The last time I took that much time off my bike was for my wrist surgery in 2012. But as time went on, my confidence came back and after one or two scary tricks I felt I was back in the game. We had a solid few months of filming up until the end of the year when we found out Calvin would have to leave the country again. Due to the pandemic, renewing his Visa wasn’t as simple as it normally would have been and turned out to be a painfully long process. We did our best to finish the part before his departure date of January 15th. The part was done, but I wasn’t very hyped on the ender and knew I could do better. At the time we figured Calvin would be gone for two months at most. I put pressure on myself to have this part out during the start of the year. Once I saw the footage together and with a song, I really wanted to film more. I felt we were kinda cut short right as things were really starting to pick up so I quietly decided I’d wait for Calvin to get back to film a bit more and get a new ender.
Four months later, it’s mid-April and I’m feeling crazy for letting this footage sit on Calvin’s computer ready to be out. There was still no clear answer as to when Calvin would be back thanks to the USA’s delay in processing his Visa application so I decided it was time to hit up someone else to film one last trick.
You filmed this video entirely in California, and mostly in LA. Was that always the plan, or did COVID dictate that?
Covid definitely dictated that. Being so ignorant to how this virus spreads and whether or not we were going to get ourselves and our loved ones sick brought a lot of stress to the idea of traveling so we just didn’t partake. Aside from that, there was this fear of going somewhere and ending up stuck there due to California locking its doors.
And speaking of COVID, in general, what was it like working on this project throughout the pandemic?
I wouldn’t recommend it. In the beginning of the pandemic we were locking ourselves inside and barely interacting. I personally got to the point that potentially dying from the virus seemed better than rotting away and falling into depression on my couch so I started to get back out. As it seemed more and more ok to go outside and do our thing, the pandemic was spiraling out of control in NYC. My friend Scotty Mezcal, who’s an Austin, TX legend, ended up dying from Covid and the numbers were starting to get pretty high in LA. This brought me back into hiding for a bit and really freaked me out. If one of my friends could die from it and all these people that you hear about in their 20s are dying from it, why couldn’t I? After another round of deciding I’d rather die doing what I love then feel the depression setting in from not doing anything and listening to the media paint an apocalyptic picture of our future, I was back on my bike and filming with Calvin. The protests were also kicking off pretty hard which lead to curfews and an increased police presence and general feeling of high tension around the city. Things got really weird towards the end of the year when I was plotting on an ender and getting the last few clips I intended to get for this part.
The fear of getting hurt and not being able to even get into a hospital became very prevalent. There were stories of people waiting six hours in ambulances and driving from hospital to hospital to find emergency rooms with space. Covid was raging out of control in LA and we’re out doing one of the riskiest things possible. In a way it felt kinda badass, but also extremely stupid [laughs].
And there was the silver lining of having schools being totally empty for a few months….
That was definitely dope. I tried not to abuse that idea too much because of the fact that I feel the more schools get hit, the quicker they get capped. On top of that, I’ve kinda grown away from getting clips in school yards as it generally looks the same and similar to a skate plaza. Living in LA, the footage really stands out when you get something in the streets and I feel Calvin and I agree on that logic so we really didn’t fuck with schools as much as we could have.
Riding street in LA isn’t getting any easier. How much spot resurrection was required for this video?
I’ll say! I rode around Hollywood today and it was just sad. So many good spots just got shut down and now that things are getting back to “normal” they seem to be going on a capping spree all over LA and at some of the classic session spots and famous schools. At the same time, the pandemic seemed to start this wave of people doing whatever they wanted to get stuff done. A real sense of lawlessness has been felt in LA since the whole defund the police campaign and it’s definitely working in our favor for resurrecting spots. I don’t want to snitch on myself too hard so I won’t get into details, but let’s just say at least 70% of the spots in this video were uncapped by myself or someone else within the last year. Some of the spots in the video were uncapped same day, the day before or even twice.
Trick wise, your last clip, the back crook at UCLA, is the definition of an ender. What all went into making that clip happen?
I’ve been talking about doing the 180 crook at UCLA for close to a year and decided it was time to man-up and figure out how to get it done. I hit up some of my most trust-worthy friends behind the lens, Tony Ennis and Jeff Z., and set up a day to get it done. Skaters took off the bottom two knobs, but the top one was still there so I went onto campus mid-day to get it off by myself. The rail is so short and steep that I knew I needed to get off.
Do you have any other projects you’re working on or about to kick off?
Not at the moment. Calvin is coming back so we will probably start working on something for Vans when he’s back. With the previous conversation about video parts being a somewhat rare commodity these days, figuring out who’s down to pay Calvin to film and give us a little budget to work with for travel and expenses is a big factor in who the part ends up going to. Either way, we’ll be out there doing our thing like we always have!
Peep Ty’s latest effort for Eclat here…
