Under Exposed with Jon Colyer

In this Under Exposed interview we chat with Jon Colyer, a Portland based freelance videographer and the creator of the skate videos Sanitizer, Aggressors and many more.

Photo by Joe Brook.

Since I know you have a degree in journalism, I did a little extra research for my questions haha.  And just for you and the readers, I am not formally trained in any way so excuse my poor interview skills. Alright, now that that’s out of the way, let’s get into it. So you were born in Sacramento, but you were raised in Poulsbo, WA. Not a ton of skaters came out of your zone, but I do know there was a skatepark at least. What was it like growing up there? School? Being a skater?

Poulsbo definitely wasn't a bad place to grow up, especially when I was super young and ignorant to the rest of the world. It's just a really safe, sterile, quiet community surrounded by places with more grit and character like Bremerton and Port Townsend. Growing up there I had access to a lot, you can drive straight south to Tacoma in under an hour or take the Bainbridge Island ferry to downtown Seattle in the same amount of time. Poulsbo does have an outdoor wooden skatepark with a perfect flatbar and a really fun, mellow pyramid. Besides that though, Kitsap County has so much to skate. Billie Johnson skatepark in Kingston was the first park I ever went to and was very informative to the way I skate now. Island Lake camp in Silverdale also used to have a covered skatepark where I'd go a lot during the winter months. Those two parks were where I first saw "real" skateboarding happening. Early 2000s Kitsap County had a really active skate scene, with skateshops in every little town like Hardline in Poulsbo, Northern Wave in Silverdale and Evans Board Shop in Kingston. I remember seeing guys like Adam Crew, who was probably already skating for Popwar, Daniel Lint and Eric Guizetti all the time back then doing stuff at the skateparks that I couldn't even comprehend.

Damn, I didn’t know there was a covered park out that way! Who were you skating with back in the early days?

As a super young kid, this guy named Patrick Thompson was my only friend in Poulsbo that skated. If anyone reading this doesn't know Pat, he was later an original member of the Sorcery 118 crew and now lives in New York and still skates. Soon after he and I started skating together we met another local Poulsbo kid named Christian Lewis, who was already a ripping transition skater in grade school and helped turn both of us on to hardcore punk and the straight edge movement when I was barely 12 years old. In addition to skateboarding those two things quickly became two hugely important pillars of my life.

Word, so he was the door opener to hardcore scene. This is kinda random, but I was recently watching ‘What is a Bremelo’ after interviewing the Location skate shop boys, and you were in that video. Tell us a bit about that timeframe for you?

That era was a lot of fun, just hanging out with John Hibbs, Adam Klein and Connor Ferguson a bunch. Rewinding a little bit, around the time I got my driver's license Pat ended up getting his GED and moving to Seattle, so I became pretty much completely isolated in Poulsbo as far as skating was concerned. The scene had fallen off by then with all my other skate acquaintances moving on to girls or cars or drugs or whatever. For a couple years I skated almost exclusively by myself. At age 17 I also withdrew from high school and started attending Olympic Community College in Bremerton to wrap up my credits instead. I was just hanging out in Bremerton five days a week and seeing all the dudes who would become the Bremelo/Location crew every day after school at the Bremerton skatepark. John Hibbs, who made the video, moved to Kitsap County from Illinois for a couple years because his wife was stationed there for a military position or something. He had a VX2000 with some crazy adapted fisheye setup that we all thought looked awesome, and from there Bremelo just happened naturally. I am by far the least talented skater to appear in that video, but John was awesome about shooting everybody in the scene and stacking clips at actual street spots. This was also around the same time I became aware of the skateboarding scene happening on a larger level in Washington outside of just Kitsap County. I became a regular customer at 35th North around 2007 or so, and later 35th Avenue.

Oh okay that makes sense, the college timeframe explains the Bremerton connection. From my research then it must’ve been pretty quickly after that you moved to Colorado for school?

Correct, I actually missed the Bremelo premiere because I was living in Fort Collins doing my freshman year at Colorado State University. By that point I was so jaded by small town life that I just wanted to get as far away from Poulsbo as possible. CSU offered me a pretty significant academic scholarship, which allowed me to do that. Once I learned Fort Collins had five skateparks and Market Skateshop was just a block from campus I accepted the scholarship without thinking twice. It's a city of like 150,000 people, astronomically larger than Poulsbo, but still much smaller than Seattle. I'd say it was a good stepping stone city to live in, which made the transition between small town life and living in a big city a few years later pretty easy.

Sounds perfect, I need to do a CO trip. So, you went to school for journalism, which isn’t a common degree these days. What were you interested in doing with journalism?

Sincerely, all I wanted back then was to work at a skate mag. I love to write and I'm a gigantic fucking skate nerd, so I really couldn't think of a better career path. When I started at CSU in 2011, I was getting monthly subscriptions to at least four different magazines. Meanwhile, I was interviewing guys like Mark Whiteley and Joe Brook for school projects and becoming even more determined to get a writing job in skating too. Unfortunately, even just by the time I graduated in 2014, SLAP was dead in its print form and Skateboarder was on its last leg. The journalism department at CSU was already shifting towards social media and public relations education, which are far more viable career opportunities in 2024 than trying to write full-time for almost any print publication. It was a great experience regardless, and I learned a ton about the basics of photography and video editing at CSU.

I had assumed it was skate related, but I didn’t wanna assume, ya know? Probably a strange time to be there in the middle of the world moving away from print, watching institutions just kinda crumble. In college is where you started filming correct?

Exactly. I cut my teeth on a Canon T2i that I bought for school, then got my first VX under the watchful eye of Jeremy Frankovis (search YouTube for his old video parts) from some kid who worked at Crisis Skateshop when I was a sophomore in college. I ended up with a Mark I fisheye somehow and immediately began shooting all my friends at the skateparks there. Northern Colorado notably gets around 300 days of sunshine every year, so the skate scene there is pretty incredible. Even just in Fort Collins guys were ripping so hard that it felt like a massive waste to have nobody documenting it, which is really what got me motivated to film. The guys I was shooting then were just Fort Collins locals like my roommate Brandon Avery, Tsedeq Baker, Kyle KJ and John Allison (RIP).

That’s funny I also filmed with a t2i when I first picked back up video stuff around the same timeframe, but was mostly filming music shit then. Technically we had shitty hi8 cameras when were like 13 or 14, but that was a different era back then and I didn’t ever own one myself. So after college you come back home to the NW, to Seattle, and start filming for a couple videos, ‘Luxury Vehicle’ first and then  ‘Aggressors’. Let’s talk about those videos. Let's start with the first one. Gimme some history and stories about that one?

In May of 2014 I graduated from CSU and moved immediately to the U District in Seattle. Through the internet and my friendship with Dave Waite I started hanging out with people like Logan Devlin, Josh McLaughlin, Ian Wishart, Michael Bala and Dane Barker, all of whom were the new wave of team riders for 35th Avenue and 35th North. I later lived at one of the first iterations of "The Purple House" with Logan and Dane, and that just turned into all of us skating together constantly. We did tons of night missions around Seattle along with frequent trips to Kitsap County and Portland too. I was in my early 20s and rabidly motivated as a filmer, pushing everyone super hard to film clips all the time. I'm proud of that video and the skating in it is amazing, but looking back it definitely didn't turn out the way I wanted it to. I think a lot of those dudes burned out on skating with me because I was so intense about it. I'm generally a very serious person and I've never been good at relaxing. During the editing process there were a lot of cooks in the kitchen, plus I was a complete novice at putting longform videos together. The end result to me feels extremely disjointed and unnatural. It still represented some great memories and learning experiences in my life though. Luxury Vehicle really motivated me to sharpen my skills as an editor and dial back my attitude as I grew up. I have a ton of respect for every single person in that video, and some of them are still close friends.

It’s always a growing process making a video like that, it’s not easy. I can relate to all of that. I just filmed a whole part with Dave Waite for the latest full length video we made. He’s 50 years old and still absolutely killing it. It’s been a huge inspiration and motivation for me personally to skate harder and try more. You also filmed with Dave for ‘Luxury Vehicle’. I believe Dave would’ve been about 40 then. What was it like filming with the local legend? Give us a Dave story maybe?

The first one that comes to mind is him putting in several hours of work on the very first day we shot for Luxury Vehicle doing what ended up being the last trick in his video part. It was like 90 degrees in the middle of summer in 2014 and he did the most epic step hop no comply over the famous hip gap on Mercer Island while I filmed it on the VX rolling long lens. I believe our logic for skaing that day was that because the spot was mostly shaded we probably wouldn't melt to death skating it. That hypothesis was incorrect, and Dave and I had both sweat through our entire t-shirts by the time he pulled it. I want to say we still skated another Mercer spot or maybe the skatepark after that, because neither of us had any reason to go to Mercer Island for anything else. Dave will forever be the fucking man.

Indeed! Then the next video was ‘Aggressors’, let’s touch on that a bit. Good times? Tough times?

Extremely good times. Between Luxury Vehicle and Aggressors I did a smaller project with Nile Gibbs called "The Night Shift," which was when I would say I actually figured out how to edit skating properly on my own terms. My friend group shifted quite a bit around that time period, and I started skating downtown Seattle a lot with Nile, Ian, Carl DePaolo, Finn Pope, Hunter Okano and Isaac White. Aggressors is still my favorite skate video I've ever made, it just captures a really fun period that I look back on fondly. The process was super organic, and unlike with Luxury Vehicle I think my level of motivation was matched by all the skaters in the video. These days I can actually go back and watch Aggressors without cringing at any of the creative choices I made. That premiere was also so much fun. We did a double feature at Chop Suey on Capitol Hill with Alex Cooper's Honeymoon video and it was a fucking blast.

After those videos I believe you moved to SF, and took a job at Thrasher, what was that like? Childhood dream type deal or not as good as it seems?

Yeah I actually had two stints living in SF in 2017 and 2018/19 that added up to about 18 months total in the Bay. During the second stint I did spend some time working at Thrasher for a little while. After Aggressors came out I bought my HPX camera setup and pretty much immediately started to feel stagnant and ready to try something new. Because Nile and Ian were both hellbent on living in SF, I ended up moving down there just a few months after them. Nile and I initially rented part of a house in the south end of the city from a sketchy Russian family who would show up unannounced at all hours of the day or night. Then later we lived in an even sketchier warehouse setup off Bay Shore Boulevard not far from the High Speed Productions office in Hunter's Point. San Francisco quickly beat the shit out of me both times I lived there, but it also scratched the itch I was having to really making a genuine attempt at working in the skate industry. Working at Thrasher I promptly realized I'd never be able to make ends meet in any position that could open up there in the future, and the stress of trying to make a living in SF wasn't worth the time or effort. Truthfully, my last few months in San Francisco, after I had already decided to move on, were the most fun. I was skating a bunch by myself, shooting skating a little with Ian and Nile, going to punk shows and kind of doing fuck all other than that. At the end of the summer in 2019 my car shit out on me and that was the straw that broke the camels back. A few weeks later I packed up all my shit and went to stay at my parents house in Montana for a month before moving into my sublet in Portland.

Sounds like adventure but also hectic kinda. I’ve always wondered how homies were doing it in SF, it seems so unmanageable to afford being a skater there to me, but I get the allure and the industry is there I supposed. So after SF you head to Portland and that’s where you have stayed to this day. Tell us about Portland now that you’ve been there for almost 5 years. From up here it kinda seems like it’s the heart of the industry for the NW region (if we can call it that). Pros/Cons?

Portland is a ridiculously easy place to live. The pros would be that it's relatively inexpensive, there's no sales tax and you can get away with a lot. Portland is weirdly kind of a lawless place. Skating here is easy because there's a lot worse stuff going on in the streets all the time, so most average citizens don't see the harm in someone rolling around or grinding a ledge. You can even make significant alterations to spots in broad daylight without anyone giving you a second look. There are very few cops and security guards to bother you, so if you're ever getting kicked out of a spot, it's usually because the spot is someone's house.

Sounds similar to Tacoma these days honestly, but y’all have way more spots! Since being there you’ve dropped a few bigger projects, the first of which was ‘Sanitizer’. How’d that one come together?

I always say Sanitizer kind of happened by accident. I didn't move to Portland with the intent of making another longform project at all, but with the pandemic it happened anyway. Alex Isenberger was one of my only friends in Portland and a criminally underrated skateboarder. We skated together frequently when I got here and through him I met Aidan Olmstead and the rest of the Portland cast. Obviously Trevor Clark and Dane Ichimura are Seattle-area residents and both of them came down a bunch to shoot with me and hang out while evertything was shut down. Before long I had over 20 minutes of footage leading up the end of 2020, and I edited the whole video in like a month while it rained. It sucked not being able to have a legitimate premiere for that one, but the web release got a great response and through that I was able to donate a bunch of money to the Ben Raemers Foundation from all the digital download sales.

Damn that’s dope, shout out to the Ben Raemers Foundation. They do some rad shit and I love all their shareable little blurbs they put out on IG. Also, I fuck with Dane Ichimura, his skating is so good. I never knew him personally and then one day I went to buy this surf board on offer and I was like “Oh shit, what up Dane!”. Ok and then the next video was Task?

Task was mostly the result of Cody Wilber and Alex being super motivated to keep filming stuff after Sanitizer, when Alex moved to Colorado Cody and I just kept stacking through the following summer. I reached out to the Pocket Mag dudes in Germany about hosting the video and they were down, which was super helpful for getting exposure to new audiences worldwide.

Sick, I love Pocket Mag. I always watch their shit. And then just recently you did the part with Aaron Herrington on Thrasher. How’d that happen?

With Aaron, I reached out to him while he was staying in Portland during the summer of 2021 to see if he had any interest in trying to shoot stuff here for the upcoming Polar video, which ended up being Sounds Like You Guys Are Crushing It. I was already filming with his teammate Dane Brady for that video, and as it turned out Aaron had tons of ideas for Portland too. Pontus Alv bought some of that footage from me and the rest of it ended up being the beginning of "Homeward Bound." We unfortunately had to finish shooting prematurely in May of last year when Aaron blew his knee out, but I truly couldn't be more pleased with the finished product. I filmed everything in it except the one Pupecki grind off Powell, and Aaron trusted me to pick a song for the part as well. Using that Wipers track was something I was pretty nervous about, knowing that some people likely wouldn't be into it and also worried about doing the song itself justice. The response was huge though, and at the end of the day I would rather take that creative risk for the sake of making something interesting and memorable than play it safe with a boring song.

It came out really dope, and was cool to see him do a full local part. And then to switch gears a bit for the camera dorks like myself, how did your cameras and equipment change throughout your career skating and filming?

I've owned all three VX models at some point or another, plus a couple of DSLRs that I used for shooting video when I was first starting out. At this point I'm pretty set with just the HPX and Xtreme fisheye as a medium for capturing skating, along with the Braun Nizo Super-8 camera. That combination is pretty hard to beat, although I'd love to get a 4K rig to shoot things other than skating with soon. 

Throughout the course of all of your projects, what skaters / parts do you like the best when looking back on them?

The somewhat obvious answer is my entire body of work shooting with Nile Gibbs. Nile and I became very close friends while working on Luxury Vehicle, we filmed The Night Shift together as a solo project when we were roommates in Ravenna, then he had the last part in Aggressors nine months after that. We did three All City Showdown contests together, and he even trusted me to shoot and edit his introductory part for Venture trucks in 2018 while we were roommates in San Francisco. Witnessing how much he's grown as a skateboarder and human being over the last decade has been so impressive. I'm lucky to have a friend like Nile, and to have so many of our shared memories committed forever to mini-DV tapes.

Love it. We need to do a little video piece on Nile, tell his story and show people more about him. I’m going to add that to the list. And how about general NW skaters / videos, what are some of your favorites? Ones that get you stoked?

My easy answers are "my friends" and "the videos my friends make" and that's really the honest truth. In no particular order my favorite PNW skaters include Josh Anderson, Jordan Sanchez, Ryan Stangland, Nile Gibbs, James Lorimer, Logan Devlin, Josh McLaughlin, Cody Wilber, Aidan Olmstead, Aaron Herrington, Dane Brady and Nick Rios. My favorite PNW videos start with Alex Cooper's entire catalogue, especially the Olympia classic Voodoostache, Ben Ericson's Outer Limits, Jake Menne's OVR NATVRE, Kevin Stake's Watercolours, Jake Knapp's Balsamic Villagers, Kyle Steneide's About Time and Logan Devlin's Pleasuredome.

Whew what a list! Hell yeah. If you had to choose 3 videos or edits you’ve created to represent you in a skate video filmmaker exhibit, which ones do you choose?

Aggressors is definitely at the top of that list, followed by Sanitizer and Aaron's "Homeward Bound" part. All of them are meaningful to me as vignettes into different eras of my life, not to mention I think they're all decent videos and still fun to watch. 

A well rounded bunch, I like it. Well I know I missed some stuff, so tell me about something I didn't ask about? And what does life look like these days?

I currently live alone with my orange cat Hamburger in Southeast Portland. I have a full-time job as a technical supervisor with a corporate audio-visual service provider, and I still film skateboarding frequently along with shooting professional baseball in the summertime. 

Are you working on anything new at the moment? And when are you coming to put your journalism degree to use here on AB? Haha. We could really use a Portland correspondent...

I'm pretty much always filming with Cody Wilber whenever our time off lines up, just constantly searching for spots and stacking clips for the next project. I'm also currently shooting with my friends Dane Brady and Nick Rios for an upcoming Last Resort AB video, which will probably be wrapped up by the time this comes out. You know I'm down to help out and put my journalism degree to good use!

Well shit, I could ask you questions all day, but to be respectful of your time I’ll wrap it up with this last one. Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, etc. Where does skateboarding go from here, best case?

That's such a hard thing to predict. I have pretty discerning taste with the skateboarding media I consume, so I don't really know the answer. I still like to flip through the new Thrasher every month but really only watch videos when they feature skaters I enjoy or that I'm somehow connected to. Generally, my finger is off the pulse. I'm already a couple generations removed from the current crop of professional skaters, so maybe I'm just an outdated dinosaur at this point.

Any final thoughts? Shoutouts? Anything or anyone to keep an eye out for?

Thanks to everyone who has supported me, especially my family and friends, I wouldn't be here without you all. Thank you for the invite to do this interview Alex. My only shout out is to call on Jake Menne to be the subject for your next one!

We’ll put him on the list, thanks a ton for being down Jon!

You can keep up with Jon by following him on Instagram and subscribing on YouTube.