"SUGUS" / ABS Annecy / PREMIERE
Part of the crew of the Annecy, France-based ABS Skateshop - Kevin Deschamps, Quentin Caillat, Ludo Mendez, Lilian Ceccon and Marc Leblanc - recently went on a skate holiday to Alicante, Spain, and made it back through the customs with "SUGUS": eight minutes of fake VX-1000 (we'll expand on that) and real skateboarding between homies, and productive ones at that seeing as the entirety of the edit was filmed over just a handful of days.
Illustration: Quentin Caillat
The finished product is what LIVE is presenting to you today and Marc, its author, explains:
"Kevin was the one behind the idea for this trip. I was super down because I had just improvised a new filming set-up to emulate the look of the classic VX-1000/MK1 combo (using an old full frame camera and a fish-eye intended for APS-C cameras that I sanded down), which I had given a quick try on the Vans Thursday Sessions last year already and thought was cool to use, and capture the footage from!
Ph.: Kevin Deschamps
We all spent some time reflecting over which city we'd visit, and we tried to get ahold of as many people affiliated to ABS Annecy as possible, since the shop was helping us out on this trip.
Originally, all the homies were down: Nico Gisonno, Falafev, Lucien Genant... There really was a spark but in the end, only Lilian Ceccon, Quentin Caillat and Ludo Mendez could make it... That's when I thought to myself: "boy, this isn't going to work according to the plan..."! Jokes aside, the guys really killed it on that trip - we really only stayed in Alicante for three or four days, yet we naturally managed to check out many spots, all the while with no pressure and always lots of motivation even when physically drained, with stretching sessions in lieu of the usual evening drinks... Thanks, homies!" - Marc Leblanc
"We asked Marc « so,
what more could you have asked for? »
and he just said
« Nabil and Morin »…"
Illustration: Quentin Caillat
Two bonus anecdotes from Kevin:
"So, we make it to the famous three-flat-three spot and then, some drunk guy starts tagging along and watching us skate - he kept requesting to drink out of our bottles and free cigs... After a while, Quentin gives in and hands him a cig, that's when Kevin asks Quentin to shake the guy's hand for a photo and, suddenly, we realize that the guy had just pissed himself - his pants were soaked with piss and Quentin was just there shaking his hand, it was filthy. We ended up giving him our Fanta bottle telling him it was Ricard and he was so hyped."
Ph.: Kevin Deschamps
"Just to provide some context, Marc has been filming for ABS Annecy for a while now, and he's spent quite the amount of hours documenting, amongst others, Nabil Slimani and Julien Morin. In Alicante, he'd be going about them every day, constantly - every evening, we'd be going to back home and watching the footage of that day, for the most part we'd be satisfied and everytime Marc would be like « yeah well, Nabil and Morin would have done better » and then at every spot, everytime someone would land a trick, he'd also be like « yeah well, Nabil and Morin would have done better », it quickly became a joke but it'd still drive us crazy. At the end of the trip, we asked Marc « so, what more could you have asked for? » and he just said « Nabil and Morin »… " - Kevin Deschamps
Ph.: Kevin Deschamps
Last but not least, let's catch the opportunity to mention the recent works of Julien Paccard, the man behind the full-length video "COLOR FOOLS" five years ago already, featuring most of the same heads and just concretizing themselves now under the form of the imminent "GRRRND ZERO", a project exploring urban textures as a thematic which you can already start discovering for yourself, here!
