Feature: Debris

Interview: Henry Genualdo Kingsford.

An interview with filmmaker Tom Pickard about his upcoming video project, Debris. 

Talk us through your move from London to Hastings a couple of years back.
I’m originally from Bexhill-on-Sea, which is the next town on from Hastings, but I moved up to London in 2009 and lived there for 13 years. After Covid, me and my girlfriend were kind of over London and the cost of living. There was no real reason for us to be there any more because of remote working, so we started thinking about moving out. Bristol was on the cards as we had some friends there, but then Richard Moore from Source BMX in Hastings hit me up about pushing the skate side of things there and asked if I would be interested in heading the project. At the time, I was losing the love for camera and directing work, which was my main job, so I thought: “Why not make a change, move to the coast, see how things go?” We moved down in May, 2022. 

Briefly, tell us about Jumble Sale, the video you made for Source back in 2022. 
Jumble Sale was all about showing the scene and all the different skaters and styles in the community, getting people skating together and creating some hype in the local area. 

And for purposes of clarity, am I right in thinking your new video Debris is an independent project?Yes. This is a video that comes purely from me. It’s not a Source video; it’s a video by Tom Pickard. The Source has obviously supported, but this is me filming outside of work hours with people who I respect and are willing to skate some pretty crusty spots. 

How did the Debris project come about? Al (Hodgson) said that Chris Collins was a catalyst.
I carried on filming after Jumble Sale, but to be honest, there was not much traction. Slowly, I started getting clips of Sonny Wright and Sam Allison here and there. In a way, Chris getting on board did heighten the project, because we started hitting loads of new spots in Kent and witnessing Chris’s solid ability on a skateboard. So it did step up a gear, but it was really when Al Hodgson got properly on board that the video became an actual concept and started coming together.

I know you had quite specific goals in terms of the types of spots you wanted to film. Tell us about this.
I didn’t want to retrace old spots or shoot ones that had been milked. I wanted to find new spots or make the best out of what we have. I wanted to show that there are always more spots to find if you look hard   enough and that the harder you try, the more satisfying the outcome.

What geographical area is covered in Debris?
I wanted to keep the areas relevant to the skaters, so East and West Sussex and Kent, but there are some clips from Surrey, Essex and Cornwall too. 

Were you inspired by any other filmmakers’ work, in terms of the spots you choose to document, but also how the film looks? 
Probably subconsciously, but there wasn’t really any specific video. Josh Stewart has always been an inspiration to me because the Static videos have constantly showcased fresh, new, cutty spots in a very underplayed but natural way. (Dan) Magee’s Conor Charleson part Slight Inclination got me hyped because it was a bit different and there were some really unique spots in there. You could really feel how rough they were – great texture levels! When someone like Conor is skating a spot that you have never seen before, it normally means that he is the only person that’s touched it, so you know it’s a very hard spot to make something out of. This is what I love: the idea of looking harder, working out the spot, persevering and then finally walking away with something. 

Give us a rundown of the main people in Debris and how they came to be involved. 
So there is Sam Allison from Brighton, who I met through Jordan Marowitch. Sam is a rad kid with an old heart. His Dad skates, so he understands the roots of skating and doing it for the right reasons. Sonny Wright from Hastingsis also a young one, but the nicest kid I know. I filmed him for Jumble Sale and kind of just carried on. He loves skating and being part of the crew – very good vibes. Mike Nicolls is an old West Sussex head originally from Worthing, but now residing in Hastings with his family. I randomly met him when we played Somnium at the shop. Al told me about his appearances in old Brighton videos and suggested I film with him. This discovery of an old OG gem led me on to another true OG: Matt Ransom! It was hard to pin Matt down at the beginning as he is such a lone, spur-of-the-moment kind of guy, but after a while he was really behind the idea of finding spots and started getting on it. I’ve always loved Matt’s skating and I knew he had more in him. As I said before, Al Hodgson was integral to the project as he is such a force of nature when it comes to spot hunting. That man is on a mission and I was happily asking for pins on a weekly basis. He really lifted the concept and I am very grateful to him for this. Chris Collins came into the picture early on. I met him at the Jumble Sale premiere and started seeing bits and bobs of him on social media. I just thought he was sick, so I messaged him to see if he would be interested in filming some stuff and he was into the idea. He is such a good guy and is very involved in various scenes in Kent, always helping people out, going to jams and supporting small crews and homies. I liked the idea of having various skaters scattered across the south, showcasing spots local to them.

Al mentioned to me that the timing of Debris was perfect for him, as after working on Somnium and Gradient, he wanted a break from filming and skating in Brighton.
Yeah, Al has really exhausted Brighton spots and I think he was missing the adventure of just getting out in the sticks and finding new things. It was good timing, as Harrison (Woolgar) was hyped on filming a Brighton video (Headz) and had that young spark that is needed to give a scene video traction. We obviously filmed in Brighton, but I tried to stay away and not tread on Harrison’s toes (too much).

We’ve established that carefully-chosen spots are central to the project. How did you go about choosing locations?
It originally came from where the skaters were based, but then gradually expanded. Like Kent, for example. Through Chris and going to a few video premieres in Folkestone, I saw local spots and naturally I wanted to hit them up, especially if they were fucked or haggard and needed work. Then there were the staple spots that we go back to for videos that someone can always work out new ways to skate, like the Buckshole Reservoir bank in Hastings or the Newhaven lighthouse. The new finds were the most important though, because skating untouched stuff is always the dream. Al found a spot behind a telephone exchange building and it was perfect. Knowing you have a spot like that, which can be showcased and skated by different people in the video, is what you need. 

Talk us through how you went about finding new spots (as in spots that, as far as we know, hadn’t been skated before) for the project?
So for me, it’s normally just cycling or driving around, or occasionally, word of mouth. I look for spots on Google Maps from time to time, but I don’t really have time to do that regularly. When I was in London, I would always cycle a longer route or take a different path, just in case I found a spot, so I just carried on doing that down south, but with more driving than cycling. Al is a spot fiend. He will go to places specifically to check for spots. He’ll be on Google Maps for hours, searching. He has a better nose for spots than me.

The spot with the handrails and banks by the A23 has an interesting story behind it. Tell us about that. 
I was driving back from Bristol very late, struggling to stay awake, and Al suddenly jolted up and started shouting. A car had come off the road and he had somehow noticed that it had knocked over a handrail, potentially leaving a bank down some steps open to skate. He went there the next day and the car had been cleared away, leaving the bank open. We had to clean it up, but it was pretty damn perfect. Then, on another visit, Al wandered across to the other side of the main road and found another bank, which was about three times bigger than the small one. It was completely covered in brambles, mud and debris. Myself, Al and Matt cleared the whole bank and again, it was perfect: good run-up, good run-out, and with a canopy of trees over the whole area! We knew that both banks would look lovely on footage and in photos, so over time we kept going there with different heads. There was also an evolution to the spot because in the end, they installed a new handrail on to the small bank. We were quite surprised about that, but in true Chris fashion, he skated the handrail.

Can you talk about some of the older, perhaps semi-mythical spots in the region you visited and in some instances, excavated for the project? 
I had a list of places I wanted to hit that were skated a while back, but were kind of forgotten about, like the Denge sound mirrors or the sea walls along the Kent coast, but after I learned about spots further afield, like the Crabble bank in Dover, it was so satisfying to find them, clean them up and make them skateable again. The Crabble bank, for instance, is always wet because it is a natural corner where rain can gather, but because of this, and the fact that it was once a ’70s skatepark, we had to hit it. Another one I was super hyped on was in my home town of Bexhill. South Cliff is a richer part of the town, with large houses that back on to the promenade. The prom has banks that go up to people’s gardens – I think they were used to bring boats down to the beach. We used to skate parts of the spot when we were young, but there was one steeper bank that we never touched because it was always covered in plants. I realised how good it would look on camera, so we cleared that up and got a load of tricks on it. Obviously it was hard to skate, but again, the more you put in, the more you get out. This project definitely made our spot goggles stronger because that was the impetus.

The Newhaven lighthouse has had some memorable appearances  in videos over the years. How does what has happened at a well-known spot like this before, inform what you document there and how? 
This was a tricky one because the lighthouse obviously worked really well for the video, but had been skated to death. I knew I wanted to go there, but had to be careful about tricks, so I really took Al’s lead on this as he knew all the ABDs. I just wanted Al to have a trick there because it’s one of his favourite spots and he has showcased that place really well in his Orwellian World Landscape back catalogue.

Were any Debris missions particularly memorable for any reason, good or bad?
One day we hit coastal spots along by Camber and St Mary’s Bay. It was a good impromptu crew: Jordan was over from Cornwall and Sam, Chris, Matt and Lizzie (Heath) were down. We hit a bank-to-drop first, and then headed towards a seawall further along the coast. En route, I got a puncture in a very desolate area and we all pulled over near a house surrounded by fields. As me and Chris were getting the spare wheel out, Matt pointed out a wooden mini-ramp in the garden of the house. This brightened everyone’s mood. After changing the wheel, we all headed over to the ramp. We spoke to a lovely lady who told us that they had made the ramp for her kids and that she was hyped on us skating it. We had a really fun session. This was a perfect example of the type of happy accident that can occur when venturing out street skating. I also had a lot of really memorable missions with Al, which always meant a lot because he understands exactly what it’s like to be behind the lens. 

Tell us about some of your favourite clips in the video.
The obvious one is Sam’s wallride on Brighton’s promenade. He tried it so many times over three different sessions and slammed super hard, over and over, because of that tiny run-out. I wanted him to roll away from it so much because he is from Brighton and it’s quite an infamous spot. When he did, I’m pretty sure I shed a tear. Chris’s Lewes roof ollie and Brighton rail feeble were insane because he did them one after the other, on the same day. That was definitely the gnarliest day of skating I’ve ever witnessed first-hand. All of the South Cliff clips are favourites because I love that spot so much: the way it looks on camera, the way the tricks work for the bank, and it’s right next to the sea. 

How would you describe your overall experience working on Debris? From the outside looking in, it seemed like a great way to spend a summer, but I know projects like this can be stressful in many ways.
On the whole, I feel that the project has been really rewarding because we have a solid crew and everyone gets along and has the same goal. Filming throughout last winter was quite brutal, but I feel like that process really helped shape the main crew and pushed everyone to make the most of this summer. The only stress came from a few ankle injuries that Chris had to deal with along the way, but that man is a beast and can somehow recover in a matter of months.

Debris was accepted at this year’s Vladimir Film Festival. How important is this sort of recognition for you personally, and for the project?
I just really respect independent film festivals. I have been to a quite a few in the past with short films and I find it very inspiring to be with like-minded people who share the same values as you. I have always wanted to go to Vlad, but never managed to, so I took the opportunity this time around with a project that I am really proud of. 

What are your plans after Debris wraps up? Do you have any new projects in mind?
To be honest, I have no idea. I’m not sure if I have another skate video in me. I’m way too old for this shit. Sorry. 

Watch Debris here.