Longboarding
Also known as: longboard skating, downhill skateboarding
Cruising, carving and downhill on a long skateboard, which splits into two kinds of footage that have almost nothing in common.
Updated
What it means
Longboarding is skateboarding rather than surfing, despite sharing a word with a nine-foot surfboard. A long deck ridden for cruising, carving or for descending a road at considerable speed.
The footage divides cleanly in two. Cruising and carving is travel material, slow and pleasant, where downhill is genuinely fast and genuinely dangerous, and the two of them are filmed nothing like each other at all.
Downhill is the one that needs care. Fifty miles an hour on tarmac in a tuck, with no brakes beyond a slide, which puts it closer to Drifting than to anything in a skatepark.
How it works in practice
A chase vehicle is the standard downhill shot. A car or another rider with a camera, holding position alongside, which conveys the rate in a way no fixed position can.
Cruising suits a Travel montage. Short shots of road, light, feet and movement cut to music, since nothing in that half of it is a moment and all of it is texture.
Low and close is what makes speed read on tarmac. A camera down at deck height as somebody passes produces the real sensation of it, where the same pass from standing height looks like a jog.
What to watch out for
Road use is the first consideration rather than the shot. A closed road is a different situation from an open one, and filming on the second encourages exactly the wrong behaviour.
Smooth tarmac removes the reference. A rider on an empty road at speed looks slow, so a Leading lines foreground or a verge passing close is what gives the eye something.
The two kinds of footage do not cut together. A carving montage and a downhill run belong in different sections, and mixing them produces a sequence with no Pacing at all.
How RawClip handles it
Fast descending passes score well on motion and cut cleanly against music, while cruising material is kept as the quieter texture around them. Both arrive from the same card and tend to end up in different parts of the sequence.