11 Favourite Tricks: Cameron Fraser

Over the past year and a half, I’ve written something on almost everyone who has a part in this video, the exception being Dean Palmer. He has never done an interview in his life, and I’d hate to be the one to break that.

Since Karl’s interview in each introduction, I’ve tried to see how many times I could call this video a masterpiece. It’s been three, and I’m going to do it again. Arcadia is a masterpiece. It is one of the most well put together scene videos that has come out of Australia in a long time. Featuring parts from Corey Young, Jae Overton, Karl Dorman, Dean Palmer and Sean Ryan, with a friend’s section that houses footage from some of Sydney’s greatest.

Cameron is one of my best friends, so there may be a bit of bias there, but watching the video you can see effort and dedication that is unparalleled. Through the three years he spent filming for the video, the thousands of dollars that he spent on 16mm film, the animations he made for the video and using a camera that hardly even works to film it all. The video coming together was a feat, worth insane amounts of praise. Beyond what Cameron put in, the skateboarding in the video is incredible.

After some music rights trouble that caused delay in the online release, the video is now live in full. I thought there would be no better way to celebrate the online launch than getting Cameron to talk about his eleven favourite clips (plus some more) from the video, to get an insight into the behind the scenes of the video.

Corey Young: Circular Quay Lines

This is two lines, but it feels wrong to include one without the other. The first one is at night where he starts at a manual pad and then skates across the street to the long outledge at Circular Quay. I love that spot and that he found a different way of skating it. I am a big fan of long lines that utilise an entire spot or piece two spots together, it reminds me of something that you would see in Eastern Exposure 3, a video which has definitely had a strong influence on how I approach filming.

The second line is the one in the daytime that ends with the backside nosegrind revert to switch manual.  This was just a random day in the city and Corey threw the idea out there while we were at another spot. I don’t remember it being too much of a battle, he did it relatively quickly from memory which is wild because it’s such a crazy line.

While making Corey’s part, we made a conscious effort to revisit spots we had already filmed tricks at, in order to showcase the full potential of these spots, and you can see there are multiple examples of this throughout the video.

Corey Young: Fish Markets Ledge Slide to Grinds

This is another Corey two piece that made sense to put together. This was towards the end of filming and there was pressure to get more footage before the deadline, so he did the noseslide to crook as safety. You can only really skate that spot in summer when you get longer days because the the carpark closes at four, we went in winter, so we only had an hour of light and the time pressure was on. It is such a cool spot, and it is such a cool way of skating it. The pillar is too close to the ledge so your board will hit it if you stay in a noseslide, lifting it up into grind the way Corey did is such a cool way of manoeuvring around the pillar. After he did the tricks, he kept on calling them the “Missy Elliot'', like ‘flip and reverse it’ because he was doing the mirrored version of the same trick, which is so stupid [laughs].

Jae Overton: Taylor Square Line

This is the oldest clip in the video, we filmed it in February 2020, right before the first lockdown. It was supposed to be in Interchange which I was planning on putting out the next month. Between then and the time Interchange came out we decided to start filming for Arcadia, so we held onto the footage and somehow, I succeeded in getting Jae to film a part. I still don’t know how I pulled that one off.

I love Nik Stain’s line in the second 917 video where he skated it in a similar way, going from top to bottom of Taylor Square so I threw the idea out to Jae, and he was down. He did it pretty quickly which caught me off guard. You can kind of tell I wasn’t quite ready as I’m really far away when he lands the switch manual. I remember taking three massive pushes to catch up to him just in time for him to do the fakie flip down the hill, which he did out of nowhere. 

The line all in all was scary to film, I was also dropping down the three-stair next to him, that was around the time Jacob Harris was dropping down stairs and rolling down banks while filming and I wanted to do something like that. Looking back I don’t love that I choose to film it like that, I think it looks a bit janky. Maybe if Jae didn’t land it so quickly it would have been filmed a bit better.

Karl Dorman: Late Shuv

The sculpture is in The Rocks, it is called “The Change” and it was designed by Michael Snape and has been skated for the longest time. The first clip I saw on it was Rhino’s [Ryan Wilson] wallride in Skylarking, a video that has had a strong influence on me and is pretty obvious when you watch Arcadia. Lawrence Keefe ollied up and dropped off the sculpture in Law of the Seas, which is where the influence for this trick came from. Late shuvs are generally quite polarising, and not a trick I am usually down for, but this is one of the few exceptions. It is such a unique spot and a cool way to approach it. Karl gets frustrated at how many of his trick suggestions I reject but I am very grateful that we filmed this. It is such a special clip.

It was also really hard to film because there was very little room for error on Karl’s part not to shoot his board into me. I was hunched up in a ball right next to where he was landing, because I wanted to do the spot justice and it’s kind of the only way you can film that trick without the sculpture getting in the way. I think it was the last trick he filmed for Arcadia because shortly after he hurt his knee and couldn’t film for the rest of the video.  

Bernie Foo: Switch Wallie Backside Tailslide

This was a few weeks before the deadline and I really wanted to get a trick with Bernie. I had only met him a few times, but I have always looked up to his skating and going back to the Skylarking connection I thought it would be so cool to have someone from that video in Arcadia.

I don’t think many people had skated that as a wallie to ledge spot at that point. We fixed up the cracks in the bricks and he went straight to doing that which is a crazy first proper trick to do on that. 

It’s funny, we went back to that spot on the Pass~Port x Evisen trip and he ended up doing switch wallie back tail shuv, which I also filmed, and it came out before Arcadia went online, oh well.

Rhys Grogan: Gap to Backside Lipslide

This is a special clip. It is such an insane thing to try, a gap to back lip on a below sea level step. He didn’t wax the spot while doing it. He kept on sticking and eating shit, we would ask him if he wanted wax, and he kept saying no. On the one he landed he somehow pushes through the ledge; does it so well and just starts laughing after it.

Rhys and a lot of the older guys used to skate St Mary’s all the time when it was actually a spot, so it is really cool to revisit that. When I first started skating, I remember looking at people skate the spot and thinking it was the coolest thing ever, but by the time I was old enough to start skating in the city it was gone.

Dean Palmer: Switch Flip Line

This is an example of a spot that’s been there forever but has hardly been skated. We came up with the idea for it when we were just out skating one day. We went there and Dean was like, ‘If I do the nosegrind revert I’ll do the switch flip straight away’. The nosegrind revert ended up being really hard and the carve around the corner to get to the gap was really awkward, so it took a while to even get to the switch flip. Not to mention that spot is in the middle of Newtown, so it is always really busy. The first switch flip he went for he stomped it. He only tried the switch flip about six times and towards the end he was getting so focused, just trying to hold on for dear life. There was an attempt where he stomped it and threw himself into the ground and cannonballs across the street. After that he said he was going to try one more switch flip and ended up doing it perfectly. He told me afterwards that, that was the longest he had ever tried a trick for, it ended up being five hours straight. He truly is the world’s best skater

Dean Palmer: Walkway Ledges Line

These ledges are at Sydney University, where I have sat and eaten lunch while studying there for the last five years. I think aesthetically it’s one of the best-looking ledge spots in the city. They were capped for so long and when they ended up getting uncapped, I was on a mission to take as many people there as I possibly could. I wanted everyone in the video to have a line there. We ended up doing pretty well, Sean, Jae and Dean filmed lines there and Corey filmed one that we didn’t end up using.  

Dean’s line is so perfectly put together, mirrored trick in and mirrored trick out. I love both those tricks. It is such a great line. Dean and I are both Sydney Uni alumni. It’s perfect.

Dean Palmer: Frontside Flip and Switch Frontside Flip Line

This was a prime example of Dean going months without filming anything and I was worried about how his part was coming along. We had filmed a lot at this point, but he wasn’t coming out skating as much and I was definitely stressing. Sean was telling me that he does this, but he always pulls through at the last minute. Trent [Evans] (Pass~Port owner) said the same thing too and told me most of his stuff in Kitsch was filmed in the eleventh hour. This was filmed about a month before the deadline for the video, and Dean hadn’t been skating much so I was a bit on edge about him jumping down something of that size, but he was so confident that he could do it pretty quickly. At one point it wasn’t looking very promising, but then out of nowhere he just does the most perfect switch frontside flip. After that Rhys, Jae and myself all filmed tricks that same day, which was probably the most productive day I had the entire time filming for Arcadia. This clip definitely lit a fire under Dean and he ended up filming half of his part in the last month of filming.

Sean Ryan: Switch Back Tailslide

He dragged me here about five times at seven am in the middle of winter. The spot is at Martin Place in the middle of the city and you can only skate it before nine in the morning or at night but Sean really struggles to skate at night so morning was the only option. This was at a time when he was really pushing what he was capable of doing, he trained up switch back tails non-stop for months to get to that point. The first time we went there he split his chin open. The day he finally landed it we were just like, ‘That’s it’ we didn’t skate for the rest of the day, Sean just bought me a nice breakfast and we just hung out.

Sean Ryan: Gap to Lipslide

When I think of Sean’s skating I think of this trick; I think it perfectly encapsulates his skating. We’d gone there once before, that spot is a massive bust and he isn’t one to get stuck right into skating stuff. He needs to test the waters, so we went there, he ollied the double set a couple of times and then a security guard came out and he tried one front lip, he hit the kink and he got thrown, he was fine, but it made us realise how jarring the kink was, and that this probably wouldn’t be something that would come easily. We went back on a public holiday to go do it to just be sure we would get enough time. We had a big crew, everyone was sitting on the hill across cheering him on, it was a really nice session. It took him a while to do it but he didn’t take any crazy slams or anything. The biggest battle was rolling away after hitting the kink, it would throw him off making it hard for him to land it. Sean went back another day after landing it to shoot a photo with Sam Coady and he told me the first one he committed to his board snapped when he hit the rail and nearly got smoked. Thankfully he was fine but yeah, that is one of those tricks I will never forget.

Portrait of Cameron Fraser by Josh Sabini