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Pushing the boundaries JimGeduldick has gone from skateboarding to creating incredible mixed-reality masterpieces
J imGeduldick grewup loving all of any skate videos he could find. “I’dwatch themuntil the VHS tapes broke,” he laughs. “But I always had an interest into how they made those videos. I wondered how they became, as skate cinematographers are called, filmers.” Geduldick got his first inkling of an answer when his family bought hima 1987 black &white handheld camcorder that recorded up to 11 minutes of 120x90 video on a 90-minute cassette tape. Geduldick things to do with skateboarding. As a kid in the 1980s, he devoured skate magazines and pored over the footage
the finals, I wouldwind up just filming everything. I was beyond fascinated.”
spent hours shooting clips with his friends - “just silly stuff, nothing cinema-style or anything” – and it was enough tomake him want more. VHS cameras gave way to Hi8 and digital. Geduldick’s passion for skating continued through high school. He saved up for the must-have skating essential of the day – a fisheye lens. Geduldick chose not to attend filmor art school, but he learned how to shoot from the library and the fledgling internet. “Every time I would go to skate or snowboard contests or things like that,” he says, “if I didn’t qualify, or there was some stuff going onwhere friendsmade
Direction and director The spark for Geduldick’s career arrived in the formof an opportunity at a prominent videomagazine, which shipped to subscribers via VHS and DVD during the nineties and noughties. A couple of friends who worked at themagazine agreed to consider a submission fromGeduldick. Soon after, he received his first cheque. “Being a teenager and seeing ‘Oh, I could get paid for this!’ was pretty amazing,” Geduldick recalls. “I realised I might be able tomake a career out of video, beyond just pursuing a career as a professional skateboarder or snowboarder. I really took to it from that point on and started getting serious about cinematography and editing.” Geduldick’s embracing of video editing came right around 1999when digital video tipped into themainstream– a point not far fromwhere virtual reality stands today. He started to land freelance jobs and, once again, set to learning everything he could about stopmotion, digital effects, motion graphics and other technologies. A burgeoning career pulled Geduldick away from the board sports world and into positions covering broadcast editorial, children’s animation and deeply technical productionwork. “I knew computer pipelines, and I knewhow to build RAIDs and high-end storage systems,” says
ABOVE Jim Gelduldick started out his career shooting skateboarding, but now he specialises in virtual production
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