A Chat With Jeramiah Corea
"Sure enough, I didn’t go back to basketball."
We caught up with Jeremy “Jezza” Corea, filmer and editor of recent VP features f [ U _ X for ASICS Australia and Sping for Suzy on life in Melbourne and the process behind his videos. Happy Friday!
All photos by Wade McLaughlin
Being that you’re part of something new with ASICS Australia, and things mostly happening in Melbourne, what’s the scene like there?
It’s pretty prominent. There’s people out there doing a lot. If you go around the city you’ll see things which are being fixed up. To find a spot and get to it early you’ve got to be pretty quick in the city centre. There’s John Fitzgerald who does stuff for Vans. Geoff Campbell makes the best videos and he’s with his guys.
I’ve noticed a lot of kids doing their own thing. We’re five or ten minutes from downtown. We started fixing stuff up and it’s kind of free reign in our own area for a while. We spent most of the Suzy video here fixing the spots. They look great too because it’s a lot of old cobblestone and no one really wants to come over here.
I feel like Los Angeles goes in waves like that where everyone is going to one set of spots. Then it’ll die down and people get stoked on their own little area.
The other good part of that is I don’t have to go far [laughs].
Is traffic bad in Melbourne?
Not really. There’s a couple of main roads that you try to avoid but public transport is good. I live a minute from a train station which is two stops to the city. A lot of nights when we were skating last summer I’d skate home and it would take fifteen or twenty minutes with parks you can cruise through. It’s nice.
You started filming skateboarding about five years ago, right?
What’s been the trajectory to working with ASICS?
I was skating before that, but I had a bad injury and got turned off it. I ended up going back to basketball as a coach and playing for a while. I was doing a training thing with a friend who also played, making videos for it as a business. As COVID hit I thought about buying a camera because I already knew how to edit from being younger, with skating and filming. I loved it.
Watching skate videos as a kid you’re fascinated with how it works. I got a Panasonic HMC150 and I actually bought it from my boss at Brick and Mortar Supply, Brendan (Brenno) Parks He just had it lying around and it was actually the camera I was going to get. Sure enough, I didn’t go back to basketball. I thought I’d film my friends and whatnot but I ended up not using it at all, I’d just skate. But my friends would pick it up and use it. Then during the pandemic, when there was nothing to do, I started playing with the footage which made me want to use it. Eventually I started filming more.
A close friend, Andrew Currie — who rode for a couple of Ricky Oyola’s companies back in the day, we were skating together and I started filming him, then he asked if I wanted to make a video. I was unsure but it went that way. Thrasher ended up putting it up.
At that time there were a bunch of kids I’d seen skating around Sydney and each one of them seemed interesting, ripped and were fun to be around. We started filming a bunch of stuff and it came to a point in the summer where I pretty much had a video of them. I showed my friend Brendan from Brick and Mortar as these kids had ties to the shop, like, “Do you want this video?” He thought it was cool and he ended up paying my rent for the rest of summer so I could finish it. After that video came out, he asked me to work for the shop as a videographer and was down to try and make it a job. He’s all about creating memories, which is cool, especially for a small shop.
Off the back of that ASICS was starting and Al Wilson hit me up and asked about me taking on a role with the team to make videos and cultivate the brand. At the same time, George [Bidgood] wanted to ride for them. I’m not super drawn to skate companies anymore. Maybe crew videos more than companies, but ASICS felt different and interesting. They hit me up and I was, like, “First thing, you need to put George on.” It started with George and Gary [Almeida]. Kalem [Beange] was the next one. Glen [Fox] was already getting shoes in Europe and then he moved here, we connected and it worked out perfectly because he was already skating with us.
I don’t want to derail things but do you have some insights on Glen’s journey?
He grew up in Jersey which is an island near France and England.
Living in New York and being near New Jersey I’m always, like, “Where’s the original one?”
There’s a small scene there and I guess Glen took off. He’s a well-travelled man. He’s lived in a lot of places. Japan, Marseille, all over the place. He came to Australia with his partner at the time and went to Perth originally, which is a very isolated place. He had to do farm work [as part of his visa] which was two or three hours away from the city in the middle of nowhere. Eventually he turned up in Melbourne, I started seeing him around, and we ended up kicking it. Then ASICS happened and I was like, “I guess you’ll just do what we’re doing because you’re already doing that.”
The last person was Matthew Boggis who was here with Kieran Woolley. He saw the footage we had coming together and said it would be fun to be a part of something like that. So there’s six of them, including Kieran, but I just got him to come in and out when I could as he’s always traveling.
How long were you guys filming for the video?
It started about February last year. Early on we went to Sydney and got a bunch of footage which gave us time to get stuff in Melbourne so I thought about making the video just Sydney and Melbourne. I’d say it was eight months. The bulk of it started with Sydney and we got everyone here in Melbourne a couple of times.
That’s good. With a stacked team there’s a lot of people to coordinate. The clip is good and I think it’s going to get people stoked.
George was making the Suzy video so he had other things to film for. They all kind of did so we just had to be mindful of what we were going to use for what.
Is there anymore crossover with Suzy?
That’s George and his friend David. Everyone wants to start a board company, but they asked me what I thought and I encouraged it. They’ve worked on it for the past year and have done it pretty well, getting boards for everyone to skate whilst filming for the video. That’s probably my favorite thing I’ve ever got to work on. It was really fun making it and everyone who rides for that it’s sort of our crew anyway.
Going back to your ASICS video, some of the spots are crazy, like that bench spot along the banks.
When I was younger we used to drive past it all the time and everyone would be, like, “Imagine skating that thing.” I lived a street from there at the time so I’d been thinking about it for ages. My friend Wade and I fixed it. We kinda got greedy, trying to get it as good as we could, and the cops came and I had to make up some bullshit story about how someone got hurt there and we were trying to make it safe. They obviously didn’t buy it and ended up calling our bluff, like, “You guys are clearly skaters.” They told us we were probably going to get charged and have to pay for damages and it’s cobblestone, so it’s like a heritage listed park. We thought we were going to have to pay back a couple of thousand dollars.
We went to get a beer that night and the cop called me. He goes, like, “We’ve thought about it and you’re obviously not trying to harm anyone. We’re going to let you off with a warning. Come into the station tomorrow, both of you, and sign the papers.” We showed up the next day and got off. I got to skate it maybe three times and I didn’t do much. Eventually it got chiseled out and it hadn't been skated for three years. Then George was thinking about fixing it up again and I was like, “I’ll go with you but I’m not doing anything.” He fixed it pretty quickly. Nothing happened, no cops came. I’ve seen a bunch of people still skating it.
It’s so photogenic.
It’s a beautiful spot. I go kick it there most mornings with a coffee, it’s such a nice park. Its funny we ended up getting to skate it again, I didn’t think that was going to happen. No one really lives around there, it’s super close to the city, but the people in that area don’t like skating.