The Commons

Xander (@xqndr) and Jake (@jacr3w) should both be household names at this point. With noteworthy SPL performances and a strong presence at jams all over, they have both made considerable splashes in recent years. The dynamic duo spent the last two years on their new video project “Crickets” a refreshing take on the night training video genre. Egg (@klickstein) sat down to chat with them about the project, night training, and cricket consumption.

Egg: How long you two have known each other and been training buddies?

Xander: At Woodward, but I don’t know when.

Jake: Seven or eight sounds about right? Because it was one year into me training, because it was the second year I went to Woodward that I met you.

Egg: Do you feel like from the start you guys have had a pretty compatible training style?

Xander: He was definitely a lot better than me for a while. I mean I was good at skill as a kid, but being good at skill as a kid doesn’t really show through that much, because it’s like small challenges and everyone else likes to do flips. So I would always just, you know, try my best to be able to hang with the group, and it was definitely always fun training.

Jake: I remember the first week we met, we played a game of stick and you were killing me, so I stuck a castaway. *Laughs*

Egg: Have you guys ever made a video together before?

Jake: We filmed the oof boys videos before, but it wasn’t really too much of a focused effort. It was more of just shoot as much as you can, and then we’ll figure it out later. It wasn’t really anything with a vision. So this was kind of a different beast when it came to planning and filming and all that.

Egg: What led y’all toward wanting to make a night video?

Xander: I think we were just at a parking lot and got inspired to do a clip, and then we we’re like “we should just do a whole video in parking lots.” And that evolved into not just parking lots, but all sorts of mundane, car centric, not really made for human enjoyment sorts of non-spots.

Jake: I think we’re just in a grocery store parking lot on the shopping cart racks, like the big metal ones, and it just went from there.

Egg: That’s something that definitely jumped out to me was the the spot choices. People talk about non-spots, but I feel like a lot of the times people are using that term, the spot is actually pretty good, or they have something kind of unique going on. A lot of these spots were straight up shitty. And a lot of them felt like very American. Desolate car centric architecture. 

Jake: Yeah, super barren, super concrete.

Egg: Was this up in NorCal?

Xander: Yeah, every clip except for one was in San Jose,

Egg: Do you feel like these sorts of spots are somewhat reflective of what a lot of the landscape is like there? Like lots of strip malls and parking lots?

Jake: Yeah, I mean, that’s kind of the spots I grew up training on, lots of concrete and like a pole. Sometimes you’ll find a pole that’s kind of an interesting shape or angle, and you get excited about it, because it’s something different.

Egg: What do you guys see as the impact of training at night and at these sorts of spots? How did it effect your trick selection and movement style?

Xander: One thing I could say is we were in a lot of sketch areas. It definitely forced me to not strive for perfection or my hardest thing. I knew I probably wouldn’t have that much time to get it done. Just like seeing people kind of mean mugging us and circling their bikes around. And we have all this expensive camera gear. Near the end I was just relieved that we had gotten it all done. We looked kind of sketchy too so cops were pulling up on us a lot. 

Egg:I found that one part in the Edit pretty funny, you’re like “Oh, it’s so easy” And then the cops pull up before you can do it.

Xander: Yeah, Jake had a really cool line planned out too. That’s a funny story, actually, it was in the parking lot of a Sheriff shooting range. It was a big parking lot, so we were pretty far away from it, but it was definitely still there. There was a night class going on, and when they left, they called the police, and the police came up on us really fast and had us put our hands behind our backs and all that, it was a pretty scary moment. They thought we were stealing copper or something. 

Jake: They were not chill about it at all.

Xander: Yeah, and your line would have been so sick.

Egg: I felt like there was a pretty decent mix of playful ideas and some high level bangers. Something like a cast full is way cooler to me doing it at night, like plus 10 style points. And like the the side pre to the angle bar that Xander did. Just the extra difficulty of a low light environment adds a lot for me. What led you guys to want to seek out some of the those harder challenges? What was it like pushing a bit in this environment? 

Jake: Usually when I get into night filming mode, I get super detailed with my lines and movement, but because we were shooting it kind of hyped me up to want to push my difficulty a bit more. Realistically, it’s not that different if you have a good lighting setup doing it at night versus during the day. It’s just like a bit more of a mental battle to get yourself in the zone and recognize that it is just the same thing. For the cast full, it was a tall wall, and on one side was just a drop to black, and then the other side was the landing. So while I was sitting in the cast, I was just looking at nothing. It was really tripping me out, going for it.

Egg: Xander, I’d love to hear about the side pre to the angled rail, seemed like a crazy one to do at night.

Xander: So that was one of the first ideas I had for this project. I think it was just a joke at first, but then I made a setup in the gym leaning a rail diagonally, and it was working so I thought I could probably do it. It was definitely scary to send at first. I do love the vibes of night training, but honestly the biggest struggle was that Ry Ry was the one holding the light and he just kept forgetting to hold it in the right spot. I had to keep just turning his hand. 

Jake: We didn’t have a subway surfers iPad to keep him engaged while filming.

(both laugh)

Xander: But yeah it was scary to send. After I did it once it took a bunch of tries to get it how I liked it. That was my proudest moment of the video, I think. It was one of the first things we filmed and now its like two years old or something like that. At the time I didn’t see anyone doing side pres to angled rails like that, but now that its been a while I’ve seen other people like Marquis doing it and I was like ah damn. 

Egg: We’re you guys mostly training in well lit environments or were there a lot of times were you needed somebody to hold a light?

Jake: We had a couple lights, but it was kind of a bare bones lighting setup. We had a little spotlight that we would hold under the camera just so it was easier to film. And then we had another bigger light that we could put off to the side if we needed to. But we really didn’t use the big light all too often, we’d usually try to pick spots that had decent lighting. And then another cool one is at the very beginning that clip with the phone booth, we lit up with Xander’s headlights on the car behind the phone booth, which I think was sick.

Egg: I want to talk a little bit about the editing style. Was this collaboratively edited, or did one of y’all kind of take that on?

Xander: It was gonna be a collaboration, but I ended up doing it. Jake did help with some concepts though.

Jake: We tried to do the shared Adobe thing, and it didn’t work that well, so Xander took most of the edit and I would pop my head in every couple weeks just to see how it was going and give my two cents.

Xander: Something I did want to say, is that every time that there’s some glitch looking effect, that is a real glitch. I broke my hard drive, and got it repaired, and then it just glitched at like perfect times. So like when I did that line rolling on the rail and then dancing, it only glitched while I was dancing, and it just looks sick and perfect. None of the glitches were edited. 

Egg: Super rad, what a lovely coincidence. 

Jake: Happy accident. 

Egg: Jake, were you doing the animations for this one as well?

Jake: I actually didn’t do any animations for this. This was all Xander. I was originally gonna do most of them, and then he did a few. And I thought they were really sick and told him to just keep going with it. 

Xander: Yeah, I had fun with those.

Jake: I really liked the gainer one where you turned into a grasshopper, that’s one of my favorites.

Egg: Heightened by the editing style, the energy overall of this video was just infectiously fun. It just really seemed like you guys are just having a blast out there. It felt really relatable for me. When I go night training with people I feel like the vibe is a bit more relaxed than a normal session. I felt like the editing style did a great job of kind of highlighting that feeling of just like being out having a good time.

Jake: I feel like the video vibe is kind of like happy chaos. It doesn’t really slow down too much for too long. It’s kind of always high energy, good vibes and a little all over the place in a good way. I think it ended up really cool and really fun to watch.

Egg: One thing I definitely need to ask about is the crickets. Where that idea came from, how you executed it… I need more details. 

Xander: So that happened after sending a draft to the Commons. They were like “its a great video, but there’s no crickets.” I immediately went to Jake and I was like I swear on our first night of filming I was filming this one cricket hella times, but I just couldn’t find that. All I had was like roaches and spiders. So I was like alright, I’m getting it. I’m getting crickets. I told my roommate Ben lets go to petco and get some crickets, and do something fun with them. It started with the idea of pouring them on someone’s body. And then randomly Ben needed to go over the 10 dollar card limit so he got some lighter fluid. And then we’re like, “Yo, you could use your lighter fluid that you bought for no reason. We could do a ring of fire and then put the crickets on your body.” So it slowly went to the idea of Ben doing it, but he was kind of nervous. I was freaked out by the crickets too. Just seeing them crawling around was terrifying. We took some shots of them just like in the bag, but I was freaked out. The more we had them slowly I was just like I’ll just put them in my mouth like what’s the worst that’s gonna happen? I’m not gonna die. Like, it’s cool, it’s art. And then Alex and Ben came to the parking lot with me, and I got a shot glass, and the rest is history. 

Some people were like you should have showed it for longer, like you did all that for just a few seconds? And I’m like hell yeah. 

Egg: That’s about all of the main questions I got written down. Is there’s anything else that y’all want to touch on before we wrap up? 

Xander: One thing is my Ender. Jake technically has the ender but I mean like my last clip in the video. I think it’s pretty cool, but I had two different ideas planned and couldn’t do them because of my injury. But I am still happy with that being my ender, because it ended up being so much scarier than I thought it was gonna be. I just hadn’t done something scary in so long, and then I did that. Also, I have a raw clip of right when I landed it and right after I celebrate the security thing is like “leave the premises” and like the sirens were going off. 

Jake: They have like a siren pole sitting in the parking lot of that spot, and they’ll yell at you through the loud speaker like “we’ve called the police, leave the premises” Its kind of scary training at that spot because you never know when it’s gonna go off, you’re like racing the clock.

Xander: So that was looming in my head. I was like it should be easy, I should do this, we’re about to get called on really soon. I thought I could just go and then do it and leave, but it took me so long. Luckily it was a perfect amount of time. I’m really happy with how everything turned out. 

Jake: Me too.