Geoff Phillip – Happy 420

I’ve never heard of Geoff Phillip before; I’ve maybe seen a clip or two of him in a montage somewhere that I don’t remember, so I came into this edit with no preconceived notions. It was a “Happy 420” edit and I assume everyone reading this knows, but for anyone who doesn’t, “420” is a random slang term for smoking marijuana cigarettes. Rumors vary depending on where you are from as to where this term came from, but for the most part nobody cares, especially burnouts that use the term.

So anyways, Geoff Phillip appears to be a pothead and to celebrate his love of the reefer, he decided to put out a bad ass edit on April 20th, which is 4/20, the international holiday of potheads. At first I assumed the song was by Jefferson Airplane but after YouTube’ing it, it seems to be “Sally Go Round The Roses” by Grace Slick & The Great Society. It is a really fitting hippie-type song for a stoner section, even though by today’s standards in blading Geoff would almost appear to be a clean cut guy. The filming all seems standard. Most clips seem to lean towards a low contrast, soft film look and shot at 24 frames per second, which can be very blurring when slo-mo’ed. There are a few special effects to make it more trippey and go along with the theme, but nothing really distracting, which is good.

Geoff has a lot of natural style skating. He really makes tricks look comfortable and I find myself wanting to do the tricks he just did because they look like they feel good. Posture wise he seems kind of tall, but definitely not lanky, and while skating in Valos he really resembles Erik Bailey. Most of his tricks are technical grinds, almost every single clip in the edit is a grind actually, but he is really good at them so it doesn’t get boring. Lacing a topside tea kettle up a stair rail is just one of the many tech moves he pulls off, but probably is the most difficult, and did I mention he 360s off it. WTF? There are some rail to ledge transfers and a lot of switch ups, one highlight being savannah 360 to kind grind. There are a few gaps and 540s, along with a line or two, and just a lot of really smooth, tech, switch ups, that just make for an all around great edit.