By 2009, I already had a camera and was fully immersed in filming skate videos every day. Shooting in the city (Petrópolis - RJ, Brasil) where I was born was a huge challenge because we had to create spots that didn’t even exist there. It was more about the mental drive to build a scene than an actual reality!
Gregori Bastos, aka Alecrim, was a master at overcoming these challenges with style and finesse.
Here are some GIFs, and at the end, a video filmed by me and edited by him at the time, featuring extra tricks from a project we worked on.
He has one of the most unique tre flips I’ve ever seen to this day.
Pay attention to his back foot position! He found a unique way to scoop with a completely different mentality.
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Or just landing a switch 360 over a manhole like the ground was smooth, ignoring any chance of the board getting caught in the cracks.
It’s crazy to think that we used to take a bus for over an hour just to skate at this small court, which today is where the city's skatepark stands.
Or that a nose grind went down on a ledge in the middle of a city so rough that even the nose wouldn’t slide—but the drive and flow to make it happen overcame all limits.
Finally, a technical trick on a gap we used to skate at the infamous "Big Ashtray" in the city center—the only skate spot in the downtown area.
You can watch the full video below!