The headline may be hyperbole, but there’s no arguing that 2020 presented its own specific set of challenges. Greg Hunt outlines what he was up against while completing Alright, OK in a new interview with VHS Mag.

The streets on lock…

It [COVID] changed the video drastically because we went on a trip to Portugal in February, and then that’s the last time I saw Gilbert. He was pretty careful with COVID and he didn’t want to go anywhere. So most of his part was filmed in Richmond. You can say that L.A. was good to skate. It just depends on your… I guess everyone handles what’s been happening differently. But when COVID first hit here, it was kind of scary. Everything was shut down. And then there was the George Floyd protests and all that going on. It just felt weird to focus on skating because there’s so much else going on in the world. So that was also another thing that we weren’t skating as much around that time. For me at least, it wasn’t really until June or July that we really started skating a lot. For Elijah, we filmed almost everything in L.A. Elijah actually went out to New York twice on his own. But other than that, it really affected the video because February was our last trip and everything else was filmed in basically everybody’s hometown.

Editing in the new normal…

For me, honestly, the biggest challenge was making this video at home with my kids at home and one of my kids in school. And I mean that, because in the past when I make videos, I’d usually be able to go to an office or be at home and just stay up all night. If I’m really into what I’m working on, I could do long days and get it done. But now the reality is my kids are all at home all day because of COVID. I had to figure out how to make this video in the short windows of time that I had every day. So it was either waking up really early. I was trying not to stay up all night because I’m trying to stay healthy right now. It’s not just finding time to edit, but it’s when you edit, you want to be inspired and you want to be feeling good and into it. It doesn’t help if you’re really tired.

L.A. is burning…

I would say, the most memorable is probably the last trick, the nosegrind nollie flip. Because man, he worked so hard for that trick and it wasn’t the very last thing he tried. There was still about another month left to film. So in a way, I was sort of nervous that he was trying that because the board’s flipping under him. And if you go and look at that rail in person, it’s chest high. It’s really big. And my worry was that if he flips it wrong, he could just tweak his ankle and he’s going to be done. That’s a really risky trick to try when you still have another month to film. So there was that sort of nervousness for me, with him trying it because so much was on the line. And also the day that he did it was the day there had been these really bad fires around Los Angeles. That day, the sky was red. And I’m not exaggerating, it looked like Mars. I’ve never seen Los Angeles look like that. The sky was really red. There was so much smoke… you could see the sun behind the smoke, everything was red. It was a really weird day. The smoke smelled really bad. It was making Elijah feel kind of sick and he was coughing. That day they were telling people not to go out. That’s how bad the smoke was.

If skate videos serve as time capsules, Vans’s latest offering joins a long list of art that can be summed up as beauty in the face of adversity. Read the full interview here.

Image Via Greg Hunt / VHS Mag