Take Your Time

A film collaboration by Jeremy Soderburg, Jonathan Labez, and Gregory Preston.

Take Your Time has been in the works for about a year and a half, from the initial murmurs at a Del Taco late one night in December 2010 after a rained out blade session to the last minute editing late one Sunday Afternoon in April 2012.

The idea formed around footage that Jonathan Labez has filmed over the course of 2010, us doing what did normally – blade and mess around profusely.  It was enough for short online video.  We decided it would make for a fitting going away present to our friend Anthony Gallegos, who was moving to Central California in Late January 2011 for school.  We figured after he left, we would film for another 4-5 months and things would be done.  We were so wrong!

At this time, it wasn’t called Take Your Time.  It’s been so long, none of us remember the first iteration.  It was Vincent Martinez (NiceGuyVinny) who came up with the title “Take Your Time”, when at a Del Taco, telling the cashier to take their time with his order.  Gregory and Vince liked the name, so it stuck.

We were meeting up weekly to film, with Greg filming during the week having recently bought a camera and Jonathan driving down to Long Beach, CA on weekends.

In many ways, we were ill-prepared for what it took to film a video.  That’s where involving Jeremy Soderburg bought a fair amount of professionalism to the video.  He was a veteran of a dozen + sections and edits.  Jeremy can bang out full-fledged edits in a week.  He is precise in where he wants to go, what to skate, how to skate, how to film.  So bringing him in focused Greg and Jonathan’s attention.

Jeremy’s involvement also brought in many of the local sponsored names in the Los Angeles/Long Beach area, the greater base of our friends.  It wasn’t just a fast food idea anymore, it had become a community project, with everyone pouring their hearts in to skate and film!

We were all equally surprised and grateful for all the support we received while putting this video together.  An example of this is we opted to duplicate the video ourselves with a homespun duplicator.  The local rollerblading community helped us with donated DVD drives, a power supply, a case.  It meant a lot to have their involvement in something that started off as an idea conceived over soda and faux-tacos.

Throughout this whole process, our aim was to keep things free.  Posted online for free, DVDs for free.  As the video grew, we decided to involve skate shops to make this possible.  In return for their support, we would offer them DVDs to offer with their orders and an ad in our video.  This trade would ensure we could fund this video and get it into as many hands as possible.

Now I bet you’re curious about the line up.  In a year of official filming, we racked up a ridiculous amount of footage.  How much footage?  In montages alone, we weeded through 3 hard drives for the cream of the crop and still came up  with 200 clips!  Some people we knew would have sections and others in post-production upon looking at the sheer amount of footage in their names, were given sections.

The section line-up goes as follows: Chris Calkins, Abel Lawal, Mike Obedoza, Jeremy Soderburg, Anthony Gallegos, Keith Hubbard, Gregory Preston, Geof Leyva, Ryan Santos, Ranier Piramide, Steven Cortez, Kruise Sapstein, Robert Besabe, Daniel Rosado, Eric Mandy, Joey Jaime, and all the way from Germany, Alexander Rudolf.

In a nutshell, that covers the last year and a half of our lives.  So we present to you our video, Take Your Time.