How a 2003 Skate Film Made the Boards Invisible

A section from Yeah Right! where the skateboards become invisible.

Yeah Right! (2003) is an influential skateboard film made by Spike Jonze — credited with taking skateboarding into the digital era.

Jonze made clever use of digital effects and in a standout film that featured actor Owen Jones sliding down a handrail, one of the most memorable aspects was the invisible boards.

When it was released in the early 2000s, many viewers had no idea how the strangely satisfying effect was achieved. Sandwich, an ad agency, explains there was a clue in the end credits.

“It was a little more complicated than painting them [the skateboards] green,” Sandwich says in an Instagram post.

While the team behind Yeah Right! used green skateboards to achieve the effect, Sandwich notes it wasn’t just a simple color key to remove green from the image. “We’d just end up with a hole where the skateboard used to be,” the narrator explains.

What is needed is known as a “clean plate”; an image without the skateboarder. But with a dynamic sport, the camera is obviously moving, so a still clean plate is going to look off.

What’s required is a clean plate where the camera moves precisely the same way as the original footage. Of course no human hand could be that accurate so that’s where a pre-programmed robotic tripod head comes into play.

“That allowed the filmmakers to get exactly the same camera movement for the main trick and the clean plate,” adds Sandwich.

Yeah Right! starts with ultra-slow motion shots filmed on Jonze’s camera that was capable of shooting 100 frames per second. Nowadays, skaters can just use their iPhone to shoot an even higher frame rate of 120 FPS.

Around the turn of the millennium, Jonze directed, produced, and filmed a number of culturally influential skateboard films and music videos, including for Beastie Boys, Björk, and Fatboy Slim — the latter including Weapon of Choice featuring Christopher Walken.

He transitioned to feature films with Being John Malkovich, followed by Adaptation, Where the Wild Things Are, and Her, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

Despite the success and influence of Yeah Right!, skateboarders still love to use the analog Sony VX1000 camera.