"I was making skate videos but I wasn’t happy with what I was making, up until, I guess, ’06. It was kind of like my film school I suppose, because there was a lot of trial and error involved and I wasn’t ever happy with the result. I changed my approach for the Lo-Def video. YouTube was out by then, and skate videos at the time were all somewhere between about thirty-five minutes and an hour plus, so for the Lo-Def video I made it about fourteen minutes and I put it online rather than selling it or getting a distributor, even though I had Sandro Grison and Color Magazine to help promote it.
Having those Vancouver guys backing what I was doing was mind-blowing to me. Lo-Def found an audience right away—the comments on Vimeo and on Slap at the time were positive. I made a website for it, and called it ‘Xampl Films’ because you’d hear fables about record labels coming after skate brands for money, and I wanted some made-up name that wasn’t attributed to me, so I could try to get away with it, I suppose." -Jeremy Elkin
