How a Full-Length Fingerboard Video Is Made | Andy of Knife MFG Co | S4 E148

On this week’s episode of the podcast, we welcome Andy, also known as Index Chicago and from Knife MFG Co! We dive into the full behind the scenes breakdown of how a true full length fingerboard video gets made, from filming missions and footage strategy to music selection, pacing, and building the structure before the edit even begins. We talk about Index in Chicago, remodeling the shop with the local crew, rotating parks, prototyping obstacles, and how they balance difficulty versus fun in park design. We also get into Big Stepas, the PSL inspired team contest format, why it is more watchable for spectators, and what this kind of yes or no scoring could mean for the future of competitive fingerboarding.

If you enjoy the show, please like, follow, and share!

⚑CONNECT WITH ANDY ⚑ 

Instagram ➜ https://www.instagram.com/knifemfgco/

Shop ➜ https://knifemfg.co/

Utilitarian Video ➜ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rPt6EOFQBs
Instagram ➜ https://www.instagram.com/indexchicago/

Shop ➜ https://indexfingerboarding.com/

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Transcript

speaker-0 (00:05.966)
With every flick I'll write my story On this 

Welcome to USAFBL Finger Board Podcast. I'm your host, Levine Cunningham. Today I've got Andy. Andy of Index? Andy of Knife? Mr. Knife Daddy himself?

What's up? Here we are again.

Again, we gotta stop being like this. Man, we've been on some journeys, some adventures.

What do you

speaker-0 (00:38.392)
Yes, we have.

I remember first meeting you in my shop like three years ago and now look at you.

A lot has happened. It's been a so much.

So much I don't know if we can get everything crammed into this little podcast we're gonna make it happen

Okay.

speaker-1 (00:55.054)
For those that don't know the myth, the man, the legend, one of the best video producers and editors on the planet. Mr. Andy. I don't even know where to start. I feel like we've got a part one already in and a part two, so we can kind of skip all the, how's you get in the finger boarding kind of conversations and get right into it. Yeah. Yeah. Let's get into the good stuff. Let me, we're live here at the index store. Open store a couple months ago.

That's awesome. Thank

speaker-0 (01:16.002)
I've that story a few times.

speaker-0 (01:22.051)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (01:25.58)
made it through Christmas season. Just looks like he's still got all your hair. So I mean, could have been too chaotic, but maybe it was. don't know.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was all right. It was good. It a good season. We're still reeling from it. We're kind of, I mean, it was a week ago, so we're still kind of like fulfilling all the orders and trying to get our store back in working order. We just got, you know, sold everything and now we're trying to restock everything and get things back to where they belong.

man alright so I'm gonna go as far back as I can since the last time we talked opened up Dindex get all these crazy parts redid the entire store huge makeover looks great by the way I saw a lot of white in the first first look at our promos I was a little skeptical coming in and checking it out you know what

Thank you.

speaker-0 (02:18.99)
like, it's getting there. It was, I mean, we had about eight days to remodel a 1500 square foot space and almost no money. And like, we just had this army of volunteers of our locals here. Teddy, who kind of helps manage the store here. He was like our foreman and he did

I shouldn't really take any credit. Teddy almost built this place single-handedly. That's not true. We had like 20 people that helped, but Teddy really was a champion and it happened. Yeah, but it's been, you know, we had a week to do it and we kind of did what we could really quick with the resources we had. And now in the last two and a half months, we kind of slowly chipping away at it. We keep trying to improve things in here, make it more comfortable and, you know, just more enjoyable to be in. It's process. didn't have a...

I mean it's just money, it takes time to build this place up.

it's a progress it's always a working progress you've been with me you've seen my humble beginnings of stuff as well I mean it's been a journey it's always a journey but it's just stacking progress on top of progress and then you look back and you see how far you come yeah

Yeah, it's true.

speaker-1 (03:36.014)
It is pretty wild. It's. Let's Harry and all right until it's Harry and I've been butchering that all day. All day. Arguably the best outdoor fingerboard and skate full length video edits I've ever seen in my entire life. And I think the majority of the community feels the same way. Thank you.

That's okay.

speaker-0 (04:00.206)
That's awesome.

Walk us through the artistic mindsets of like the vision of like starting it or thinking it starting it and making it happen. Because I know this doesn't happen overnight. This has got to be definitely a tell the story. I don't want to talk.

Yeah, I mean, a full length video has kind of been like from the very beginning, it was kind of the dream and I didn't really know what that actually looked like. Like we make a lot of videos and I experiment all the time with them and trying to gauge like how much finger boarding can you actually watch? Because it's kind of unpalatable if you are watching 40 minutes of someone finger boarding. Like it happens so fast, you can barely tell what's going on and you sort of get fatigued by just watching.

thing after thing after thing after thing. So I think it took a couple of years to just kind of like make short form videos and make these other projects, figure out how different techniques I want to use and stuff. And mostly testing like how can we hold people's attention? Is it even worth attempting this? Because it's kind of like, it's just a lot. It's a lot to watch. Thing boarding for more than a few minutes. But I mean, we knew we wanted to do it. we kind of just had to go for it. And we had been

I'd been shooting with a full-length in mind for, I don't know, two years before the video came out. But it was kind of like, it's tricky because it's slow going. Most of the guys don't live in Chicago and I see them, we get Bailey out here like four or five times a year. Some of them I'm with all the time, some of them I only see once a year. So when we are together, it's kind of like, well, we're gonna go out on this filming mission. We either have the choice to save that footage for a video project

speaker-0 (05:44.872)
someday we might put out in the future or we put out shorter videos now. And so it was kind of like, had to be really choosy of what we released and what we kept because the best stuff we are excited to show, but we also want to keep that for the full length. So that took a while, but really probably the beginning of 2025, it was like, all right, we can do this. We have the resources now. We sort of have the infrastructure and

I kind of had more of a vision of what it could actually look like and Yeah, I don't know we just started like the first Let's see. Can you remember we kind of started traveling? intentionally for that video in the spring Which is like either me flying to the East Coast and being in New York for a while with Kevin and Zack and Jay are up there or Them coming to me whatever it is

And it was kind of like, I'd work on it in chunks. So like we do this a week of filming. Maybe two people come to Chicago. We just film every single day and then go edit and experiment and see like, what's this thing gonna look like? What's the, you know, what's the ultimate? It was like every filming session was a gauge of like, okay, when we spend this much time doing it, this is what.

kind of a dent we can make in a full length video. And it got kind So a formula. I mean, a little bit. It's just like, it's totally, it's a little bit of unchartered territory and it's just kind of hard to know what to expect. Like you don't really know how much usable footage you'll end up with from any one session. A single fingerboard trick is like one and a half to maybe two and a half seconds. So if you consider that this video is almost 40 minutes long.

It's a lot of fingerboard tricks and that's a lot of time and like whatever. and then like the vision of it and sort of the, I guess the structure, all of that. I've had the like visual identity of it in mind and kind of been working on that for years. I'm pretty strategic about how I design stuff and make mood boards and just collect.

speaker-0 (08:06.518)
references and inspirations and stuff and so for years I've had songs picked like the intro song is by a group called Goblin and it's part of the soundtrack for Dawn of the Dead and I've had that in my pocket for years. There's a few songs that I've just been sitting on waiting

That was one of the things that a lot of people notice and definitely you see it in the comments of the video, but like the song selections on point.

It's extremely important. so much of this, I felt like a psychopath working on this video because I had this huge whiteboard in my office and before I had even started assembling any of the video, I basically created the entire structure of the video on paper with Post-it notes. And I knew which songs I wanted to use. probably had twice as many in the video and I knew those

15 songs were going to be probably used. And so I was using Post-it notes on a whiteboard and I would structure it visually like a table. know, like intro and this is probably the song I'm going to use and then after that maybe we'll flow into this person's part but we're going to have a little in-between montage. So I just like had this crazy schematic because the music I think is the most important part, the audio in general. It kind of

There was a lot of time spent thinking about the dynamics, like the dynamicism of the flow of the whole video because... I don't know, I'm sorry if I get carried away here, but...

speaker-1 (09:47.27)
I mean, I see a lot of like people that make really great parts. They'll pick the songs first and then they'll literally start overlaying tricks on top of the beats. And so like if there's a beat drop or whatever, like they'll literally time these like clips perfectly to the songs and stuff like that. Yeah, it just all ties together and you man you kill this.

Thank you, man. Yeah, I really liked the puzzle of trying to piece all these different sections together because we also put out a photo book with the video and I've published a handful of my own photo books and I've designed them and edited them for other people too. So one of the problems when you make a photography book, which is just photographs on each page, is you're kind of looking at the open face, right? So you can see two pictures at once.

When you're choosing the pictures, you're always trying to consider how they interact with each other. Because the colors, the content, they sort of interact. But page two also has an interaction with page 60. Because as you're going through this book, every image has a relationship. And so you kind of have to piece this puzzle together of, well, these two facing pages work, but do they work with the following page? Do they work 10 pages after? And so I kind of use that same structure for the video of like,

you know, this person's part with this song works really well, does it flow into that part? And then do those two kind of work with the next one and it's a lot of experimenting and I don't know, was really interesting. I kind of lost my mind, but it was awesome. It was a really...

speaker-0 (11:32.568)
That's called Let It Kill You. That's a book that I made with my friend Ben McQueen, who's a tattooer in San Francisco. And we made the book first. I was actually, it was when we met, my full-time job was producing that book. That was what I was working on. And the book, it was like a coffee table book about sort of the crossover of pro skateboarding and tattooing. So like pro skaters who have retired from skating and become tattooers or famous tattooers who have a background in skateboarding.

We had James Thomas in it, Tyler Bledsoe, a couple other handful of people. And that book ended up becoming a docu-series on vice that's still ongoing now.

I remember that I forgot that the book tied into that though so that's I'm gonna now go back to the book to go back I got some stuff to do tonight so for people to want to check that out is the book still available or is it a limited

Yeah, there you go.

speaker-0 (12:29.294)
Let it kill you. Yeah, no, that's the book is long gone. Actually. It was just reprinted and republished by a Japanese publisher I'm not sure if they're still available in the States. You can probably still get them from Japan. I I'm not sure I'm not super involved with that that part of it. I don't know

the

The show is called Let It Kill You. There's a handful of episodes out now. When this store started, I kind of had to let that project go, which is really sad. It was one of the coolest things I've ever gotten to do. They're still my good friends, my two buddies that I produced it with, but I helped produce the first five or six episodes. The last one I did is a documentary about Art Osari and his photography in Hawaii about surfing.

You can go watch that one, it's awesome. There's four or five before that too that I was part of.

Okay.

speaker-1 (13:30.956)
I know you got some projects in the works. you can leak? Anything you can leak on the pod?

Oh my god. I mean with Knife, honestly it's kind of weird because like our that video like all our eggs kind of went into that basket like like I said years of footage like our big effort for filming was in the last 10 months but it was years of footage I mean there's footage in there of like Stoli that goes back four years

I noticed that, was like, when did you take that?

Yeah, and it's all over the place. I mean, it's everywhere from LA to Boston to Germany and Toronto. But anyways, I had been sitting on a lot of footage and content and ideas, and I kind of pushed everything into this one effort. One, because we wanted to make it as good as we could and make it the best it could possibly be. But it's also kind of like, it's time for a new chapter, kind of clean slate.

Now, this time of year, I usually focus more on behind-the-scenes stuff and our production and that structure. So right now, we're in the process of redesigning our mold with our boards. We've never offered multiple molds at the same time, and I never will. It's just too complicated. I like the one offering with multiple shapes. So we're redesigning the mold a little bit.

speaker-0 (15:00.866)
It'll mostly be the same, just a few tweaks to make it perform the way we want it to. Like our whole production system is changing a little bit. We have more staff now. We have a handful of people that help me make stuff. have like... We got a lot of help. We're trying to...

Yeah

We have lot of good help and are trying to manage our manufacturing in a responsible way. I've addressed this a million times before, I don't need to talk about it too much, the short story is the demand is greater than the supply. it's not because we want it to be that way. I mean, there's just too much going on, I don't have the time. So trying to address that in a responsible way that's,

both makes the boards more accessible, hope, and doesn't kill us doing it.

Hard balance man. I ran a shop for a year and a half and I mean just making products content running the shop day to days mingling with everybody. It's tough. Yeah, that's a tough balancing act

speaker-0 (16:14.894)
It's like this place is virtually every minute of every day from the minute I wake up until I can't stay awake anymore. And Knife is kind of like either where I can fit it in or I have to dedicate a week when someone comes to town or whatever. So yeah, I mean that's kind of it for Knife. We're starting to plan like our trips for the year. We will, I mean, I don't have...

don't have much to say about it yet because it's not there yet, but we'll jump right into another video project. That's like what we like doing. That's kind of the point of the brand and so we'll always do that. But so we started booking trips and travelers. I've got Bailey and Kevin coming here in about a couple of weeks. We'll just kind of jump into it. But yeah, that's kind of it. And index, we will focus on continuing to build out the infrastructure of the store.

That's exciting.

speaker-0 (17:11.522)
We're working on our kind of our manufacturing here, which we do a lot of stuff in house. We sort of finished building out our wood shop finally, and we've got a lot of different aspects to that. Man, I don't know. There's other projects in the works too that I'm not ready to say anything about, but.

speaker-0 (17:36.558)
I'm hyped dude, just, I don't know, it's cool. I fingerboarding is in such a cool place right now. just get so stoked about it, whether it's a product or the culture, whatever it is, every day it's like...

think there's just so many pioneers right now. Like 10 years ago, it was just a small handful of pioneers. There's like Black River, all the Germans, got flat face, sorry for finger boarding. Like there was just like a good core of just pioneers. And now there's just so many more people coming in and like contributing. And it's a beautiful thing.

Yeah, and it's I love that like I don't know these last five years I feel like are so special and it's only gonna get better in this regard but like There's there's more people involved from other backgrounds, but I think like people my age, you know early to mid-30s who kind of I think are the sweet spot for like growing up with tech decks who came up with that first wave of American pro fingerboarding thing like now we're all sort of adults with resources and

education and all this stuff and like at the same time technology is getting better every single day you know manufacturing and equipment is more accessible and it's all coming together like so quickly where every new product is like raising the bar and not in a way that it feels like a diss on any old product because i think like stuff from the golden age you know if you will is still good it's still awesome and people will always love it

And then there's this other thing happening where technology resources, all this are developing rapidly. so every new product, every new wheel, every new truck, every new board method is like getting a little bit better or more artistic or more this or that. And it's it's just flourishing. It's awesome.

speaker-1 (19:35.34)
the

sure you're with the shop. Yeah, well I don't know when this will air so this may be irrelevant but in two weeks from today we have like our first big kind of pro contest here which is called Big Stepas. We did it last year and this is the second version so it's a team fingerboard contest based on a skateboard contest called PSL which is a contest that Sean Malto and Mike Moe and some others put together. It's sort of like a more elaborate sort of

points based kind of complex version of skate down a stairs gap.

I like the format it is from the outside looking in a lot of people understand skateboarding and how you win at skateboarding and like this format kind of helps the viewer whether you're in the skateboarding fingerboarding or not have more of a invested interest in like what's actually happening.

Yeah, it's a I noticed that to the first time I watched PSL it was like it's so interesting because it's you know, I'm not like anti-Olympics or SLS by any means but I it's a very specific type of skateboarding and scoring skateboarding is tricky and it's weird but I agree like PSL was so cool because you can root for a team and they're scoring points but it's not necessarily based on their

speaker-0 (21:08.982)
like style or they're, you know, they're not getting graded. It's just kind of yes or no. Yeah. And it's like, it's like watching a football game. You're, like rooting for a team because you, you know, they got that in their bag of tricks, but you don't know they can pull it off. So that's why we're so attracted to it because it's, it's, it's a really fun contest to spectate. kind of get to be involved and your friends are involved and it's an interesting like discourse with the, with the partners. Cause

There's this whole aspect of you kind of, you know, you can, there's not a ton of wiggle room, but you do have the option to kind of like, this guy's better at that thing. Maybe he should try or she's got this one. So she should do it. that's, it's really interesting. I'm, I'm excited to.

I was, I'm excited to see it because I've been thinking about adopting it, but I'm like, dude, that's like a whole system. And I'm like, we're definitely going to figure something out. But I'm like, kind of been waiting to see how PSL does it. And yeah, maybe that works for them. If it works for them, then we should definitely start adopting it. you're like, nah, we're going all in.

that Yeah, it's very it at first look it the rules seem really complex. Mm-hmm. Once you've heard it and walk once you watch it Beep once once you see around yeah, it's pretty easy to understand but it does come across kind of Complex, but I don't know. I'm stuck the first the first time we built a park for it and we sort of Not really a replica, but we did a similar gap to what they used in PSL, which is a seven stair gap

And this time we've built a completely new park. It's huge and it's a similar thing. Another thing we really like about the contest is that it's very, even though the rules seem complex, the actual structure, it's pretty stripped down as far as what you can do, which is what I like about skate, is it's so bare bones. It's just kind of like, there's nothing really left to change. It's just like if you're

speaker-0 (23:10.806)
if you have the skill and if you get lucky. So the park, we've sort of introduced like each round of the bracket will kind of have a different twist. I don't want to give away too much, but anyways, the park is huge. It's symmetrical again, so that your team doesn't have to walk around the park. So you're facing each other literally. And it's going to be hard, which is something we lean into a lot with parks. And we are always kind of like,

trying to balance like challenging or really fun. And where's the balance? So this park and what we'll do the contest on is going to be definitely tricky. I have seen who the teams are and I know that they all have it. So I think it's gonna be really, really fun to watch. Everyone's kind of got a different. I'm excited for it,

Yeah, I may literally have to come up with the weather is good. I might come up with that

Yeah, please do. It's gonna be interesting. Stephens happens in a couple weeks. New products, I mean, we have stuff pretty much every week. New stuff, we're always cycling. New product from around the world. I don't really wanna give away new brands we have coming in, but there are new ones lined up for every month, basically.

notice that you got a lot of new stuff coming in. You're highlighting all the new drops, things like that. Is that enough? And I like the fact that you do that.

speaker-0 (24:40.822)
Yeah, we really tried to like, bring in, mean, I don't know, the product we want, you know, like my favorite stuff to use, what Nash likes, that's what we want to sell. We want to sell stuff that we would choose ourselves. And that's kind what we go off of.

Yes.

We've so many spectators, it's awesome. I know. But yeah, other than that, we do have a bunch of like index product that we'll keep rolling out. We got obstacles that we'll roll out. We've been like prototyping. If you're around the store, if you're local and you come through, like you'll see, we kind of have chopped and screwed versions of the different obstacles that we're working on. We've given time out on the floor for people to try and see what they think of them. And then we go make adjustments. We try that again.

We like that. you know, parks are like our favorite thing to build. We are going to keep designing them for the store and we only have so much space and we don't really have storage space. So kind of our method is that when we build a new park and old park goes away some way. like for step for Stephens, we'll raffle off this park right behind us here. And that'll be that'll be the end of that one. So

keeps things fresh to having a store with rotating parks rotating inventory I mean it's every time you come in there'll be something new something different

speaker-0 (26:11.16)
Yeah, that's the idea. we also like, we're always trying new stuff when we're building. And, you know, I feel like we get better with every build, no matter how many fingerboard obstacles or parts we've built, we learn something every single time. So, and it might just be like, we came up with some feature that we really liked. because of what, this is a real example that happened in our last build. We came up with this little feature that we really liked, but because of,

constraints of that particular part by the time it was done, you know, we would have done it differently. So now on the next one, cool, we can blow this up, we make this thing a little different. So that's, that's been fun. Yeah, lots of that. Lots of figuring it out as we go. It's like, there's, know, Nash and I are here all the time. And then we have three other guys that help us. We're amazing. But like, like I said,

from the minute I'm awake to the minute I can't stay awake. I'm working on this and every day it feels like I just can't even make a dent. There's so much to do, there's so much I wanna do that, and it's not like a bad thing, it's just, yeah, there's only so many hours, so.

It's a never ending list man. I working on something, I scratch something off and it immediately adds two more things onto the list and it's just never ending cycle. You know they're doing some crazy stuff behind us.

Exactly.

speaker-0 (27:34.958)
What do we got today?

Man alright, so where can people find you on the internet?

Yeah, I don't have like a personal fingerboard Instagram or anything. Instagram is my main form of communication, but I have Knife. Instagram is knifemfgco. Index, I'm generally the one running the index Instagram, so if you're communicating with us on there, you're probably talking to me. So there's that. You can find my personal photography Instagram if you look hard enough.

speaker-1 (28:16.974)
the the

Yeah, thanks for coming all the way

speaker-1 (28:46.71)
It's still got a couple Joy-Colds, I might pick one up on the way out, like- I know! Man, appreciate ya. Till next time.

the

speaker-1 (29:21.064)
I'm soaring like a bird

speaker-0 (29:37.656)
I'm fighting free With every flick I'll write my story On this board I'm never alone In the skate park I found my home

speaker-0 (30:05.326)
as they scream finger boarding tree finger boarding I'm flying free with every flick I'll write my story on this board I'm never alone in the skate park I found my home finger boarding field of thrill chasing feelings and never ending the wheel

You

speaker-0 (30:36.11)
you