The Story Behind Boxton Square
Wrote this piece on/with Mike Manzoori and Sharon Tomlin about their work on Boxton Square and it got shut down by etnies... resulting in my inspiration and writing of the Legend of Boxton Square fiction that ran in the mag. If at first you don't succeed...
Anyway, thought someone out there might be interested in reading... so here ya go.
The Story Behind Boxton Square
By Rob Brink
“There were supposed to be clouds made of corn starch packing peanuts, but there just wasn’t time. I’m pretty gutted about that… they would’ve been awesome,” says etnies Skate and Create art director, Sharon Tomlin. “But Mike [Manzoori, director] did a pretty good job of reminding me to keep it as simple as possible—otherwise I'd still be barricaded in the etnies TF making overly detailed buildings, cityscapes and sniffing glue. I'm amazed we made as much stuff as we did in the time we had.”
“To be honest, my heart was not into this project at all until the concept came together and got me sparked,” says Mike Manzoori, “Having done Skate and Create with Emerica last year, my main goal was to create a dream world that would be easy to configure around the skateboarding that would occur when the etnies team (Sean Malto, Mikey Taylor, Kyle Leeper, Tyler Bledsoe and Davis Torgerson) rolled in.”
After talking in circles with the crew at countless creative meetings, Manzoori turned to Tomlin for a bit of inspiration.
“With the Skate and Create thing I could see Mike was tearing out his hair because they needed a low-budget concept that could hold up against last years’ ideas and the potential ideas from competing companies this year, while also portraying etnies’ uniqueness and eco-coolness,” says Tomlin.
“Sharon flipped the ideas a bit and incorporated them into an overall concept,” says Manzoori. “She came up with the idea while joking about a Zoolander fashion concept that would have the etnies team dressed as homeless people living in a fictional cardboard city, paying homage to the homeless camps made of cardboard boxes during the '80s and early '90s at the famous South Bank skate spot in London.”
“It ended up pretty simple actually… with a secret theme behind it that only I really knew or cared about,” says Tomlin. “A fantasy recycled cardboard town—a parallel universe where beer bongs are worshiped, birds are flat and you can skate anywhere you want and not get kicked out or hurt because the buildings cushion your fall. Every skater is a giant. Beige is the only color. There are cardboard houses, trees and trains but no cardboard people. People generally just spoil stuff so there aren’t any. Its biodegradable-when it rains… a recycled and recyclable town.”
But once the group started to work with the tedious and complicated set in the warehouse, they soon found out that “easy to configure” wasn't quite the case with this concept.
“After all the twelve-plus hour days, I became pretty OCD,” says Tomlin. “Combine that with the Sharpie fumes and Boxton Square started to become a bit too real. Ollie [Tomlin’s assistant art director] would discuss the political, social and spiritual agendas of Boxton Square until the early hours of the morning.”
“I wish I’d had time to add more detail and elaborate and communicate the recycled/eco vibe a bit better,” continues Tomlin. “Like power stations animated to look like they were fueled by used wheels and trees made out of worn out skateboards… things along those lines. But time inevitably ran out and it ended up being pretty stressful to rearrange everything for each filming session.”
“etnies is really into the green/recycle vibe and also happens to have ton of cardboard boxes to recycle all the time, explains Manzoori. “Why not give their waste another life as the set? Typically skate spots are just elements of urban architecture anyway, so we assumed that whatever mystery objects TransWorld gave us to skate would be some kind of imitation of things found in real cities. We hoped it wouldn’t be too hard to turn them back into elements of actual architecture.”
Despite Manzoori’s mention of Sharon joking about the homeless camps and Zoolander, Tomlin was actually quite serious.
“The whole homeless camp actually wasn't a joke, I thought that it could look pretty cool to cover the obstacles in recycled cardboard and make them look like prefab eco-houses; then build a set that looked like a camp with accessories to match. Not a homeless camp necessarily, but a friendly, fantasy urban-style makeshift camp where skateboarders lived and skated and grew vegetables in a self-sufficient, security-free, skate stopper-free utopia. You leave your cardboard penthouse and skate your front yard with your cardboard-dwelling neighbors. When the spot gets played out, pick up your house and move it somewhere else. In a way, I thought it would be amusing to see Mikey Taylor living in a box; making home-brewed cabbage wine and growing dreads. What I ended up making was a miniature version of that concept… sans cabbage or dreads.”
In her spare time, Sharon enjoys making illustrations and miniatures of futuristic, post-apocalyptic cities where there are no people… the animals and plants have taken over.
“The animals are fully pimping with hot tubs, jacuzzis and helicopters,” she explains. “All species get along with one another because there are no humans to project fear, misery and conflict onto them. They are all vegetarians and travel in helicopters that run on veggie fuel. When Mike started mentioning the cardboard tube sequence in the Michel Gondry movie, La Science des Rêves (The Science of Sleep), I was insulted. I knew I could build a better town than Gondry and his friends. So I did.”
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