Skateboarding Gets the Reality TV Treatment in this Bonkers Short Film

Bonding over our common love for skating, art, fashion and cool, weird shit, VICE and Vans partnered to launch Unbound—a series that enables emerging Canadian creatives to work on what they love.

Eight people cramming into a three-person Airbnb, friends turning into liabilities, alliances severed over who drank the last beer, and that poor, poor toilet; skate trips are brimming with enough characters, drama, and excess to fill endless hours of reality TV, and it’s these kinds of tropes that get embellished in The Unreal Life, a new satirical short from Clubgear’s Dave Livingston.

Filling in the gaps between every Instagram story highlight and every trick you indifferently drop a fire emoji on while scrolling past and, Livingston drops us into a twisted late season episode of a fictionalized skate show that finds Clubgear luminaries like Tremaine Glasgow and Evan Hay living with a group of friends in a NYC flophouse.

Life of Ryan this is mercifully not, but it still faithfully mines the sensibilities of early 2000s reality television as it stitches together a series of vignettes that offer a bizarre blend of fact and fiction—revealing how the two intersect when we surrender ourselves to be part of the neverending content cycle.