Direction Skateboards Free Ride Rejects the Trick-Video Playbook
Direction Skateboards' Free Ride is a digital video campaign produced by Shanghai-based agency and production company Liberum13 and published in China in June 2016, designed to replace the conventional skate-video format of repeated tricks and slow-motion city imagery with a product-centred narrative short film approximately one minute in length.
Direction Skateboards operated from both Shanghai and Hong Kong, positioning the brand at the intersection of China's growing recreational street culture and the global skateboarding lifestyle. The campaign's single media asset was classified under the Recreation and Leisure category, distributed through digital channels at a time when Chinese youth audiences were increasingly consuming short-form video content on mobile platforms. The Free Ride campaign was not structured around athletic spectacle. Instead, as reported by Branding in Asia on June 24, 2016, Direction founder Ansen Wang stated that the brand deliberately wanted to move away from the standard skate-video formula — one defined by tricks, slow motion, city life, and more tricks — and instead build a story centred on the brand's own products, specifically its decks and bearings. This editorial instinct placed Free Ride in a category of its own within the Chinese skateboarding advertising landscape of 2016, where the prevailing creative vocabulary had been imported wholesale from North American and European skate media. Liberum13's decision to treat the film as authored content rather than a sports highlight reel reflects a strategic understanding of how lifestyle and travel-leisure brands build identity over time. The campaign carries a Clapboard Score of 54 out of 100, indicating a modest but coherent creative effort that demonstrates clear intentionality even in the absence of documented performance metrics.
Direction Skateboards identified a creative gap in China's skateboarding content landscape in 2016. The dominant format for skate brand communication — domestically and internationally — was the trick-compilation video, a format so entrenched that it had become invisible to its own audience. Ansen Wang, founder of Direction Skateboards, recognised this saturation and commissioned Liberum13 to produce something structurally different, according to reporting by Branding in Asia. The strategic brief was to foreground the product — Direction's decks and bearings — within a narrative that earned viewer attention rather than demanding it through athletic extremity.
In the Chinese market in 2016, skateboarding occupied a niche but rapidly developing position within youth recreation culture. Street skating in cities such as Shanghai was gaining visibility as part of a broader lifestyle and travel-leisure shift among urban young people, even before skateboarding's inclusion in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games accelerated mainstream awareness. Against this backdrop, the two most resourced competitors in the global skate-brand communication space were Vans and Nike SB. Vans, for instance, launched its anniversary-driven storytelling initiative in 2016, as documented on vans.com, demonstrating that even heritage skate brands were moving toward narrative formats. Nike SB had long used documentary-style content to build credibility with core skate communities globally. Direction Skateboards, as a Shanghai- and Hong Kong-based independent brand, could not compete on production budget or distribution scale, but it could compete on creative authenticity — and Free Ride was the vehicle for that positioning. Liberum13's decision to serve simultaneously as agency and production company gave the project a tightly unified creative and executional voice, which is structurally important for a campaign built entirely around a single one-minute digital asset.
Patrick Tom directed and co-edited the Free Ride film for Direction Skateboards, bringing both visual authorship and post-production control to a project that depended entirely on the coherence of a single short-form asset. The campaign's creative team, as documented by liberum13.com and confirmed by Branding in Asia, included Malcolm Costain as writer, Julie Wu as producer, Matt Osbourne as co-editor alongside Tom, Vincent Taylor as colourist, and music composed by fatmackajoe through music company Studio Calcutta. This is an unusually complete and specialised credits list for an independent Chinese skate brand campaign of this scale, and it signals a production approach that prioritised craft parity with international lifestyle film standards.
The creative execution of Free Ride was defined by what it chose not to do. Rather than filling its approximately one-minute runtime with slow-motion footage of tricks, urban grit aesthetics, and the rapid-cut grammar of conventional skate videos, the film built its identity around storytelling structure and product visibility. Direction's decks and bearings were positioned as central characters within the narrative rather than peripheral props. The colourist credit to Vincent Taylor is notable: colour grading in short-form lifestyle film carries disproportionate weight in establishing mood and brand register, and its presence in the credits confirms that Free Ride was treated as a considered cinematic piece rather than a social content clip. Studio Calcutta's involvement in the music composition further reinforces this positioning, giving the film an original sonic identity rather than a licensed track. The result, as covered editorially by Branding in Asia upon publication in June 2016, was a campaign that positioned Direction Skateboards as a brand with a genuine creative point of view inside the Chinese skateboarding and street-skating lifestyle space.
No verified performance data for the Free Ride campaign is publicly available. No view counts, engagement figures, conversion metrics, or sales data have been published by Direction Skateboards, Liberum13, or any third-party measurement source in connection with this campaign. What is documented is editorial recognition: Branding in Asia published a positive feature on the campaign on June 24, 2016, which constitutes meaningful earned media for an independent Shanghai- and Hong Kong-based skate brand operating in China's recreational leisure category without the distribution infrastructure of global competitors.
The structural effectiveness of Free Ride rests on several observable creative decisions. The campaign concentrated its entire budget and creative attention on a single, well-crafted digital asset rather than dispersing resources across formats — a high-risk, high-coherence approach that is more common in brand film than in product advertising. By rejecting the trick-video formula explicitly, as stated by founder Ansen Wang and reported by Branding in Asia, the campaign created a clear point of differentiation in a category where creative templates are heavily recycled. The involvement of a dedicated colourist, an original music composer, and a director who also served as editor suggests a level of post-production integration rarely applied to emerging market skate-brand content. The Clapboard Score of 54 out of 100 reflects a campaign that demonstrates genuine creative ambition and structural clarity without the measurable market impact or industry recognition that would push the score into higher territory. For a 2016 digital campaign from an independent Chinese skateboarding brand, that ambition alone marks Free Ride as a document worth studying.
Free Ride is a digital video campaign created by Liberum13 for Direction Skateboards and published in China in June 2016. It is an approximately one-minute short film designed to replace the standard skate-video trick format with a product-centred narrative highlighting Direction's decks and bearings, as reported by Branding in Asia.
Patrick Tom directed the Free Ride film and also served as co-editor alongside Matt Osbourne. The full creative team, documented by liberum13.com, included Malcolm Costain as writer, Julie Wu as producer, Vincent Taylor as colourist, and fatmackajoe as composer through music company Studio Calcutta.
Direction founder Ansen Wang wanted to move beyond the conventional formula of tricks, slow motion, and city imagery, according to Branding in Asia. The brand chose instead to build a narrative centred on its products, seeking an authentic creative identity that differentiated Direction from competitors in China's skateboarding lifestyle category.
Free Ride was distributed through digital channels in China in June 2016. Direction Skateboards operated from Shanghai and Hong Kong, and the campaign targeted urban young people engaged in street skating and lifestyle recreation in the Chinese market at a time of growing recreational culture among city-based youth.
Liberum13, a Shanghai-based creative agency, produced the Free Ride campaign and served as both agency and production company, as documented by liberum13.com and confirmed by Branding in Asia. This dual role gave the project unified creative and executional control across a single digital asset campaign.
The Direction Skateboards Free Ride campaign holds a Clapboard Score of 54 out of 100. This reflects clear creative intentionality and a well-defined strategic departure from category norms, tempered by the absence of verifiable performance data and documented industry award recognition for this 2016 China digital campaign.
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