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Skateboarding In A Global Pandemic | COVID-19 Los Angeles

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A lone skateboarder glides down empty L.A. freeways that are normally gridlocked bumper to bumper — and the footage is six years old.

As Los Angeles ground to a halt under stay-at-home orders in March 2020, skate media outlet The Berrics dug up a short film that suddenly felt ripped from the headlines. “Urban Isolation,” a three-minute piece from director Russell Houghten, shows a single rider carving through downtown L.A.’s freeways, bridges, and interchanges without a single car or pedestrian in frame. The catch: it was shot and finished in 2014, years before any pandemic emptied those streets for real.

• “Urban Isolation” won first place at the 2014 REDirect filmmaking competition, hosted by RED Digital Cinema and The Berrics.
• Houghten shot the piece on RED digital cinema cameras, then used rotoscoping, clean plating, and motion-tracking to digitally erase every vehicle and bystander from busy L.A. thoroughfares.
• The Berrics resurfaced the video in March 2020 as a parallel to the newly deserted streets caused by COVID-19 lockdowns, and Hypebeast featured it on March 22, 2020.

Constructing the Real Empty City

There was no curfew, no shutdown, and no empty city in 2014 — Houghten had to manufacture the illusion frame by frame. His crew filmed real traffic and pedestrian activity on the same freeways, downtown streets, and highway interchanges skaters normally can’t touch, then went back through the footage in post to strip out every car, truck, and person using rotoscoping and clean-plate compositing. Motion-tracking let the visual-effects team lock those erased backgrounds to the moving camera, so the skater appears to glide through a city that has simply vanished around him.

The result reads less like a skate part and more like a disaster-movie establishing shot — wide, static, and unnervingly quiet, with the rider’s wheels and the ambient hum of a city as the only sound. It’s the kind of effect studios usually reserve for post-apocalyptic blockbusters, applied instead to a stretch of the 110 and the bridges around L.A.’s Arts District.

Delayed Viral Success of Contest Winner

“Urban Isolation” wasn’t obscure inside skate media — it had already taken first prize in the REDirect competition, a showcase RED Digital Cinema and The Berrics ran to spotlight filmmakers pushing what their cameras could do. But it had no reason to resurface six years later until Los Angeles’ own freeways started looking exactly like Houghten’s VFX work, minus the skateboarder.

A city built to erase its own traffic in 2014 suddenly matched the real thing in March 2020.

The Berrics’ resurfacing hit at the precise moment stay-at-home orders were emptying L.A.’s streets for the first time in most residents’ lives, and Hypebeast picked it up on March 22, 2020, framing it as an eerie preview nobody asked for. The video’s original conceit — a lone rider claiming freeway lanes and downtown blocks that are normally off-limits — no longer needed the VFX team’s help to feel plausible.

The Craft Behind the Illusion

What makes the short hold up on a second watch is the confidence of the skating itself. Houghten’s rider treats the freeway shoulders, bridge decks, and interchange ramps like a purpose-built course, threading transitions and street tricks through spaces built for sixty-mile-an-hour traffic, not trucks and grind rails. None of that geography is real skate terrain in the ordinary sense — it’s forbidden ground that only exists as a line because the visual-effects work cleared it out.

That same instinct — turning restricted or inhospitable space into something worth documenting — shows up across a lot of solo-adventure content that trades on isolation as its hook, whether it’s catching and cooking on an uninhabited island or bunking down for a solo overnight build in the woods. Houghten just built his version of empty ground with a rotoscope brush instead of a boat or a shovel.

Houghten’s short never mentioned a pandemic and was never meant to predict one — it was a VFX showcase entry, full stop. But six years after it took first place at REDirect, “Urban Isolation” ended up as the internet’s go-to stand-in for what L.A.’s freeways actually looked like the week the city shut down.