Skateboarding Just Entered Its AI Era with Lenovo Yoga

0shares

Skateboarding has always been about seeing the city differently. A handrail isn’t a handrail. A schoolyard isn’t a schoolyard. A ditch isn’t just concrete, it’s a line waiting to happen.

With Not Just Another Day, Lenovo Yoga and SUPERHEROES directly into that mindset, not to fake tricks, but to bend reality around them. Part of the ongoing Made with Lenovo Yoga platform, the film pairs three real skaters with three AI artists to reimagine what a skate video can look like in 2026.

Real Tricks. Unreal Layers.

Pro skaters Monica Torres, Yuri Facchini, and Gage Boyles spent two days filming across Los Angeles schoolyards, parking lots, Venice Beach.

Every ollie. Every kickflip. Every grind. All real.

The twist? The world around them isn’t.

AI artists layered generative VFX over the footage, transforming familiar LA spots into surreal, game-like dimensions. Reality stays intact, but perception shifts. The city starts behaving differently. The session feels slightly… glitched.

Not in a gimmicky way. In a “what if this is how you see the world when you skate?” way.

Not a Tech Demo. A Hybrid Experiment.

The team shot with a core skate crew to keep the energy raw. Only after capturing the session did generative tools enter the process, tools that reportedly didn’t even exist in this form a few months ago.

Importantly, the tricks weren’t enhanced. They were framed. There’s a difference.

“This project was highly experimental,” said Rogier Vijverberg, Chief Creative Hero at SuperHeroes. “With Lenovo Yoga and AMD, we want to inspire a new generation to explore AI’s creative potential. This hybrid project shows how accessible emerging technology has become, proving that what you can imagine can now be brought to life.”

The campaign also includes “How I Made It” breakdowns where the AI artists share their process, reinforcing that AI isn’t magic. It’s workflow, iteration, friction, experimentation.

Very skate, actually.

The film was co-directed by Kaspar van Lierop, whose history includes helping establish Nike SB and now leading ASICS’ skateboarding program, a signal that this wasn’t built from the outside looking in.

Here’s what makes this interesting. Skateboarding has always been about hacking space. Reclaiming architecture. Rewriting how cities are used. Now, the hack isn’t physical. It’s visual.

For years, subcultures have resisted digital polish in favor of authenticity. But this film suggests something new: AI doesn’t have to sanitize culture, it can amplify perspective. If early skate videos were about documenting rebellion, and HD era edits were about performance, this might be the beginning of something else:
Skateboarding as world-building.

Not Just Another Day is live on Instagram here.