Today we’d like to introduce you to Darryl Tocco.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Originally from New Jersey, I started riding BMX when I was eight or nine years old. I quickly fell in love with it and couldn’t bare to be away from my bike for more than a few hours. Throughout the years everything else in my life (besides family) became noise. I gave up sports, my grades suffered, I didn’t care about girls, BMX consumed everything. When I was 13, my Dad started letting me use his old Betamax camcorder to lug to the local trails, and I started filming my friends riding. Shortly after, I realized filming was one of the few new things in my life that had piqued my interest. I started shooting photos and filming my friends regularly over the years to come and eventually saved up money from service jobs for new cameras. A lot of my friends in the area were amazing riders and I decided I wanted to make a full-length BMX dvd to showcase what was happening in the South Jersey BMX scene, under the name of “Bad Timing”.
When the video was released, I had several connected people in the BMX industry reach out to me about distributing the video, which I couldn’t believe. I was planning on selling them at the local skatepark and spending the money on my friends. Before I knew it we were already working on our second DVD, and Jay Roe called me one day to ask me to ride for KINK BMX, a pretty prolific company based out of Rochester, NY. Jay was the new Team Manager and he said the company was going through a rebrand, with new team riders, new projects, new goals. He asked me to start riding and filming for them and my life changed pretty profoundly. I was able to quit my job and began traveling the world, filming and riding with people I had looked up to since I was a kid. I rode professionally for Kink and several other companies for ten years before stepping down from the Pro BMX title and taking over as full-time video director for Kink. Over the past 4-5 years, I’ve expanded my work outside of BMX, working for companies like Red Bull, Amazon, Austin Eastciders, and Royal Enfield Motorcycles. Recently I made the tough decision to leave the video director job at Kink and focus on a full-time position shooting for an agency that one of my best friends recently started out of Dallas, called 360 media.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
My road has been far too smooth, I’m so fortunate. However, I’ve come to learn that smooth rides comes with reality checks along the way. I lost my father to cancer in 2017 and it’s something me and my family still struggle with. Both him and my Mother were instrumental in nurturing my love for BMX as a kid and always encouraged me to go after it. As I mentioned, my Dad put my first video camera in my hands at an early age. My parents took my brother and I on Skatepark vacations throughout my teenage years because watching us ride got them stoked. When I was offered the opportunity to begin a professional BMX career and the ensuing travels, they gave me their blessing to drop out of college and pursue something that made me truly happy. I still think about him every day and wish he could see some of the things my family and I have accomplished since his passing.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
On a work level, I’m most known through my experience in the BMX field with Kink and various other projects and videos throughout the industry. Being integrated into the company for such a long time got us to a point where my personal style of shooting and editing became a part of the image of the brand, and I’m really proud of that. From 2018-2020 I directed, shot, and cut Kink’s “Champagne” full-length dvd, and we were honored with BMX’s 2020 Video of the Year award. This award is voted on by other professional riders and industry folks so it meant a lot to us to be recognized by so many of our peers. It’s one of my proudest moments in BMX for sure. We spent two years shooting this video and it was a complete team effort between the riders, the people behind the scenes at the brand and myself, I’m left with a ton of memories from this project that I’ll hold onto forever.
Right now, however, I’m focused on building something new with 360 Media. We have a ton of cool projects we’re working on with Etnies shoes, Royal Enfield, Stacyc, and Oakley at the moment. It feels good to be working on something at the ground floor again, we have a team of people that I care about and we’re trying to build something special. Shout out to Chad, Cody, Tyler, and Felecia, it’s going to be a fun ride.
So, before we go, how can our readers or others connect or collaborate with you? How can they support you?
Get in touch! Hit me on Instagram or through my website and let’s see what we can come up with.
Contact Info:
- Email: darryl@darryltocco.com
- Website: darryltocco.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/darryltocco
Image Credits
Photographer names are in the file titles to clarify who is who Tristan Afre Jeff Zielinski Rob Dolecki Devon Hutchins
