Covid has been hard on everyone. Months on end, banned from traveling, stuck twiddling thumbs. Death and despair around every corner. Surfing banned in certain places. A person would be forgiven if they simply decided to lie down on the couch and wait for it all to end, but that person would be a depressed lump of coal. Liam O’Brien and Toby Mossop decided to take an alternate route and work on a film project together. Since Australian restrictions were especially strict, they had to stay mainly around their homes on the Gold Coast. They did manage to squeeze in a few Australia-based strike missions, as well, along with a U.S. trip and a bit of Mexico.
The project wasn’t exactly a strict one. Instead, they just went surfing and filmed it, hoping to get enough to put something together. “We started slowly gathering clips about a year ago,” O’Brien explained. “We didn’t film religiously or have a set plan. We’d just shoot when the waves were fun around home impromptu style. The vast majority of the clip is just on the Gold Coast. There’s also a little bit of stuff from some different parts of Oz and I was lucky enough to film in Mexico and the U.S. while overseas for an event.”
Unless you’re a high-level pro, making a surf film isn’t the easiest thing in the world. Both O’Brien and Mossop had jobs to pay the bills, which added another wheel in the machine. “It was a hard one to film though because we both had jobs,” said Mossop, “so linking up for sessions was a tough one sometimes. So the majority of the film is shot on the Gold Coast. There are a few other spots that we raced to when our domestic borders opened up, but that was always a gamble because we weren’t sure if we would be able to come back home.”
In the end, TOBLOB is a film about two friends who just want to surf as much as they possibly can during a very strange time in history.
