How far are you willing to go for waves? Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Surf films vary wildy. There’s plain old surf porn, which is just good surfing in good waves, generally with a soundtrack behind it, then there’s the more artistic stuff. Surfing is a wonderful backdrop for the latter, because surfing is often in places that are achingly beautiful. Those are the good ones. Those are the surf films that stick with you. Those are the surf films that make you want to experience not just surfing, but everything that comes with it. Those are the surf films that Ben Weiland makes.
Years ago, I was interning at SURFER magazine. I lived in a rest stop in the back of my truck, too embarrassed at my lack of planning and lack of funds to let anyone in the office know that I was doing it. It was fun, sure, but being essentially homeless for five months is… well, it’s tough. Incredibly fun and memorable, but tough. Somewhere in the process, I met Ben. He lived with one of the guys in the SURFER office, and much to my embarrassment, they found out I was living in a rest stop. We were all friends by that point, but they let me shower at their house and eat at their table, which generally became the best part of the whole experience.
Ben and I have lost contact over the years — aside from an Instagram message every now and again — but I’ve watched his career as a filmmaker blossom into something amazing. He’s wildly talented in graphic design, art, and of course, making movies. Ben’s always been a very talented guy with a deep interest in surfing cold, remote places, and if you follow surfing, you’ve seen some of his missions, I’m sure. Films like Island X and The Search for Volcano Island. Staggeringly beautiful films, made not only about surfing, but about searching for surf in some of the most inhospitable places in the world.
A few years back, Weiland and Brian ‘Bobcat’ Davis joined creative forces to start Fielder Films, and since then the work they’ve been doing is some of the best in the business. The thing about making a film, though, is that the people who make it aren’t the ones getting the glory. It’s the people they’re making it about that get all that. Making a surf film, especially the way Weiland and Davis make them, is hard. Very, very hard. Which is why the short piece of video they put together here is so interesting.
It’s a look at what went into making The Search for Volcano Island (watch here!), an incredible film that everyone who loves surfing and adventure should watch. In it, five friends travel by boat through Alaska’s Aleutian Islands to find a wave one of them saw in a film when he was just a child. It’s a wild adventure, shot perfectly, told perfectly, and edited perfectly. But it’s good to remember when you watch something like The Search for Volcano Island just how much effort went into it.
“Sometimes in life there are opportunities that come along where you know that if you say yes to it, it’s going to push you into unfamiliar territory,” Weiland says in the video. “That’s basically what happened when I met Ricky McDevitt. I knew I was on the edge of something really big. He invited me to take an open spot with him and his closest friends on a boat that was going to explore the entire length of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands in search of undiscovered waves.”
If that’s not what surfing is all about, then I don’t know what is.
