We try to reinvent the wheel with surf films sometimes, don’t we? Of all the different genres and styles of filmmaking, showcasing good waves and people shredding those waves can be about as minimal of a concept as you’ll find. Point. Shoot. Surf.
Still, established methods like storyboarding, planning out your shots, coordinating that gratuitous lifestyle angle, and setting up the faux candid soundbites are all part of the game when filmmakers have an idea they want to execute. And these things are all totally necessary for narrative surf flicks. But when you find yourself just sitting on a pile of footage — a common circumstance in today’s industry, where every board with a sticker has a camera pointed at it from the beach — those rules can go out the window. And that brings us back to the beauty of the good old-fashioned shred flick. If you have great footage, the job’s practically done.
This is (kind of) how Billabong’s new team film MERGE came together. Team riders like Ethan Ewing, Ethan Osbourne, Creed McTaggart, and Lennix Smith, to name a few, had been collecting passport stamps and scoring over and over. Ewing went to Fiji. Scored. Creed McTaggart was exactly where every surfer wants to be when it’s on: home. He scored too. You get the picture. Suddenly, Billabong’s Thomas Crews had a gaggle of clips from a ton of good waves, so he kept things simple and turned them into a collage of high-performance surfing. Well, he merged them.
West Oz, Victoria, Fiji, NSW South Coast, all pumping, and the Billabong crew giving us 20 minutes of great surfing,
