Surfing on the Silver Screen

I don't really watch all that many surf movies any more.  That is, apart from one four-day weekend every year in London when the London Surf / Film Festival is on and I binge on airs and barrels on the big screen.  The other 361 days of the year I usually click on any one of the handful of three minute web-edits that are posted on a near daily basis, and after about ten seconds I either get enormous work-guilt or I get bored of seeing the same old thing yet again and click away.  I don't think that I've got A.D.D. but my attention span for surf films without any narrative is definitely pretty short.  That's where the LS/FF swoops in and rescues me; a carefully crafted line-up of surf films balancing documentaries with adventure and art, feature length flicks with quality shorts, and all on a massive screen.  If anything is going to hold my attention more than the screen of my laptop, it is a full-size cinema screen in an auditorium full of hooting surfers.    

This year I had the pleasure of multi-tasking for the four days of the festival; I was invited to be the event photographer, as well as exhibiting both a selection of my photography and a display for Otter Surfboards.  It kept me good and busy, but I still managed to sneak into the back of a choice selection of movies and get my fill.  Here's a stack of images that I shot, alongside one film selection from each night for you to take a look at…

Thanks to LS/FF Directors Chris and Demi for inviting me along again and for putting on such a great festival.

This year the festival moved to a new venue at the Genesis Cinema in E1, and in one fell swoop both doubled its capacity and damn near filled it.

Surf photographer, cold water adventurer and plastic pollution campaigner Tim Nunn gave an incredible slideshow presentation on Saturday night.

5x ASP Women's World Champion Stephanie Gilmore paid the festival a visit for the UK premiere of the biographical documentary film "Stephanie in the Water".  She smiled constantly and and posed for photos for a good couple of hours with fans, as well as throwing some shakas with the big painted cut-out of Rob Machado produced by Chris from Makemake.

I carried the Otter Surfboards exhibition across London on the tube in a hold-all bag, and managed to bring it back to Cornwall in one piece too a few days later.  Thankfully my exhibition, on the other side of the corner, was delivered for me in a big cardboard box.

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

Expencive Porno Movie from Nothingwillchange on Vimeo.

LS/FF 2013

Well it's been a busy week.  This time last week I was trying to get to Nazare in Portugal before the sun set to see whether the St Judes mega swell had arrived.  On Monday morning I was stood on the cliffs there taking photos of enormous swells breaking beneath and yet seeming to tower over the lighthouse there.  And right now, a week later, I'm sat at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London, as the 2013 London Surf Film Festival wraps up for another year.  This is the festival's third year and this year I was lucky enough to not only be invited to exhibit some photography, but to also be the event photographer.
It's been a busy couple of days, but great fun and it's great to be involved with such a highlight of the British surf scene's year.  It seems as though half of Cornwall have come up for the weekend, as well as loads of London surfers and it's really nice to catch up with some familiar faces.

On Saturday afternoon there was a free event with solo surf travel adventurer Kepa Acero making the trip across from the Basque Country (and missing a classic day at his home break Mundaka) to present some of his short movies, and the premiere of Finisterre's short film Fv25.  In the evening there was a "Surf Trippin' Triple Bill" with three brilliant movies that I've been looking forward to watching for ages; Compassing by Cyrus Sutton, The Fortune Wild, and Chris Burkard's Russia about his exploratory trip to the Kamchatka Peninsula.  If you get the chance then all of the above are worth watching.

This year the Approaching Lines room showcased art, photography, and surfboards, with a live shaping demonstration on Saturday evening in a specially built booth.  It was great to be a part of the London Surf Film Festival again this year, and massive thanks has to go out to Chris and Demi for masterminding such a great weekend.  I'm looking forward to next year already, and this year's festival hasn't even finished.  Speaking of which, I'd better get back upstairs for the awards ceremony...

And The Staves Played On

I found Alex, my oldest friend, on the beach building a fire.  It was his job to organise this whole thing and as the sun dropped people were starting to trickle onto Porthcurnick beach from the coast path and the small lane that runs down onto the sand.  Over the past year he's organised a series of small, intimate, performances by rising stars of the music scene at unique venues for mobile phone company Nokia.  The theme of the Nokia Lumia Live Sessions has been undiscovered artists in undiscovered locations and he's put on gigs such as Kodaline in an old tannery in Dublin, Fenech Soler in a fight cage in Leeds and Lianne La Havas in a skate park in Liverpool, to name but a few.  This was due to be the last Lumia Live Session and was to feature British folk sisters The Staves performing fireside on a small beach in Cornwall to an invited crowd.  

Of all of the Lumia Live Sessions that he's had to organise, this one was perhaps the most unpredictable due to the vagaries of the British Summertime weather.  It had been a lovely, sunny, August day and there was a fair crowd on the grass and benches around The Hidden Hut cafe above the sand.  There were paper cups of wine and seven enormous paella pans were being tended to by a team of chefs and the brightly coloured food looked, and tasted, incredible.  Around 150 people had been invited (plus some of the cafe's regulars and passers by) and as is so often the way at events like this in this little county, most of the crowd knew each other.

The Staves made their way up from the water's edge just after 8pm and the three sisters arranged themselves on the rocks and piles of logs beside the small fire.  They were performing accoustically, with French film makers La Blogotheque recording the performance and they'd placed their microphone right next to me.  The crowd was absolutely silent, listening intently to the sister's familial harmonies and the gentle guitar over the sound of the outgoing tide, until a few bars into the second song the rain began to drip...and then drum.  It was a summer downpour of biblical proportions, the heavy black cloud like a bruise appearing over the hillside and emptying onto the beach within minutes.  People ran for cover under the low cliffs, umbrellas appeared over the three heads of the Staveley Taylor sisters, and the French film crew hurriedly covered their expensive equipment in whatever jackets they could find.  Many people left as the rain set in, but the performance was simply being relocated to the Hidden Hut cafe just behind the grass.

Two large gazebos had appeared, tables were cleared and The Staves reappeared a short time later in the serving hatch.  Periodically the rainwater would build up on one of the gazebos and overflow, crashing down onto the already soaked-to-the-skin spectators.  But the band played on, and ended their performance with an encore in the midst of the small, steaming, crowd.

This was one of those events where it seemed that every other person present had a big, fancy, camera so I'm really proud that Nokia have used a load of the images that I shot for their website banner images and other post-event publicity.  I'm certainly really grateful for the opportunity to attend such a unique gig; if you get the chance then spend some time watching the La Blogotheque films of the other five Lumia Live Sessions and checking out The Staves beautiful music.

Slipping, Sliding and Finless Wave Riding

Stop/Go, Surf/Stokesy.

Finless heat #1, Stokesy sliding beneath some seagulls.

"Your feet must be awfully cold?"

Yup.  I'd not had a whole lot of time to mentally prepare for this though.  When the call went out for the first annual Slyder Cup, a finless "friction affliction" wave sliding event, I thought that mid-April would mean a summer wetsuit and some heavy whomping in the shore-break.  Instead, I was stood at the waters edge in my winter suit with the hood up, gloves on and no boots.  I'd realised the night before when I was stuffing neoprene into my day bag that I can only just squeeze my hooves into my swim fins anyway, so I had no chance with wetsuit boots on.  Gwynedd, who I'd guess is easily twice my age, seemed quite concerned for my well being as we waited for the starter's claxon.  On the other side of me stood Alan Stokes, former British Surf Champion, and along from him was a bloke with a warped plank of untreated plywood that he'd cut from a sheet of 8'x4' that morning.  There was also a Welsh guy with the most incredibly shaped asymmetrical paulownia paipo with a drop-knee cut-out.  Five minutes into our paipo/bellyboard heat and Stokesy and I figured that Gwynedd was beating us fair and square (and for the first time ever I wished that maybe I'd had a childhood of bodyboarding to stand me in good stead for moments like this, a thought that I quickly dismissed).  

After twenty minutes, sure enough my toes had turned white and gone numb.  

 Alan Stokes and Gwynedd Haslock lining up for our paipo/bellyboard heat.  Read more about Gwnedd here and get inspired.

Paipo/Bellyboard heat #2.  Check out the craft!

Dream Big. 

Paipo

Sawboards are the people responsible for the assymmetrical paulownia drop-knee paipo in the photo above. 

The Slyder Cup featured four categories of competition; finless surfboards (anything from alaias and Wegener albacores to normal surfboards with the fins pulled out), paipos and bellyboards, bodysurfing and mat-surfing.  There were a couple of heats in each category before a final…and then a grand final with the winner from each discipline going wave for wave to crown the ultimate slyder.  

The albacore riders dominated the surfboard rounds, with Alan Stokes and the eventual champion Jimbo Bennet getting some insanely long rides with spins, slides, shove-its and even a couple of head-dips.  In the final they were spinning their boards right onto dry sand in the shore-break. 

There were tons of bodysurfers present, including a small crowd who turned up with some old skateboard decks, a load of hand tools and sandpaper to shape their handplanes there and then.  

The South-West's mat-surfing crew were also present; a committed bunch of surfers whose choice of craft would ordinarily raise a few eyebrows on the beach, but not here.  They looked to be having so much fun in their heats and I learnt a lot about these rare inflatable sleds over the course of a five minute chat with mat-maker Graeme, which will probably make another post altogether.

Alan's Albacore.

Bodysurfers on the start line.

Fin(s).

Marcus Healan, mat surfing victor.

Jimbo Bennet spinning on to the sand in front of a punk-as-hell spectator.

Bodysurf competitor kicking into a little high tide wedge.

At the end of the day, as the drizzle started to thicken, the final claxon sounded and Jimbo Bennet climbed the podium (a small slide) to hold aloft a tiny trophy.  There was a brief "run-what-you-brung" session in the high tide shore break with tea trays, polystyrene kids boards from the '80's and me trying to ride a canoe paddle like some sort of polynesian grommet with no success, before the crowd retired to the scout hut for a surf movie and then a few beers and some music.  This is slated to be the first of many events (some competitive, some not so) put on by the Approaching Lines crew, and I can only imagine that they will grow in popularity as word of the good-times and smiling spread out radially.  A competition where you need no prior experience, can borrow your vehicle, line up alongside champions and senior citizens in the same heat and nobody gives a damn about the scores, statistics and rankings?  Sign me up already!

Ben Sousek's homemade handplane quiver, crafted over the previous 24 hours from old skateboards.

Fins and Flags.

The final line-up…from left to right, Jimbo Bennet (surfboard sliding), Alan Stokes (bellyboard), Joe Brown (bodysurf) and Marcus Healan (surf mat).

You can read more about the event here, and keep checking back if you want in on the next one.

Huge thanks has to go out to the organisers Chris Nelson, Demi Taylor and Nick Holden for putting together such a great event, and to Reef and the other sponsors who put their faith in such a quirky, edge of the surfing spectrum, event.  There were a whole load of people who pitched in judging, tabulating and marshalling who did an incredible job just for the love of it.  Thank you.