Ride the wild surf with Storm Surfers 3D
With cameras on surfboards and jetskis, helicopters, boats, and even from behind the talent’s head – the new Storm Surfers 3D has every angle covered.
The Storm Surfers franchise, produced by 6ixty Foot Productions in association with Firelight Productions, was initially developed as an adventure series for the Discovery Network, following Australian surfing legends, Tom Carroll and Ross Clark Jones as they did battle with the biggest swells in the Southern Ocean.
First they surfed a ‘mythical’ never ridden before wave in the treacherous seas of Bass Strait simply called Dangerous Banks. In their second outing, they explored New Zealand’s rugged coast off the remote Fiordland. This time they cast a wider net. With help again from meteorologist and Swellnet.com.au’s webmaster, Ben Matson, they chase storms that rise from Antarctica to bombard our cold southern coast, and they do it all in 3D.
Storm Surfers 3D dives into another world that very few people would ever see otherwise and where any sane person would fear to go – into the solitude of big wave surfing, to discover the challenges, both physical and mental, faced by two ageing gladiators of the sport and experience the pressures of 30-foot waves and their 30-year careers.
“It’s a character-driven adventure film,” says producer Marcus Gillezeau. “It’s a buddy film, about two dads in their 40s, at the age where anyone else would be at the peak of their career, but these guys are at the twilight of their second career. These guys were professional athletes on the world tour, who then built a second career to become big wave riders. Tom’s 49 and Ross is 45 and they’re charging on these big waves like they’re teenagers but of course, they’re getting older. Ross still wants to go for everything,
Tom is a little more reticent and they’ve been best mates for 25 years, so there’s a wonderful tension between them.”
There are no take twos
“We’re very much influenced by good feature docs like Touching The Void,” says co-director Chris Nelius. “We don’t want to make a surf movie as much as we want to make a good documentary about big wave surfing, shot in 3D. We’ve got really good characters that we believe in that are at a critical point in their lives – we want that to drive the story and let the 3D of surfing big waves be the icing on the cake.”
Nelius shares his role with Justin McMillan, which stemmed from having different skill sets. “Chris is a film school grad with a writing background and I’m a commercials director, hands-dirty type of guy,” says Justin. “The style of filmmaking that we always wanted to do was a really good mix of getting the audience right into the action but presenting the content in an intellectual manner, that hadn’t been done before, so you need to be in two places at once.”
During a surf shoot, while Nelius is in the helicopter getting establishing shots that help to tell the broader story, McMillan is directing the surfers, in-water cameramen and the crew on the boat who are in the moment. However, says McMillan: “It’s a constant communication between the two directors to ensure the story we set out to tell and the story that’s evolving are both being covered correctly.”
“It is an observational documentary in a really critical environment that if you miss one thing, there are no take twos,” says McMillan. “And if we’re not ready for it and don’t capture it in some way then all the effort, time and energy to get you there is a waste because you missed the one thing you went to get.”
At Sydney’s post house E-Films, who are also investors in the film, the footage in 3D is remarkable. What’s capturing a lot of this high-risk footage are numerous tiny GoPro cameras, two per rig and merged to be stereoscopic in an underwater housing. There’s one attached to the nose of Jones’ board capturing him front on, one mounted on the back shooting the churning maelstrom that breaks behind him while another is attached to the end of a carbon fibre rod. As the surfer stands side on to the wave, with his back arm extended, this handheld rig puts the audience deeper in the barrel. Dean Cropp, Underwater DOP, bobs about on the shoulder of the wave with a handheld camera. From a helicopter fly-by and from the safety of a boat, we get a clear establishing shot of just how big this wave is, huge.
“One of the big challenges is making sure we’ve always got that establishing shot,” says McMillan. Because of the somewhat strained nature of 3D on the eyes, you can’t do so many quick edits as you might in a normal surf film. Another problem they’ve encountered is, while the GoPros get the audience up close and personal, their wide angle pushes out the perspective of the shot and you can lose the extreme nature of the wave if it weren’t for that solid, reliable establishing shot from the boat. “However, we can’t shoot at all big wave spots because we might not have the deep water nearby to park the boat safely, so we have to pick our breaks.”
“Imagine Wall.E on steroids”
What’s giving that establishing shot? Gillezeau says: “Imagine Wall.E on steroids, a robot with these two big eyes. It’s a side-by-side rig with the highest resolution possible, with two Sony EX3s and these two Fujinon lenses that Fujinon have given us to test for this shoot. They have zoom, aperture and focus all synchronised completely. Everything has to be synchronised on both eyes otherwise you just can’t watch it.” The rig then goes on the boat with a Makohead camera stabiliser.
Today, on dry land, and for the other observational documentary components of the filming, “ee’re using a beam splitter rig which most 3D is shot on”, explains Gillezeau. “However what we’ve got is the most light-weight beam splitter rig available, an Elena-Technica Dark Country rig and then we’ve done a whole set of modifications. Our stereographer Rob Morton, and our assistant camera guy Rick Kickbush with our DP David Maguire, take it to a workshop to make this hotrod beam splitter rig with an SI-2K camera. With a set of lenses that we bought from Mark Lewis who did Cane Toads: The Conquest, and record to our 3D recording device, the Cinedeck.”
“We also have a tiny domestic 3D camera, a Sony TD10 to use in water shooting situations, to pull out on airicraft, or stick on the dashboard of a car. Then we’re using another ‘prosumer’ handi-cam by Panasonic called the 3DA1 that’s being used for a lot of 3D acquisition and that camera we also have in an underwater rig. All these rigs we’ve had to do modifications to,” he says. “I get all these cameras, I hand them over to the camera department who take them to engineers to chop up and put back together. What was a 4-cylinder car is suddenly a V12 with mag wheels.”
“We’ve had fantastic support from all of the manufacturers of the camera technology and the post-production technology because 3D is so new.
“You can rest assured no one has entirely worked out how to shoot 3D and particularly a documentary film being shot in the most extreme circumstances.
“We’re sending surfers into storms with 30-foot waves, rain, hail, snow, four degree water, blowing 30 knots and we’re on the coast where everything gets smashed to pieces and ships get wrecked with the most complex, cutting edge technology in the world – awesome!”
The production made news around the world recently when Carroll wiped out, not on his board but on the jetski, getting picked up by the lip of the wave and taken over the falls, nearly landing on Jones who was surfing the wave below. They lost the $25,000 jetski and $15,000 camera mounted on it, but neither were seriously hurt. Of course, the footage is spectacular.
“What Ross, Tom and the other surfers do is dangerous and that’s what makes for great viewing and a great story [but] our insurance company loves us because we pay a premium. We made Storm Surfers One and Two so we had a track record of being able to deliver this show. As producers Ellenor Cox and I have made a lot of adventure television that is fairly hair-raising so we’ve been able to prove we can take on challenging projects, on time, on budget and safely.
“We put absolutely everything into doing it as safely as possible and now that’s part of what the movie is about. Shows One and Two tested what our audiences wanted to know and that is now shaping the next Storm Surfers. How do you do it? How do you get there? What are the logistics? How do you shoot it? We’re just super lucky as filmmakers that we get the opportunity to keep answering those questions. That ongoing dialogue is part of the success of Storm Surfers and will be part of the success in the future.”
View webisodes and plenty more at Stormsurfers.tv
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