In this particular exercise I have matched audio from an interview with one of my subjects and Go Pro footage of the water. My aim was to produce a recreation of the traumatic event of being held-under as relayed by the surfer. I chose to open in black with the voice of my subject combined with audio from the Go Pro on the mouth mount. The breathing that resulted from the mouth mount does sound quite panicked and I attempted to amplify this feeling by cutting it off with the sound of gurgling water. This trauma builds to a crescendo and then dissolves with the water becoming calmer and my subject coming to the conclusion that in situations like this, you have to “tell yourself to be calm.” Whilst the tonal shift is sudden and possibly jolting, this is reflective of the surfer’s epiphany. His conclusion that “you can’t overpower the wave,” alludes to one being in harmony with the water. This is why I made the decision to have the camera side on to the wave as it gently rolled by, as opposed to the earlier shots of the wave crashing directly onto the front of the camera. The audio in this exercise reflects the embedded value of ‘going with the flow’ in surfing, which is something I wanted to reflect from the start of my project. Whilst as a stereotype most surfers are not highly strung, most of them have had experiences in the water which were out of their control. This is partly where, I believe, the stereotype of surfers being relaxed people has come from.

Whilst the interview audio is raw and I did not direct my subject in this particular piece, there is an element of drama to this exercise. The recreation is quite dramatic as I have deliberately put the footage together for this effect. Later, I used slow-motion to calm my audience after the quick cuts and vivd description of being held under. I end with a shot just below the surface as it feels as if the camera is floating. The act of floating is very harmonious as the object/subject is one with the water and neither are fighting against each other.

Overall this exercise did achieve my goal of reflecting a value and thus the culture of surfing. However, I feel as though the tonal shift is rather quick and it is therefore a lot of information to receive at once. In theory it seemed like a good idea to have quick 30 second exercises, however in practise this was a tricky time constraint to keep to and involved putting a lot of audio-visual information into this short space of time.