This exercise is my favourite as its slightly more playful than the others and shows more of the fun side of surfing. I wanted to depict the journey to the water and the process of catching the wave. I opened with the POV shot of walking to the water with the boards in the morning sun as this is somewhat of a ritual for surfers.Whilst I like this shot a great deal, it is considerably shaky. I had anticipated this when I’d asked my subject to walk with it under his arm, however I had planned to use the Warp Stabiliser in Premiere Pro. Unfortunately this didn’t go according to plan as my shot would be significantly cropped as a result which would ruin the composition.

I put together the shots in a progressive order. For the journey to the beach I included shots of a signpost and surfboard art- all things you would see around a popular surfing area. I intercut these shots with those of my subjects jumping over the smaller waves in the shallows and duck diving under the larger waves in order to get out ‘the back’. At this point there is a tonal shift to footage in real time of actually riding the wave. I matched this with the music I had recorded from one of my subjects. I was quite inspired by this acoustic guitar and felt it was representative of surfing. As the tempo slows before increasing I introduce the raw audio of the clips to give the viewer the sense as if they’re they’re in the water. Next I introduce shots with lots of movement such as of my subject riding the wave, waves breaking and the water churning etc. My second last shot is that of the board bouncing in the water after one of my subjects had come off. The shot that follows is of a surfer sitting on his board looking around. I chose this shot to end on as I wanted to depict the surfer’s eternal search for better waves. I was told by a subject that catching waves can be compared to a drug because one just isn’t enough and they’re never quite satisfied.

A criticism I have of this exercise is that it perhaps has too much of a music video feel to it in the beginning as I didn’t include the audio from the footage. I chose not to include this though as I felt it was far too distorted when slowed down.