Introduction
When things started going crazy in Hanoi; mandatory masks, all bars and shops closing and even all the western staff at our hostel getting fired on the spot, we thought it was time to escape the madness Corona virus had inflicted, cut our losses and head to Australia, slicing our Asia trip in half. We arrived in Sydney and made our way to Byron Bay with only 2 days before all boarders closed.
During our time in Byron, myself & Chris (@slaterrrrrrrr) met travellers in the same situation as us, we decided to commit and see what happens in Australia instead of heading home and batting down the hatches.
Concept
Whilst playing with some photos we got chatting with Hugo (@hugopossum), a surfer keen to get some snaps of himself in action to which we agreed but instead, why not go further and make a film as both me and Chris had wanted to experiment shooting surfing and with filming in the sea.
Collaborating with fellow travellers played such a huge role in this film as without them I very much doubt the film would have been able to happen, especially Nick who by chance had a drone in his car boot which he had collected from another job & his willing to wake up at 5am to come & film at Broken head beach.
The shoot concept was simple, a vignette on a surfer during his time in lockdown. Luckily for us this was probably the quietest Byron Bay has been in decades, this allowed us time in the ocean without disturbing the usual high volume of surfers.
Equipment
The kit for this shoot was absolutely minimal, I had my Fujifilm XT-3 with me and a couple lenses so this shoot would be about as bare bones as you could manage. The rest of the kit was borrowed from fellow travellers with a couple small purchases on a shoestring travel budget.
Full kit list
DiCAPac WPS3 Waterproof Case
Monopod purchased from local shop
Fujifilm XT-3
35mm f2
23mm f2
55-200mm f3.8-4.5 borrowed from @ebbabernbro who we met at a hostel
Audio was the XT-3 held close to Hugo as we interviewed him
DJI Phantom 4 - borrowed from Nick @Nalexandercamera
Chris luckily had his MacBook Pro (FCPX)
Surfboard borrowed from Wakeup! Hostel to help us not drown in the sea…
Shoot
Shot over 3 mornings to catch the sunrises with pickups during the day as the underwater shots needed as much light as possible. The first two mornings we shot on Byron main beach, as were the underwater pickups. The third morning with the drone at broken head beach. The shots from the beach were simple enough stabilised with the monopod. The hardest shots were when we swam out as a team, one surfboard allowing the shooter to swap and have breaks between swimming.
Issues arose due to the current dragging us down the beach so we had to keep resetting and also the underwater ‘housing’ gave us some trouble down to the fact that the most minute amount of water left in the bag caused condensation in the bag fogging the lens due to the cold water and camera heating the bag which in turn caused some of the the shots to be unusable. We had to leave the case out in the sun to fully dry off before continuing.
We chose to shoot the film initially in a 4K 50 FPS F-log 8-bit .h264 mode due to being away with one small harddrive, we decided against the beautiful 10 bit for space saving and the .h265 is an intense codec to work with on older machines. Another thing to note is the fuji XT-3 isn’t a low light camera so crushing the blacks here helped to hide the noise.
We used a surf board from the hostel to help us get the idle in the water shots as this gave us a break between filming and also we could use it to push us under the water to get the UW shots, as we had no weights to hold us down. Shooting at 4k 50fps also gave us the benefit to slow the footage down giving us those dreamy UW visuals.
We finished the shoot by interviewing Hugo, we had no audio kit so one of us held the camera close to Hugo the other interviewed with a bunch of questions we had written down.
Edit
We chose to edit this project with FCPX mainly due to the fact the play back with the Fuji was smoother and it crashes less then PP…
After each morning we ingested media and checked everything through, we noticed the flat profile in 8 bit had some real issues with banding due to the low contrast that’s when we decided to continue shooting in the Eterna profile which seemed to mask these artefacts without too much of a grade.
For the edit we wanted to tell a story, we didn’t just want a linear structure ( moody surfer > enters water > surf ) instead we wanted to take viewers on a journey, experience what the surfer experiences with the same amount of appreciation for nature as the surfer feels when in the water and facing the waves. We wanted to incorporate Covid-19 as it played such a huge role in us being in that location and the fact that Byron had basically turned into a ghost town of sorts, this gave us the freedom to film without any disruptions and helped form the basis of [Surf] Isolation (our nod to the world wide restrictions in place).
Once the edit was down we gave the film a look, used some luminary flares and added some film grain mainly to cover the low light noise and artefacts the camera had introduced.
Conclusion
As I mentioned, this film was a traveller collaboration as without bumping into and chatting with people in the same situation as us, this film wouldn’t exist. Opening up conversation allowed us to push the film further and make the most of the situation. Shooting on a none existent budget with minimal kit pushed us to think more about composition, story and less about which kit to use as at times, on regular shoots with gimbals, tripods and what not, this can sometimes inhibit creativity and slow the whole process down. In many ways it was refreshing to utilise the limited kit we had on hand and in future I think I’ll leave a few none essentials off the kit list! Massive thank you to everyone that was involved, please check out their linked instagrams. This was a great experience and for me, evolved into something special.