I knew it! I knew there had to be a reason why most surf flicks all seem the same these days.  Turns out it’s because they’ve got a machine that they use to make all the videos…a secret machine.

OK, that’s not entirely true, but check this out. Veteran maritime cinematographer, Sonny Miller, is boycotting the new surf movie Secret Machine claiming that Globe, the big action sports apparel company that’s behind the movie, used a machine to create artificial surfing footage for the film.  Globe initially hired Sonny as the cinematographer and now he doesn’t want them to use his name or any of the footage that he shot in association with the project because he thinks Globe’s movie making machine is evil.  Globe denies that there is any truth to Sonny’s story and has gone so far as posting a scanned copy of a letter to a website that they evidently created for the specific purpose of dispelling notions that the machine is evil.  Anyone who goes through the trouble of registering a special domain name must be pretty serious….

My opinion is that regardless of what the truth about the movie is, surf videos are already pretty homogenized these days.  They’re all basically the same: music videos that show nail-biting footage of sponsored surfers ripping gnarly waves.  Monkeys could edit them.  These types of videos are just advertisements for the big companies that sponsor them.  Fine with me if they want to take production to the next level by creating artificial footage.  People will still watch them.

I’m confident that there will always be someone out there willing to put a lot of passion and creativity into creating surf films that actually mean something - films that have a soul.