I work for Go Ride A Wave Surf School as a Freelance Photographer. It's a great job. I get to meet people from all over the world and photograph them trying to stand up on a surfboard. Which can go two ways. Either they stand up and I get a photo of someone in complete euphoria, realising a life dream. Or they fall off in comedic fashion, cushioned by soft sand and fluffy waves. It's a sight to see, which results in lots of laughs at the end of the class when we get to review the photos together. There are worse places to work than on the beach, with happy tourists and cool local surfers. As we get stoked on sharing one of the best sports in the world. A few weeks ago, my boss there asked me if I could help them out by making a promotional video. It needed to show our multilingual instructors in action.
I started out by planning the key shots and then making a shooting schedule. I sat in the shop for about two hours, trying to visualise what it should look like. Taking notes and reordering ideas until I knew what I wanted to make. Planning a shoot usually is the hardest part, and obviously it's the most important. It was going to be a bit of a challenge with timing the shoot to finish before the usual lesson, and to manage the six cast members while filming. A Photographer/Videographer must always think about light. I had to consider its direction when planning where to put my camera. The good thing was that I am very familiar with shooting at the beach.
I used a Rode Wireless Go to capture the audio and filmed with two different cameras. We couldn’t have asked for better weather and the cast were very accommodating of my direction. The shoot went well, which made editing in Premiere easy, as I had a lot of good shots to work with. I added some motion graphics with After Effects to spruce it up and voila, it was done. Take a squiz at the finished video below.