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Inside the Surf Video Network.
Intro to Surf Video 101...

The Surf Video Network is the largest distributor of surf videos in the world. They supply many of the ones you buy in your local surf shop. Surf films make up the largest share of their 250 odd titles, but Surf Video Network has moved beyond surfing into skateboarding, windsurfing, bodyboarding, wakeboarding and other extreme action sports. Besides expert, well equipped photographers in spectacular settings, the only necessary ingredients for these productions seem to be; 1) a board of some kind, 2) gravity, 3) water in some physical state (optional), 4) a hellman or woman able to push performance to unheard of levels. I had an opportunity to visit and interfview the Surf Video Network's founders while on surfari through the central coast in late September. Dave Natal and Chris Darling agreed to discuss their work and disclosed allot of information about how to plan, produce and market an action sport video product.

BC: I brought this over. A twenty-five year old magazine (1974 April/May issue of Surfer Magazine featuring an interview with George Greenough). Since we are in "The Ranchlands" here (Lompoc).
DN: Do you know how to get a hold of Greenough? Because I hear he's got a couple of his movies are on video right now.
BC: No. I'd like to. I saw him film one day at Little Drakes but that was the Winter of '69. A couple of friends and I had the place all to ourselves one January day and then he came up later in his highway patrol car.
DN: Well I've seen footage in the tube at Little Drakes, so it was probably the same.
BC: No doubt. The waves were solid 6-8 feet with offshores. He must have got some good footage that day. The last ride he got the wave came over like a curtain and knocked the film off the tracks. He came in and talked about it. Those "from the barrel tube shots" still set the standard. He was using a 16mm fisheye in a backpack housing. The shutter was controlled with his teeth. He was out there on a matt doing 180's: He would drop in, throw the matt into a sideslip-stall and then pop out of the tube feet first with the lip crashing on the camera/backpack. If you watch the tube sequences in "Echos", you'll see these "bubble effects" at the end of the rides.
DN: Yeah right, I remember that. Gosh I forgot about that car of his.
BC: Dave, you did "Off the Wall 2", did that ever play at the Santa Cruz Civic? Usually the movies would come to the Civic and it a big ritual. In fact, that was the only way you could see surf movies at one time. I saw alot of good movies there; "Free Ride..." I was wondering if you were on that circuit?
DN: No we didn't do it at the Santa Cruz Civic. One of the biggest shows of the whole United States was the Santa Cruz Civic. It was a "make or break" it show. This was a super 8 film; we did it at a pizza parlor. We did it for 4 or 5 nights in a row. That even played in Half Moon Bay, one of the few movies that made it up there. Nobody showed up. There were about 6 people. My ex-partner way, way back, the guy that made "Off the Wall" with me, used to do promotions for other films. He did Bill Delaney's movies and Scott Dietrichs movies.
BC: It seems like your business has brought the "Civic" home as it were, in being able to deliver the movies in video format.
DN: The theatrical shows are getting less and less profitable for those guys for whatever reason, I don't really know why...
CD: Of course today that all changed. With the Molokai Theater in Hawaii. We are going to start providing them with products so they can have three shows that they'll show twice a week for two weeks and then we rotate in another three movies. So they'll be showing that constantly.
BC: So that will be a LARGE screen.
CD: That's gonna be a 25 by 35 foot screen video projector...the new video projectors that are now able to project onto those huge screens and look right. It's a real intense video player of some kind. And this guy is really stoked, his wife owns the theater that was blown down by a Hurricane about 5 or 6 years ago and they just finished rebuilding it. And it's the only entertainment on the north part of the island. He's really hyped on it.
BC: There is something in that theater experience.... Its big....
DN: There's a vibe too, even if the movie's bad. Surfers have a good time. I think that it would be good for everybody that makes a video nowadays to have to show his or her movie publicly. Because, if they come to us with a movie, and Chris and I try not to judge whether a movie is good or not. We look at it technically, if its clear and it goes to the right places and has the right players then OK we'll distribute it but then allot of the movies bomb. And then the filmmakers come back to us and go, "Well, hey it was a good movie, how come you didn't distribute more?" But I'll tell you when you're out there at a theater and you turn on that projector and people boo.
BC: Yeah, instant feedback! The Surf Video Network isn't just involved with surfing.... 250 titles.... You're kind of a "Swiss army knife" of extreme boardsports.
CD: Yeah, that kind of came about over the years. It started out with just being surfing and then as the other sports came online, we were at the forefront of bringing them online as far as the video product goes. Whether it was Stacy Paralta with the "Bones Brigade" series. We worked with Stacy on his first movies. And then Jake Burton, "One Tracked Mind", the first snowboard movie. And then the first independent snowboard movie which was, "Western Front", with Jerry and Artie from "Falling" and it just went from there. All of the people who are now real popular in those specifically snowboarding, in that area, all started out with us distributing their movies and then we kind of brought that whole thing into focus because if we were not there pounding people's doors, making them buy the product. And say, "Try the product! Try it and if you don't like it we'll take it back!', you know that kind of thing, they wouldn't have had any success.... It just never would have happened. Maybe they would have had success but it would have come at a much later date would be my guess...and I would say the entire snowboarding industry would have had allot more stunted a growth if there hadn't been the aspect of the video presentation.
BC: "Big Wave/Big Mountain", riding these boards. Like you see a ride at Mavericks and then see somebody go off a snowbank in Alaska...there is sort of a similarity.
CD: Sure. They're all so related to surfing anyway. I mean skateboarding, snowboarding and of course windsurfing. All the sports are very much related to surfing, which is at the heart of it, or the root of it. So it was just a natural progression. When people want to bring something, for example right now we're talking with some guy who is trying to bring this, "Off Road Skateboarding" to the limelight or to the forefront. Big knobby wheels that are inflatable and all this stuff. And the latest video we got from him looks pretty interesting and we might just carry it and try to put it out there. But that's always the start because if it's an acceptable movie then all of a sudden, your product is now been seen by all the kids who buy the product and it just instantly makes that product profitable.
BC: The level of your product is very high and your website says that you are intimately involved with developing it. How are you doing that?
CD: I think we have been critical of certain of certain things. In the past, we've turned down movies that have gratuitous sex or violence in them and we didn't feel was apropos. Now of course with the realistic viewpoint of shows like "COPS". Where everybody's kind of become numb to it all. We're a little bit more lenient with what will be allowed to be shown. We've had people approach us with movies that just had crazy sexual things going on didn't have anything to do with the movie other than the filmmaker's ideas of how it somehow fit. And we've tuned them down. Body mutilating stuff, people hanging up from hooks and all kinds of other bizarre shit, and we have refused to handle that kind of stuff because we feel its not going to help surfing. Its not a surfing or sport oriented thing and were really not the people to be distributing something like that. We try to stay centered on what we started and feel that we are expert in. And that's is these particular sports. We try to do the best job we can distributing it and going with the flow. We don't try to censor or change somebody's content unless, that content is going to affect the sales of the product. For example we had a filmmaker a few years ago say, "Hey, I want to have that in there. I don't care if anybody likes it or not. You can't just take it out". It was an episode with defecating on the hood of a car. (laughing). We said, "Well you know what, this doesn't have anything to do with surfing. This is the worst thing you could put in a movie. I know it has a great deal of "shock value" but now what's going to happen to your audience? Because you're not going to be able to sell this to some kid who's gonna take it home and pop it on the TV and sit there with dad and mom and watch the movie." Because it has too much bizarre stuff in it. So you're just gonna have to edit that out.
DN: He calls us up about 3 or 4 times a week and says, "That's against the Constitution, we have freedom of speech. You're censoring me!" We say, "No we're just not carrying your video, man.... If you want to take it out, we'll carry it." "Well that's censored". He's grown up since then. This is quite a few years ago. Now he's got a little girl.
BC: Eric Nelson in Half Moon Bay filmed "Twenty Feet Under" which is a classic Mavericks video. In fact you carry it at Surf Video Network. Eric once produced a public access cable TV show called "Powerlines". I think he got a good sense of what was appropriate to show. His movies don't have any of that kind of bullshit. This might be an alternative to renting the "Civic" to get feedback on a project.
CD: Allot of people just can't put 2 and 2 together. Certainly a kid who goes out and feels like he wants to make a film and maybe takes a film class in college or in summer school or something and goes out and make a movie...they don't have any idea of how to approach the demographic they are shooting at. Let's say they are putting out a movie on, "Longboarding in Santa Cruz". And that's it. That's all they've shot. Longboarding in Santa Cruz. They bring it to us and go, "Well.... Here it is! I expect to sell millions of these things because its got...Ratboy and this guy and that guy and whoever in it". And we put it on the screen and after the first 5 minutes we're falling asleep cause he never goes anywhere but Santa Cruz. Now this is an example of things that have happened in the past when we'll say, "Hey now you've take this somewhere else or its not going to sell. " It'll sell OK in Santa Cruz, but the demographic shrinks from the whole United States and the world to where? The city of Santa Cruz.
BC: But then you get a film like the "1998 Quicksilver Pro NOT". Where you've got one spot; G-Land. But the spot is so intense!
CD: And there too, even though it's one spot you're looking at 20 or 30 of the best surfers in the world riding it. And on that Quicksilver NOT it's over a period of about a week. You have about 4 or 5 different filmmakers involved in that. So you have a perspective that's more than just single- myopic -from the beach. See that's my example. You take something like Quicksilver NOT or any of the Quicksilver Series on the G-Land Pro Contests, and what they do is always bring more than one filmmaker. They bring somebody to shoot from the water. Don King shot water and Tony Roberts shot from the beach and I think they had a couple of other people involved there too. Hornbaker was in there. So they had all these guys involved. Well all these guys have their own ideas and perspectives on how to shoot the movie. So when its all mixed together, its almost like you're seeing 3 different movies and cutaways and stuff the way they would do it. And the fact that you have everybody from Tom Carroll to Kelly Slater to whoever's gonna be there riding it, again brings a different perspective. The key to having a successful surf film is variety. And ideally it's a variety of locations and riders. And a variety of shots; water shots, and all the other shots that fit into it that will work. Because the more variety that's in it, the more interest level is going to be in it.
BC: I think of those waves in the recap of the 1997 Quicksilver pro at G-land, the slow motion montage of Kelly Slater, Occy and Luke Egan who had won the event, and its just "other worldly".
CD: Did you ever see "Metaphysical"? This is the first one where they went in that direction. That one is really, I think, the best one. "Metaphysical" has Kelly Slater so far back in the tube he's on the foam ball. That's the deepest tube, I think, they've ever photographed. (Asking Dave Natal) Did that win best tube ride that year?
DN: I think it did.
CD: Yeah, best tube ride of the year at the Surfer video awards. But getting on another subject when you handed me this magazine (with the Greenough Interview) it has "The Lost Island of Santosha" on the cover. This is a movie that we once carried and then there was a problem between.... I guess Spider Wills made it, but the people that were handling it, it wasn't Spider Wills, it was somebody else. But they had a little conflict between partners and then they folded and we ended up with it and if you look in there (pointing to Dave's office) Is there one in your office Dave?
DN: Its right there, next to the Golden Breed poster. That's the original poster...a little faded.
CD: That's kind of funny because they came to the last trade show and said that wanted to get it back over to us so that we could start distributing it again. We haven't had it for about six years.
BC: So there is still a demand for some of those "old classics"?
CD: We're finding more and more of a demand for the older movies, especially ones that were really well done. We met a guy named Dale Davis. We met him by the strangest of circumstances; a guy came by our booth when we were doing a show in Las Vegas at the video convention. He came by our booth and handed us a movie. I don't know who was on the front. It had some contemporary surfer riding like Sunset or something. And then we put the movie on and it was a longboard movie! We're watching it and, "That was really a good longboard movie." We're watching the whole thing and, "Who made this thing! Who made this thing!" Finally there was a little blurb, Dale Davis. And then all the credits were cut off. So we just picked up the phone about two weeks later...
DN: I think I found his number through Mike Doyle. And I called for weeks and weeks and weeks. I said, "I give up, we're never gonna get this guy, he never picks up his phone.
CD: And then I called him up and I said, "I think there's a guy pirating your movie. You should really call me back. Let's find out whether he is or not. The name of the movie is "Golden Breed". So I called the next day and he picked up the phone and he started talking and it turned out, it was pirated. We called the guy up who had already sold us a couple of hundred of em, cause we had started buying em. We sent him packing. And then we went over to Dale's house and met him in person and found that he had four other movies that were under his stairwell. Still in 16mm format, never been transferred to video. So we took those and restored all those and brought them back. And that's the Dale Davis Video Collection. We have that. We have Walt Phillips Collection, which is really good. And we have Hal Jepson's Collection, which of course is real good. Steve Soderberg. Steve Spaulding. Scott Dietrich. Then we have a montage of old movies from Australia and some independent guys. Old movies are consistent and continue to be very, very popular. We were carrying Bruce Brown's movies for a long, time. But Bruce has turned his movies over to like a Hollywood company. And they are putting it through a subdistributer who's putting it through another distributor. By the time it gets to us, it's just not even worth carrying. So we kinda backed out of carrying those. Unfortunately. Because those are real classics too.
BC: The theme of those old movies was "discovery"; finding a paradise somewhere. Is that really relevant in this era? Its all high performance now.
CD: You know what? As a matter of fact this last summer, in fact I think it was in November or December of last year. We had a number of filmmakers call us about a year ago and asked, "If you were gonna make a surf movie, what would you make right now?" I said, "Well, they've been making allot of high performance, like you stated, almost contest oriented movies where you know the guys are out in the water, they're all the best guys that are competing at a spot. Then they go to another spot and compete and they're wearing their jerseys. And this kinda seems to be the way it is. I said what they ought to do is they ought to make a travel like an adventure travel one. Because there hasn't been one of those in a long time. Everything goes in cycles. You know 26 years ago; the big movie was "The Forgotten Island of Santosha". What was it? It was a travel movie to some exotic location nobody's ever been before. One of the big movies last year was, "No Destination" which was a movie where the Quicksilver Team pretty much got on a boat and motored all over the South Pacific looking for the best waves. And that was extremely popular. That was a Hornbaker movie and then he did another one that was similar to that which was also really really popular, right before it called, "The Hole". Where they were on Tom Carrolls boat. Martin Potter, Tom Carroll went around and tried to find the best surf in the South Seas and it was another adventure flick. Kind of a male bonding adventure flick. That seems to be something that seems to be working its way back into it. I think currently where its headed and what we're starting to see now are surf movies that have break away action that would be unrelated to surfing. Like you might have a breakaway segment where somebody's involved in a bullfight sequence. And the guy gets gored by the bull and the guy gets his pants pulled off. And we had another one where they're running the bulls in Spain as a kind of a cutaway segment. Or cutaway into motorcycles or they'll cutaway into chicks. The oldest one of course is the cutaway to chicks in Bikinis. But now its a cutaway to chicks fighting each other on the beach! Just weird stuff. So anything to kind of get everybody's attention. Make em have a yuck or whatever.

BC: And it seems like its coming from all over the world now, not just The States and Oz. The level of the guys out in Indonesia, I mean the locals.. They are at pro level: Rizal Tanjung, Renan Rocha impressed me... Out there with Wayne Lynch. ...Just ripping!
CD: Well, I went on a sailboat trip in '74 and we sailed down to Central America and Costa Rica. Then I got off the boat. And then the boat went on to Tahiti and was in Tahiti for ten years. While it was in Tahiti for ten years, when my friends got there nobody surfed in Tahiti. None of the local kids even surfed there. In fact not too many people had surfed Tahiti because the outer reefs were pretty treacherous. And the technology was just evolving to put you out there with the right type of equipment. And while they were there they met Simon Anderson, who was developing the tri-fin there. And my friend ended up giving Vitea David a board and helping him learn how to surf. So what's happening is all these places is that there's the travel aspect of getting to these far away places as the world shrinks. More and more surfers get around, and after all surfers are the friendliest people in the world.... When they're out in a strange location anyway! (laughing). And you know they teach these other people in other countries how to surf. And all of a sudden it catches fire and man all of a sudden you see guys coming from Brazil...
BC: ....So as the world gets smaller and there is such a hunger for product, what do you see as big opportunities for Surf Video Network?
CD: I think what we're doing next is we may be going public...and we may be also expanding into other forms of media.
BC: You mean online? Being able to download these videos?
CD: That's certainly something that's going to happen, there's no doubt about it. And also what's going to happen real shortly is linear video is going to be gone and its going to be replaced by disc. And DVD is going to take over. Probably in another five years, there won't be linear tape. And then there's the aspect of cable/satellite. The fact that there's gonna be three or four hundred station options....may bring about a Surf Video Network channel.
BC: That's interesting, because I was talking to Ted Dietz from Surfcheck.com who has the live wave cams. In my mind, I could see a connection there....a "How the surf was today in the world" show. Surfcheck does that in a way with its "tour".
CD: That was my first show! The first thing I did when I started into the surf business was, I did a show called the, "Surf Preview" which was introduced by ....Shawn Tomson. He introduced my show. It was on right before Wally George on Channel 56 out of Anaheim. And what it was, was every morning I would get up and I'd go shoot a segment at Huntington Beach of the surf. And while I was shooting it, my old camera back in the days of the big camera, a big suitcase recorder. I had a prompter in my ear that would prompt me at 30 seconds to stop the camera and another 30 seconds to roll the camera, say what I was gonna say, get it all done by these prompts. And then I'd take it in totally unedited and they'd put it on TV at 8 O'clock, I was down there at six. And I had to go from Huntington to the Anaheim studio, put it on.....then that show was over with, that show was done. I'd jump in my car and head off for either County Line, Zuma, Zero, Secos, Malibu....wherever it was....shoot a segment there, probably around noon...and then haul ass back to Anaheim to get that on for the 5 O'clock break. And it was just a nutcase thing. It was called the "Surf Preview".
BC: You were logging some serious miles.
CD: Yeah! And the station was just humoring themselves with me, watching me burn myself out and they weren't doing a very good job with it. But when I left and stopped doing the show, they called me in and said, "Boy, there's allot of people here...Ya sure don't want to do this anymore? Allot of people want you to come back and do it some more". In fact way back then I remember saying to Dave, "The best way to do this would be to actually rent a spot on the pier, put a little camera there and just dial it in and flip to it in the morning and then do your show right from the studio, rather than running around like a nutcase....and I'm sure that'll happen one day as the video cameras get smaller." Cause back then, the video cameras were like this long (gesturing).
DN: (laughing) It took two people really to carry that thing.
CD: So we've seen that technology come along and we've seen that thing come to fruition and its very exciting to see. You can get on the Internet now and I guess once you get up on a camera you can even pan the camera around and look at the surf.
BC: It'd be cool to have something in the water, so you could really see the conditions...rather than those static cameras up on a building so far away.
CD: Oh that's possible too probably. As long as it didn't get in the way.
DN: Do you think there will be a camera on Mavericks permanently?
BC: I think there already is one during the winter season. I know the one in Pacifica was ripped off. Allot of the Pacifica local's surf Mavericks and I guess one of them thought the wave cams were an incursion.
CD: Yeah, I've driven by Pacifica and it just didn't look that great to me. I don't know why they would want to have a camera out there. I'm sure its on sometimes, just like any place.
BC: After it had been ripped off, they put another camera up in somebody's house, and they threatening to burn the house down! (Ha! Ha! Ha!). I think the solution is to get closer shots from the water at key spots that have already been crowded for years. Make a surf report out of that. You don't need to show every place. Any idiot can tell what the conditions are like from a few key spots.
CD: Amazing.
BC: The shots at G-land that Don King was taking (Quicksilver Pro). What kind of equipment was he using for that?
CD: I think they were using 16mm weren't they?
DN: The interviews were in Beta (Betacam).
CD: Did they use a wind up 16mm out there in a box. Or what? Did they use a big one?
DN: Its a powered one.
BC: So its film transferred to video?
CD: Yeah. Quicksilver Australia has really been in charge of those projects and they want em shot in film. So they have a certain look, a certain quality look. Now Quicksilver here in the United States is taken on projects where they'll send out an independent crew and it might have film and video in it. But what's happening is, the cost of quality equipment and the technology is becoming closer and closer and closer and pretty soon you'll be able to buy the best video equipment, it will look as good as film, it'll be a digital format. You'll be able to hit a button in the editing studio and we want it to look like .....16mm film?, like 35? ....70?..... 70mm/Dolby? It'll all be done on a computer! Right now our computer stuff, we've gone from linear to non-linear format. Meaning that there's no tapes involved. Everything gets transferred to huge computer hard drives. And when you want to do a movie, in the old days, you used to story board a movie. And now you bring in the completed project and you can edit-storyboard in the computer and assemble the whole thing just in a matter of hours that would have taken weeks before. Just crazy how fast it can go.
DN: You know what's really interesting though is allot of the new filmmakers, they come in here and they've never edited on linear before, which is really, really time consuming. And I don't think we've ever had anybody here that used to edit in film. But the non-linear editing is just like editing in film. Its actually faster to edit in film if you're using your original footage...the only thing that slowed it down and made it expensive was...you didn't use your original film in the old days. You had to work from a (dupe) then you edited that and you gave the original to a negative cutter and the negative cutter had to go in and match everything. But when you're editing in video and you have a three-minute section you say, "Gee, I want to put a longer shot in there in the very middle." The only way you can do it, is to reedit everything that came after it. That's the old video style. With film editing, you can stick a piece in there anywhere you want. Non linear editing, its back to the film style mode, where you're actually going in and you can insert pieces anywhere you want of any length that you want. And so its really given allot more editing freedom to the new generation of non linear filmmakers.
CD: Plus the sound tracks are allot better.
BC: Do you use Adobe Premiere and After Affects for your editing?
DN: No, its quite a bit more sophisticated system. Its allot like the AVID System. A competitor with AVID its called FAST and its from Germany.
BC: Who is your competition?
CD: You know in a pure state I don't really think we have any head to head competitors. We have people who compete with us on the edges. And as things go, one of our competitors was someone who worked here for a time and evidently thought it would be a good idea to compete against us and started their own deal. Another one is a guy who started out asking to subdistribute some of our stuff and then went on to become a distributor who competes against us too. But both of those competitors are so small that they really don't amount to much. Plus we're finding that the filmmakers that have gone over to allowing these other people to distribute their product are unhappy...for whatever reason. And at the latest trade show we had a large, large number of people coming back to us saying, "Hey, you know we need to get back together. ..and we really want you guys to distribute our films". And you know, there's a difference. OK.... When you have guys that grew up surfing. And the first thing they did was make surf movies, not sell surf movies. Who have been involved in the sport their whole life. Who love the sport. That's different. Dealing with those kind of people....which are Dave and I. As apposed to dealing with somebody who graduated from college with an MBA and decided to rip off our idea and try to compete with us. Because those guys don't have a soul in the business. Their soul is somewhere else. Their soul is their MBA and how much money they can make. Dave and I have always treated this thing like a labor of love. Its never been a real high profit thing for us. Its been a comfortable lifestyle for both of us. Maybe more so because we have our freedom to go surf or do what we want to do because there's two of us and because we like what we're doing....its allot of fun for us. And we can certainly relate to all the guys that are surfers or making surf movies. On the other hand these two people who are competing against us, I mean neither one of them surf. Neither one of them are involved in any of the sports.
BC: Yeah, I heard about somebody who was going to watch if people took videos of "big names" and try to get a royalty off of everything. Nothing ever happened because it was so absurd, I mean we're not talking about Michael Jordan here. But I saw that and I thought, that's an "interesting" vibe.
CD: That's another one of the real misconceptions, another "Let's bump our heads and move backwards" type of approaches. Because, after all, if you want to promote the sport, you don't want to in any way, encumber it. And that's what you're doing when you try to pull stuff like that. There's one real famous surfer, I won't mention his name. But he's got an agent and this agent seems to think that if you want....any unauthorized use of his image and this and that. We're gonna sue you and this and that. You know there's an old law and its called the public domain and that means this. If you're in anywhere where you can be photographed, this is what the paparazzi do and that's what protects them, if you're in the public domain. In other words, you could be seen in a public place or from a public place, even if its your own house. If you can be seen from a public place where the public is standing, you are in the public domain. Therefore, you cannot charge for that image. Also, with surfing events, even when they're charging for surfing events, unless they can, like Dodger Stadium, wall it off...so that the players can't be seen. They are still in the public domain. So all of it's hogwash. And you know they say, "Well, you can't use our image. You can't do this..." Well, I would not like to spend the money to challenge that in court, but I've been told that in fact that that would be a court case that would probably go with the public domain situation. Because its been fought over and over again. So that kind of thing is, I think, not only detrimental to the sport, because it doesn't promote the sport, but discourages the dissemination of the sport. But also it goes against the common law of public domain.
BC: Well, Dave, Chris.. thanks alot for taking the time to do an interview for proexchange.

In this interview, Dave Natal and Chris Darling provided an effective formula for creating a successful surf video. They suggest developing the best product technically, with film and or video. Shootthe best players at the best locations. Use variety: A variety of pros, locations, shots and styles. Do it in a way that it promotes the sport. That's straight from the Surf Video Network, the largest distributers of surf videos in the world. But it's time to roll, I'm on surfari, the 6-foot south swell is intensifying and the afternoon is hot, sunny and glassy calm. Time to get back to the ranchlands for another session.

-PROEXCHANGE/Bill Clarke