Flight of the Barrel Bee

As curators of the Wavescape Film Festival, we once thought that the surf film genre was on a ticket to nowhere. There's only so much surf porn you can watch - so much mind-numbing repetition driven into your cranium by another bass-blasting background track - before you drift off to lalaland.

I once accidently told an audience that the film they were about to watch was a long, boring movie. What I had meant to say was that it was a longboarding movie. My subconscious had intervened, or maybe it was the two weeks of non-stop surf movie watching had deadened my brain, which tricked my mouth into a potentially embarrassing semantic contortion.

But now "Phantom", "GoPro" and new kid on the block, the suddenly famous "drone", have shoved all that silliness aside, and injected the action sports genre with enough juice to fuel the stoke for years to come.

Slow-mo Phantom clip
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Suped-up model helicopter drones - the remote-controlled model pilot's wet dream - can cover the action from just about any angle, and that's just one component of a slew of exciting stuff happening with incredible new high speed cams and portable point-of-view cameras.

The new flavour of the month in surfing sequences - following recent gobsmacking POV barrel clips - has got to be the aerial view pan of a surfer riding the length of the surf spot. Put some aquamarine-coloured, lucid tropical water and the mottled hues of anothe coral reef in the background, and you have an instant hook that pulls the audience right in.

Cut to that crazy, wide-angled shot panning back as a surfer gets barrelled off his nut towards you, or the MTB dude landing a ginormous table top jump. The drone is a millions times steadier than a hand-held cam shooting from a boat yawing in an unduluting sea, or a 4x4 bouncing down a jeep track.

And then of course, just to round off the oohs and aahs, cut immediately to the next scene - of what's it's like to BE the guy you just saw - the POV first person shot from inside the barrel, or on the bike as it soars through the air.

Drone footage
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The quality of material finding its way onto the Web beggars belief at times. The learning curve in drone flying is over it seems, although it remains banned in South Africa.

But never mind the drone. There's also a monumental leap in quality. Filmmakers can shoot the action with ridiculous 1,000 frames-a-second technology with video cameras like the Phantom Flex. Okay they cost a bit, starting at around R500,000.

You can film your movie from multiple angles and speeds unheard of before: along the route, inside and ... on top.

This variety of options as opened the floodgates for the Wavescape festival this year. We have 30 great films, from features to shorts. The quality has never  been so good.

GoPro footage
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Among our selection, you'll notice several examples of filmmaking's fave new shot - the flyby aerial shot. It's a fresh departure from the land-based camera pan that attempts to track a surfer's ride. Good composition is hard to sustain without multiple cameras or other tricks, such as driving along the beach.

Sure, there’ve been some great shots of Skeleton Bay from 4x4s speeding down the beach at up to 80km/h to keep up with those freight train sand-eaters growling down the sand spit meters from shore. But nothing beats those epic angles delivered by the modern drone.

Mix it all together
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The ubiquitious action cam, such as the GoPro, which is so portable and affordable, simply adds a cherry on the top by sucking you right into the viewpoint of the subject. The visual narrative goes from third to first person with lightning alacrity. The future is bright. Little wonder that retail brands are diversifying into content production, such as Red Bull into Red Bull Media House.

Incidentally, Nic Woodman, 39, who invented the GoPro in 2004 because he wanted to show his buds videos of himself surfing, has never looked back. His company, which launched on the Stock Exchange in June this year, is valued at US$3 billion (about R35 billion). They sold something like 3.8 million cameras last year.

A whole industry has sprung up overnight. Athletes such as Danny MaCaskill, the free riding pinup boy for trail riding, can concentrate on content generation rather than compete in events.

Danny Macaskill
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Your average Joe can now produce super HD footage of himself doing his favourite sport. Youtube and Vimeo are brimming with content, some of which is world class, and gob-smackingly so. That's why we've launched the Wavescape Short Cuts Film Contest, in collaboration with Red Bull Media House, for budding producers who want to take it further.

Slo-mo aerial pans of mottled coral and carving surfers are a far cry from those clunky, grainy Super 8mm shots from the 1960s. Wes Brown, son of Bruce Brown who discovered the surf of Cape St Francis in Endless Summer, once told me that the ride at Bruces Beauties was so long that his dad’s Super 8mm cartridge couldn’t capture the whole ride. By the way, a Super 8 cartridge lasted about 2.5 minutes at 24 frames per second (fps).

That’s a far cry from the Phantom 4K Flex. This heavy calibre beast achieves 2,570 fps at 1920 x 1080 resolution. The camera has its own RAM in addition to an inserted “Memory Magazine”. Packed with 512 gigabytes, loading this machine is like loading an M60 heavy machine gun. My camera is a peashooter, and my 16gig memory card pellets in a BB gun.

The future of the adrenaline rush never looked so good.

A record 30 films are being screened at the Wavescape Festival in Cape Town between 29 November and 14 December. Wavescape is presented by Pick n Pay, and supported by the Save Our Seas Foundation, WWF-SASSI, Banana Peel, Jack Black Beer, Zigzag and Men's Health. See www.wavescapefestival.com for more details. #wavescapefestival @WavescapeSA.