One Hour of San Diego Surfing Collapsed Into 2 Mins Just Might Be The Coolest Thing You’ll See Today

A San Diego based cinematographer and editor has managed to figure out a way to compress an hours worth of surfing on a local beach into a two minute clip by overlaying all the best rides and making it seems as though there are five wicked surfers going at all times. 

This video was created from one hour of source footage shot from a bluff in San Diego the morning of Jan 21, 2014. I was interested in exploring the manipulation of water and to see how the movements and patterns from surfing interact. Watching surfing typically happens in one or two ways: in films/videos or in person standing on a pier, beach or bluff. In most surf films, the riders are so talented and the waves are so good it becomes an abstraction from the average viewer's/surfer’s experience at an average break. On the other hand, watching in person can be very slow and depending on the swell there may be long stretches when nothing happens at all. This video is a playful attempt to split the difference and reveal just how much can actually happen in an hour in an otherwise nondescript surf spot with non professional riders. There are no CG elements, these are all real surfers and real waves with the time separating them removed. The video does not contain every wave that passed during the hour; I picked the best rides but otherwise tried to maintain chronology.