Swellnet is a proud sponsor of the inaugural Sydney Surf Film Festival (SSFF), a two week celebration of surfing on celluloid. Over the next fortnight we'll be running interviews with the folk behind all the shortlisted feature films. Up today is an improbable - but hugely enthusiastic - crew of surf filmmakers from Austria talking about their latest film, 'The Young, The Old, and The Sea'.

Swellnet:Tell us a bit about yourselves.
Hello. We are Stefan, Roman, Harri, Lisa, Basti, Andy and Mario, and yes, we are surf filmmakers from Austria. I [Mario] think to speak for the team when I say: A lifestyle of living in a bus, surfing the best spots with locals while being considered a productive member of society - that is, filmmakers - is pretty awesome. We want to keep going.

How did you get started in filmmaking and why? Did you study filmmaking formally or are you self-taught?
Roman and Harry studied visual arts, all the others in the team are self-taught. We started this project about surfers in Europe when Andy and I realized, that there is no comprehensive movie about the mentality of the surfing scene specifically in Europe. At least we couldn‘t come up with one at that time. We had both been studying on the north coast of Spain and were blown away by the good vibe and the other good stuff of the surfing community there. 

The cool thing about surfing in Europe is that it‘s so diverse. There are surfers in Italy, in Northern Germany, in England, Ireland, the Netherlands... But the best conditions are usually found in France, Spain and Portugal. It‘s there where Surfers of all nationalities gather to surf and hang out. A multicultural melting pot. Check the number plates in Rodiles, Supertubos or Hossegor - there are lots of origins packed on one spot. That just made it really interesting to look at it from a cultural perspective.

How did your film come about?
We were quite surprised about the attention we received already during the first shooting trip in the spring of 2012. Maybe because we’re from a country without a sea, maybe they just liked the idea, or the stunning photos Stefan contributed… Who knows? Major surf magazines contacted us and wanted to know our story, some shots Stefan did of the characters, we had lots of questions around the project. It was unreal having a Surfers Journal in your hands, featuring your project. Sweet lord... It was the same during the second shooting trip in fall 2012 - once a local newspaper lady suddenly appeared during an interview we held with a local and wanted to interview us. We ended up photographing each other.

Then it took us almost a year to finish the movie and it became a little more quiet. We lived in our cutting room to somehow make sense of over 140 interviews we had collected over the course of the shooting. I tried all sorts of canned food available on the Austrian market. No tan, pale face, red eyes.

Since the release of the movie we‘ve been on film festivals in France, Spain, Austria, Germany, the US, Bali, South Africa... Incredible. We are really happy and proud that we were able to finish the movie. And even more so for the way it has come around.

Where do you look for inspiration?
There are so many great sources of inspiration. There is Werner Herzog, a German American film maker who just made the most amazing documentaries about the regular lifes of regular people. Michael Glawogger - I‘m a big fan of his work - who captured cultural differences in his sometimes highly provokative movies. Jason Baffa, who cinematographically speaking is just incredible - just check out Bella Vita, a surf movie about the Italian surfers in the mediterranean sea. Baffa took a 16mm camera and squeezed it into an humongous underwater case. Crazy, but the outcome is beautiful.

How do you feel about your work being seen on the big screen?
It‘s a little thrill every time. I usually stay with the audience for a couple of minutes to see how they react to the first few funny scenes. Sometimes there is loud laughter, other times people are more pensive. I never really understood how you could say "city X has the best audience and cheers the loudest“ - but it seems as if there‘s some truth in that.

The Q&A sessions after a screening usually reflect this first impression. Sometimes it‘s very leaned back, other times it‘s really exciting and becoming a very interesting discussion with the audience.

Anyway, it‘s weird and pretty cool to get the chance to pack your memories into a movie and see people actually being interested in it. It‘s awesome. Awesome-awesome. Awesomeness!

What equipment do you use?
We used mostly Panasonic GH2 cameras. They are ridiculously cheap, small, lightweight and since you can hack their firmware the resulting quality is just beyond what this little camera might make you assume. Apart from that it‘s just regular tripods, monopods, a cheap steadycam, a selfmade rig built out of home depot parts, a sound recorder for 300 bucks.

Some guys who surf professionally didn‘t take us serious  - maybe because of that flimsy looking equipment. We were cheap, but dedicated.

What do you think makes a good story? How do you set about translating that onto the screen? What is your starting point?
I guess a good story is only good in the right context. In The Old, the Young & the Sea it happens to be very regular stories about regular people. What makes them special is their dedication to stay true to themselves and their lifestyle. 

An old guy of 78 years, speaking about his first barrell - well, for Europe that‘s just a great story, because surf doesn‘t have such an old history in Europe. Juan was one of the first surfers in Spain, a real pioneer. It‘s inspirational how they conquered something genuinely new for them and how his friends and him just erred in finding the right technique, the equipment and the spots. Plus, Juan for example is a great storyteller himself.

We chose to not include a narrators voice because we wanted to leave the things people said in the interviews unaltered, not interpreted. We just wanted to present them, as they presented themselves to us. We wanted to keep it really authentic without the need to find a prototype or a generalization.

So the starting point were people we met. Sometimes because we asked around for interesting guys - other times it was just plain coincidence. One guy for instance, who proved to be a great main character of our movie was just collecting mushrooms in the forest when he jumped in front of our lense. People who've seen the movie: Guess who! 

How much of the process do you think is creative and how much do you think is technical?
50/50? 70/30? It‘s a movie with a lot of spoken content, embedded into nice camera work. Both parts were important for us: the beautiful landscape along the way and the feelings people put in front of your feet.

In post production it‘s maybe a little different again. You start quite creatively by watching and selecting material. You start composing sequences you love and realize: You can‘t keep it 5 hours or so long. So in a technical sense you have to start balancing the movie: make it shorter, distribute the weight how it feels right, throw out sequences in which the quality of the material just doesn‘t match an overall look you want to achieve. Here some discipline helps.

And getting a finished movie to different formats to different cinemas or platforms - that’s a technical jungle. I had spent many hours in forums - hey, thanks Creative Cow! - until that was done. 

Where do you see the future of surf filmmaking going?
There‘s a lot of diversification going on. Surfing is a huge sport practiced by little girls, big boys, family dads and extreme water women. And while it‘s a water sport the whole mentality of waiting for the conditions, the travelling part, the environmental conciousness, the whole culture around the sport in short opens up a broad field for the genre of surf movies.

From a technical point of view it‘s going to be glorious for everybody. Drones that follow you on a wave automatically are maybe a consumer toy in some years. From an aesthetic point of view, Jesus Maria, there‘s going to happen a lot. And I guess there‘ll still always be people who push the boundaries in terms of the athletic aspect. For sure - and it‘s probably not about wave size but new approaches to known breaks.

But for me as a surfer who just enjoys being in the water that‘s something to remote to relate to. I hope to see more movies dealing with the human side, the travelling aspect and the interchange between cultures. I‘m very interested in how people in remote, undiscovered areas pick up surfing and create their own rituals around it. A movie I still didn‘t have the chance to see is Splinters for example. From the trailer I would say that‘s an extremely interesting movie. Surfing is a great vehicle to get people to places and it‘s an activity that challenges given views on life and the world around us - I think that is still going to be interesting for quite some time in the future of surf filmmaking.

What piece of advice do you wish you’d been given when starting out as a filmmaker?
How about: "Don‘t do it!"

No. But really: 50% of making a movie is having it done and trying to bring it to audiences. It‘s way more challenging than we initially thought. So yeah, sounds like we‘re here for the money, but a good advice or the other on how to sell a movie would enable us and many other filmmakers to make more movies, more quality movies.

To be honest it‘s pretty much idealism to make surf films - and if you‘re not big yet, the same applies to films in general. Still it‘s something we really want to keep doing. It‘s just incredibly fulfilling and worthwhile. So...fingers crossed.

For dates and times of all screenings visit the SSFF website.