Why Sound Design Matters in a Surf Film

I spent fifteen years in music before I ever picked up a camera: playing, then producing and engineering. When I started filming surfers in Brazil, the habit that came with me wasn't visual. It was listening.

That turns out to matter more in a surf film than almost anything else you can do on the day.

Music sets the mood, sound sets the place

A track tells the viewer how to feel. It does that well, and there's a reason nearly every surf edit has one.

What it can't do is tell them where they are. Music is the same in Hossegor and in Santa Teresa. The sound of the place isn't: offshore wind through pines is nothing like wind through palms, and a shore break on steep sand doesn't sound like one on a reef shelf.

Put a few seconds of the real thing under a shot and the viewer is somewhere specific. Leave only music and they're watching a mood board.

What I record, and when

Ambience is gathered when the light is useless: the middle of the day, the wait between sets, the walk back up the beach. Thirty seconds of each, on their own, not as part of a take.

The list barely changes: wind in whatever grows behind the beach, the water from far enough away to be texture rather than subject, a van door, wax on a deck, the velcro of a wetsuit, footsteps on wet sand, voices in the car park with the words indistinct.

None of it takes effort. All of it costs nothing but remembering.

Recorded separately, always

The audio that comes attached to a shot is rarely usable: wind on the microphone, your own breathing, the camera housing knocking.

Recording ambience as its own take means you can place it where you want, fade it under a slow-motion shot, let it carry a cut. Sound tied to a picture can only be as long as that picture. Sound recorded on its own can hold three shots together.

That's the whole trick, and it's why an edit with good ambience feels continuous while a cuts-only edit feels like a list.

Slow motion has no sound of its own

A take-off at 120 frames per second, played back slowed, produces a smear if you slow the audio with it.

So the sound comes from somewhere else: a low layer of water at real speed, a breath, a swell of the music. What the viewer hears is not what the microphone captured, and it's what makes the slow motion feel weighty rather than merely soft.

Cutting back to real speed on the exit, with the real sound returning at the same instant, is what creates the impression of speed. The contrast does it, not the frame rate.

Silence is a tool

The easiest way to make a wave sound big is to give it a moment of near-nothing first.

Drop the music out for a second and a half before the drop. Leave the wind. Then let everything come back at once. It costs one decision in the edit and it does more than any amount of low end.

Where the music finally goes

Last, and after the structure is settled.

Music laid over an unfinished edit hides its problems: a sequence that doesn't work will still feel fine under a good track, and you'll discover the fault weeks later when you watch it without sound. I build the film on ambience and cuts, then bring the music in.

On the documentary I'm editing at the moment I'm also writing the score, and the order is the same there. The picture decides what the music has to do, not the other way round.

If you do one thing

Next time you shoot, take four separate recordings before you leave the beach: wind, water from a distance, one human sound, one object sound.

You'll use at least three of them, and the edit will hold together in a way you won't be able to point at.

The surf films behind this are on this page.