I’ve been “making films” for more than a decade now, predominantly focusing on my passion for surfing. As my comfort circle expands and I transition away from filming on the beach and into covering subjects I’ve long aspired to document, I wanted to make this tribute to the progression of surfing I’ve witnessed, documented, and so fondly admire.
I started out at the age of 13 in 2003 with my family’s old Canon ZR80 camcorder from Costco, a ghetto Sony PC and a painfully buggy version of Windows Movie Maker. After hustling the neighborhood with dog-walking, computer-fixing, gardening and various odd-jobs, I worked my way up to a Canon GL2 a bazooka-sized Ocean Images waterhousing. throughout my teenage years, I ditched school and work to sneak off and film my friends surfing, making short films I released on Myspace, Youtube, and sold on homemade DVDs in Santa Barbara’s surf shops.
After I left high-school and held a steady job, I worked my way through a costly Super-8 phase, and my first high definition camera, the stunning Canon XH-A1. I continued making films for the web but almost grew away from my passion as I fell into a sudden and unexpected photography career.
After a year hiatus from filmmaking to explore my newfound interest and career in photography, the Canon 7D was announced. I immediately purchased one and started making films of a technical and artistic quality I had been longing for endlessly. Come 2011, my photography career took off and my schedule exploded, and the 7D was back on the shelf. But in early 2012, Nikon announced the D4 with video, which gave me video capability in the still cameras I was using on all my shoots. Again O was hooked, so hooked, in fact, that I treated myself to a Red Epic! My logic for this investment was that if nothing else, my technological curiosity wanted to take it apart and reassemble it to better understand the circuitry and complexity of its small package and beautiful form factor.
Fortunately, 2013 saw Quiksilver supporting me in investing a lot of time and energy into making films with Stephanie Gilmore and Kelly Slater and pursuing passions commercially for other surf industry clients and artistically for myself. A Red Epic, Red Dragon, and now Red Weapon later, I spend at least 50% of my time and energy making movies. While they’re mostly outside of the surfing realm now, I will forever love and cherish my time filming surfing and pointing my camera at my first and favorite passion… and I will continue to do so, in new and exciting ways.
See more from Morgan Maassen on Instagram, Facebook, Vimeo, and on his website.
