Raves & Rants . . from Penzance

Luckily, summer arrived this year, immediately stymieing the 'It's so grey and rainy and cold' critics. Of course, up to this point, no one was quite sure if summer would put in an appearance, but as you know, we got hit by a heatwave. And no sooner did it arrive than the critics cry changed to 'It's too hot and muggy, bring back the grey'. During the heatwave I was at home, stuck in front of the computer, editing video footage from a two week surf trip to France . Apart from when I was out making more video of things in another hot zone - of which more in a later post. The video footage, the two week stuff, consisted of nearly 100Gb of clips and stills, totalled nearly 10,000 files, and has taken (alongside PR, press and editorial work) the last three months to condense into a 45 minute promo film.  Sifting stills, naming clips, timing them to music and the myriad finer points of tweaking footage into a narrative is massive multi-tasking job for someone mor...

So we planned a trip to try out this crazy new type of surfing - Brush Boarding. Designed to try and replicate a skate-surf-snowboard sort of feel, it's essentially a metal quarter-pipe skate ramp with holes cut into it, through which brushes rotate at high speed. You stand on a foam board and try and surf against the upthrust of the brushes. Am I making sense? Pretty much like surfing or skating, you can drop in from the top, do bottom turns and cutbacks, trim down the line, as well as kick-flips (not me) off the tops (maybe after a bit more practice) and wipeout (definitely me). The wipeouts are OK though, with loads of padding around, and instaed of being mullered by the rest of the set, as in surfing, the guy on the controls simply shuts the machine down, so you can dust yourself off, and get right back into it. Which, it turns out, is what everybody wanted to do. It was definitely fun to do, and with further developments in the pipeline, I can see this becoming a great traini...