Surfdonkey directors ride high

There is a moment in Surfdonkey Episode Nine when Lance Moore is asked how long it’s been since he was in the water.
“About… 23 days,” he says. Not “about 25 days.” Not “about three
weeks,” but “about 23 days.” This is a guy who clearly lives for being
in the water, if he can estimate with that kind of clarity. The
problem—in Episode Nine, anyway—is that he’s done damage to
his ears for having been in cold water a little too often.

That’s just one of the misadventures—or shenanigans, as Lance
would call them—documented in the short videos posted on Surfdonkey.ca. The site was started by
Lance and his brother Craig as a way to share their activities with the
wider world, many of which are surf related as Lance’s day job is
running the surf shop Dacane on Blowers Street. The idea to shoot films
came from capturing both the activities around the surfing lifestyle as
well as those related to the business: they do independent tests of
products that come into the store. Episode 11 looks at the
viability of a heated wetsuit— maybe the first of its kind in
Canada.

“My brother Craig went to film school at NSCAD, like everyone else
in the city,” says Lance, who also spends his downtime writing
treatments for TV shows, and feels that the unique thing in their video
documents are the challenges of surfing in this climate: “How crazy it
is because it’s so cold.”

The best way to describe what they do would be “branded
entertainment”—podcast-like—with episodic content shot on digital
tape, explains Craig. “I like to describe it as a reality-style, online
video, ongoing,” he says. “It’s easier to describe it as an online show
than, say, short films.”

Craig knows the culture and the world of surfing from having been
into it years ago. Craig and Lance considered doing dramatic, scripted
content, but found with just the two of them, it would be too unwieldy.
“From my experience, what I know works is keeping it really simple and
keeping it true to what’s actually going on,” says Craig. “So we sat
down and had one of those ‘ah-hah’ moments where it was like, what’s
really interesting is Lance talking about surfing. He’s got the
expertise and a band of cohorts that are very colourful,” including
top-level surf people that come through town. “Lance has a built-in
horseshoe in the right place. There are different things happening all
the time.”

The first show went live online in August 2008. The shoots go for
about a half-day at a time; Craig edits what they have and posts it
online. The site hosts 11 episodes currently, with three more in the
can. Lance has been able to lure some local celebs to be part of the
upcoming episodes, including Newfoundland native and national comedic
force Shaun Majumder—who is an old friend—and Dartmouth rocker Matt
Mays. They’ve also interviewed surf legend Tom Curran, the “Wayne
Gretzky of surfing.”

What started as something of a lark has become a bit of an online
hit, with 60,000 downloads and climbing. “The audience is growing
around the world,” says Craig. “We’ve got people in Australia and
California, the UK and Germany who all really like what we’re doing. In
turn, it promotes Nova Scotia.”

An organizer of the Surfilm Festibal in Donostia-San
Sebastián, Spain, has also been enjoying the brothers’ work, and
contacted them to solicit one of their clips for this year’s festival,
running June 11-14. “I took one of the ones I hadn’t released yet,”
says Craig. “It’s unique. It’s a cold-water experience, of surfing in
-8ºC.” Craig also arranged for the clip to get Spanish subtitles
for the local audience.

As for the future of Surfdonkey, Craig sees it as a profit-making
venture. “It’s a showpiece for me and my company, Spider Video,” says
Craig of his corporate video productions, which he plans to expand into
different things. With the web being the main avenue for his work, and
the world watching, surf shenanigans are just a jumping-off point.

This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2009.