Patagonia

"I'm super proud of how Southern Blast came out. It was an awesome community project where so many people came together. I wanted to showcase the magic of Tasmania in particular, because it's usually left off the map, but also just communicate that rootsy human experience, that epic feeling of being a surfer and turning up to a beach, the surf's pumping and it's just you and your friends around. It is a bit dreamlike, and that's why it's hard to describe those experiences to people that aren't surfers or aren't passionate about something like climbing or being out in nature.

"I did have a pretty strong vision. I wanted the film to feel a little bit slow and contemplative. Originally, we were going to do a 30-minute film and then it turned into 40 because we had such good material. This film was made for the cinema. I tried to do away with the online attention-economy approach to storytelling. I wanted to let it breathe. I think the topic behooves that.

"Really, the film was in the same vein as the history of the Surfrider Foundation. It was a bunch of surfers piling into a couple of cars and setting off on an expedition. We were on a mission to uncover more information about seismic blasting, but also to score epic waves along the way. It ended up being this intentional Merry Pranksters-esque tour of Tasmania, which was awesome.

"I'd made a film for the Surfrider Foundation a few years back, where we went down to King Island and filmed a short doco about the salmon farming that was proposed there. Then last year, I invited Damien [Cole] and Drew [McPherson] to come along to see the premiere of The Road to Patagonia in Byron Bay and we just got chatting from there. We were all really amped to team up and kick off another documentary together.

"To be honest, I don't think any of us fully realised how deep we were going to go. We really gave it everything. We did something like 40 days of shooting, two big blocks down in Tassie and a few integral interviews on the mainland. They weren't small days either. It was the middle of winter and we’d wake up at four in the morning on the days where we were trying to surf, so we could get in the water before the sun was coming up and catch that epic light.

"The late Mick Lawrence had such an amazing web of contacts across Tasmania. Wherever we went, he would sort us out with accommodation or an interview or whatever it was we needed. He was the ultimate in fixers and producers, so it was pretty smooth sailing.

"Day to day, well it's all a bit of a blur now, but we were just driving around, looking at waves, stopping at health food stores to restock the food supplies. It was all pretty wholesome. Someone would be on the brekkie cook up and we'd be eating really nice, healthy, earthy food. We had lots of music making too. We were hanging out with Dusty Rusty (Regan Martinovich) and so many of that crew who were right into making music. At the end of the day, a guitar would be pulled out. If it was a Saturday night and we'd been shooting all week, the red wine would be out and we'd be blasting away on a piano and having a good time. It was the perfect little adventure of a shoot.

"Before we made Southern Blast, all I knew about seismic blasting was that it was really loud, obnoxiously loud, for animals and plants under the water. I knew that it was wrong on a moral ground. We don't tolerate that kind of noise level in the air on a terrestrial experience. So why are we doing it to everyone who lives under the sea? But when I dove into it and we started interviewing people and reading all the academic papers and speaking with the scientists, it blew my mind how categorically damaging the blasting is and they've only scratched the surface of the impacts that are happening.

"We were really cognisant of making sure that the information in the film was easy to digest and not too jargony, because at the end of the day, that gets boring. No one wants to go and watch a film and be lectured at the entire time. It was always going to be a little bit tricky making a film about seismic blasting. It's a very specific topic and it's a negative topic. It's hard to really lift people up out of that discussion once you go there.

"The beauty of filmmaking and other mediums like photography, though, is that you can capture a lot with an image or music, or even the lack of music. It was so great to work with Will Coleman – the musician who scored the entire film in just a few weeks – and the Surfrider team as well. Drew (who co-produced the film with Mick) and the crew worked so hard on this film. We were really lucky to have amazing people to interview, who could clearly communicate these convoluted topics.

"Mick Lawrence was a great man and producer. He was such a father figure – it was incredible how close I felt to him in the year that we were working on this film. He’d made some amazing films in his own right, and he let me stay at his place the entire time we were filming. I think, because of the experiences that he's gone through in his own life, he really took this younger generation of people that could have been his kids, he took them on board and gave us all of his love, advice and experience to help guide the whole production. Without Mick and his wife Robyn, the film wouldn’t have been half as good as what it turned out to be.

"Everyone in the film was incredible. And then you’ve got Annie Ford. What a legendary power woman. She was the perfect protagonist because she had been working on the dark side initially, and then she saw the light, metaphorically, and realised that it wasn't what she wanted to be involved with anymore. She started campaigning against it and completely burnt all bridges in that industry. She was like, fuck it. I'm going to call it for what it is. I've seen it. I've been a part of it, and now I need to be a part of stopping it.

"There's one thing that I feel a lot of hope about – there’s a change of guard in terms of where the power lies and hopefully, we get a bit more feminine energy coming into the world."

Watch Surfrider Foundation’s film Southern Blast, then take action to stop seismic blasting.