Here’s How You Can Digitally Watch Thomas Campbell’s New Film

Click here to purchase Yi-Wo on Vimeo

Twenty seven hundred redwood trees watch my ancient Toyota bump and groan up the mountain and through the fading evening. From my window, they stand straight and speed past on both sides. Above, they sway in the soft seabreeze. 

Thomas Campbell lives behind a garage in the mountains of Santa Cruz. His living room is small, with a textured painting of red and white sitting on the carpet as I walk in. A baby blue cabinet of records, his daughter’s rainbow rainboots, a folk guitar, and various sculptures adorn the walls and counters in a scattered net of ideas.

I’m here to watch a film — the one Thomas has been working on, in a roundabout way, for over a decade. 

“I filmed the Morocco section with Dave [Rastovich], Burch, Trevor Gordon, and Lauryn Hill in 2014,” he chuckles. 

In the time since, he became a father and created an entire skateboarding film — Ye Olde Destruction. 

“I guess I was less worried about the surfing I’d filmed feeling old,” he tells me. “I didn’t mind sitting on the footage. Skating evolves quickly, but the surfers in this movie are kinda just timeless.”

Yi-Wo stretches to around 80-minutes. It features Dave Rastovich, Ryan Burch, Craig Anderson, Lauryn Hill, Trevor Gordon, Alex Knost, Joel Tudor, Karina Rozunko, and a handful of others. It does not feature a single clip played in real time.

“If you don’t have an attention span, you’re fucked,” laughs Thomas. “Everything is slow paced. This is our life, it’s an amazing experience, and if you can’t honor the experience, get the fuck out of here. There’s a lot of things in there that are at the edge of what’s acceptable to subject the viewer of a surf film to, but, I’ve always believed in long cuts. Always. I like watching people drop in. I like watching their whole wave. It keeps it in the dream space, moving and floating in and out.”

If you’re looking for a fast-paced high performance surf film, this isn’t it. 

The entire experience is foreign — a look behind your eyes at the space you’ve been meaning to sit in. A reminder of your childhood in the ocean, a reminder to breathe when you bottom turn. 

Surf films are often crippled by false poetry,  written by the PR departments of multinational corporations. 

But of course, reading real poetry isn’t always easy.

If you can get there, if you can sit there, if you can meet the fist as it comes for your face, there are inspirations to be had between the frames of Yi-Wo. 

“The jocks are definitely gonna hate it,” chuckles Thomas. 

Lending to the psychiatric transposition of the film is the soundtrack — recorded across various continents and eventually compressed into an eerie collection of previously unheard echoes. The musical project that led to these sounds has evolved into what Thomas and his friends are calling Cone Cinq.

“We started working on the music probably like five years ago,” says Thomas. “I think I just had an idea of what the film was going to be like, and we recorded most of it in my friend’s studio in San Francisco. I think we made 25 tracks or something. I’m going to put out a record with the tracks probably next year. I played many instruments horribly,” he chuckles. “Guitar, bass, keyboards, violin, shakers, I sang too… but I’m more of the producer. I’m better at telling people what I want.

“One of the songs is Alex Knost and Kassia Meador in Costa Rica at a cafe. Kassia is playing sound bowls and Alex is just doing feedback on his guitar. It’s really long, but someone recorded it and Alex gave it to me. I just threw a part of it on one section of the film and it fit perfectly.”

As you may have seen through the various promotions of the film in recent months, the standout aestheticism comes at the feet of Ryan Burch and Craig Anderson — the latter of whom spends the majority of his screentime carrying the poise of a renaissance model.

“Craig pays for it dude,” recalls Thomas. “He’s performing. Yeah, he’s smooth and casual, but you don’t get that for free. He’s decided he’s going to fucking chill, but that doesn’t always work out. You never know what Craig’s gonna do because no one does that. You kind of know, but then he’ll just roll over and set the most perfect fucking line in the most critical place with no hiccups. Who does that?”

If you’ve already watched it, the film is undeniably indulgent in its slow-paced artistic inclinations. And yet, it comes at the crescendo of our attention span crisis. 

“I mean, I started this movie before you got your drivers license, before you had an Instagram,” Thomas says to me. “I’m not trying to be definitive, but I have a feeling that the ramping up of information is changing people. I think maybe there was something about not being stimulated before that allowed certain people to progress into their own people without too much external information influencing them. Look at Dave [Rastovich] or Alex [Knost]. They’re very much unique individuals.

“I feel weird talking about it, because I obviously want to make things that are positive. There’s not enough time to be negative.

“It’s just all folklore, right?” he continues. “I mean, literally everything. All the stories we tell ourselves, all of our historical beliefs, they’re all fairytales. The crux of our time here is love and compassion. I’m just trying to address dimensions of our existence. I guess, parts of this film are little launch ramps, and you can go off the launch ramp however you like.”

The film is now for sale on Vimeo if you’d like to purchase and watch.