What’s It Like Seeing Your $160K Camera Go Over The Falls At 15ft Chopes?
Phantom man Chris Bryan talks getting bear clawed in Abu Dhabi, and the highly specialised trade of surf cinematography.
It’s been a while since we last worked with the legendary Chris Bryan and his Phantom rigs.
In the intervening years, he’s graduated to considerably more important and lucrative pursuits: feature films, television, high-end commercials, and high-speed tracking shots for various motorised lunatics while explosives detonate beneath them.
George Miller fever dream territory.
Chris sits comfortably atop surf cinematography’s food chain.
Not only is he one of a handful of Phantom camera operators, but one of even fewer to have studied in New York to become a qualified Phantom technician. Which is to say, his expertise extends well beyond buttoning on. He actually designs the tools himself, from underwater housings to adapters and all manner of itsy-bitsy cords, cables, and screens.
He hasn’t abandoned surfing. Far from it. But the film industry offers certain professional perks that filming surfers, with their notoriously elastic budgets and appetite for free clips, don’t always provide.
“I would say I’m more passionate about surfing, but still obsessed with the whole commercial feature film industry as well. You work with so many different people, and every time you learn something new. You take a lot of pride in it even though you’re getting good money, it’s also branding and advertising for your own name and credibility.”
His IMDB profile includes credits on: Blue Planet II (narrated by Sir David Attenborough), Life Below Water (narrated by Morgan Freeman), Limitless (starring Chris Hemsworth), and several other large-scale film and TV productions.
Most recently he’s been working on NCIS Australia, where his responsibilities ranged from “underwater, B camera topside, setting up tracking vehicles for boats and jetskis for chasing bad guys on the water and high speed stuff with the Phantom. Mostly I’m using the Alexa 35 though, the number one camera that’s used on all high-end feature films and TV commercials.”
“Put it this way, if I won the lotto, I’d still be doing the same thing. I just wouldn’t do some of the shittier jobs. I’d be more picky.”
Bryan lives in Oyster Bay, a few kilometres west of Cronulla. In June, we caught wind that he was keen to take on a new project. Gladly, we had plenty in the pipeline, so we enlisted him to join Dan Scott and Dylan Roberts in filming Mikey Wright, Craig Anderson, Eithan Osborne and Hughie Vaughan at Surf Abu Dhabi.
“A good little team all round, for sure,” he says.
The assignment came with a fairly open brief. Capture four surfers with distinct, radical approaches, and make the Middle East’s most famous wavepool feel otherworldly and alluring.
“I just tried really hard not to show the background ‘cos when its obvious it’s a wavepool it’s not as inviting. Whereas if you’re tight, it almost looks like the Mentawais or something. Yeah, your mind never stops thinking, ‘how can I do this better?’”
When he can, Chris still pays his way to Tahiti, Shippies and the South Coast of NSW to shoot when the charts are glowing.
“There’s nothing as exciting as shooting surf,” he says. Though that enthusiasm comes with some small caveats.
Bryan has grown weary of pros, and the occasional joe, soliciting footage only to upload it to Instagram with little consideration for how it was intended to be seen. An extraordinary amount of technical work goes into producing a few seconds of Phantom footage. Much of it is lost in translation somewhere between the camera and a vertically cropped social media post.
“It’s that metaphor of feeding the fat kid cake. You give them too much and they don’t appreciate it. They don’t know sound design, coloring, calibration, and it just makes us all look like kooks. So I don’t hand out clips anymore, unless they’re a good mate or working on a proper project. I promise I’m not a jerk. I just value my work and don’t want to splash it everywhere. Also a 3-second clip on the Phantom is 32 gigs and a 10-hour upload. So yeah, most of it lives and dies on a hard drive,” he chuckles.
It’s a slightly bleak outlook for footage that may have required a ton of planning, thousands of dollars in equipment and the occasional near-death experience to acquire. But Bryan would evidently prefer that to watching someone butcher it for a few thousand Instagram likes.
Not that the commercial world is any less capable of putting his equipment in jeopardy.
On a recent HSBC shoot with Matahi Drollet and Tahurai Henry at Teahupo’o, the crew rigged a camera mount to a surfboard for a 15-foot tow day and played around with some hand-held follow shots. The experiment ended with $160,000 worth of camera equipment going over the falls.
“Eimeo [Czermak] went for a wave holding the camera, pulled out, and the biggest set of the day was behind it. Matahi was on it, so he was scrambling to get out of the way trying to get under this thing and ditched the $160K housing and his board. But because of the buoyancy of the housing, which had pool noodles tied to it, he couldn’t. There’s a photo where you can see my purple Dave Kelly housing going over in the lip. It’s aluminium, and it ended up washing in past the tower inside the lagoon, still recording, not a scratch on it.”
Sadly, we never really got around to properly testing his Clark Rubber frankenstein rig in Abu Dhabi.
“Normally on any sort of commercial or movie, you have camera grips, which are this team of guys that do all the rigging for cameras in cars, bikes, jetskis and whatever, and they’re professionals at mounting cameras in hard-to-get places kind of thing. We didn’t have any, so I bought some board mounts with me and just that Clark rubber closed cell foam you get — yoga mat stuff — and a heap of gorilla gaffer tape.”
“Craig was the perfect guy for a board mount looking back out of the barrel. He’s kinda the modern day Gerry Lopez. We rigged it up with tape and whatever else we could find, but we left it until the end because I didn’t want to risk cracking the housing and losing the camera. It was also the last day and that shot wasn’t really a priority, so we tried it for 20 minutes, Craig got two waves, but the shots weren’t quite what I’d imagined. I’d love to try it again somewhere like Desert Point or Supersuck. Four to five feet would be ideal. Anything over six doesn’t look as good.”
Also, attaching 30 kilos to the back of your board makes it fairly cumbersome to paddle and surf. On both Craig’s attempts, he was whipped in by Crewsy (see below).
Despite his success outside surfing, Chris suspects his reputation for high-end production has gradually priced him out of parts of the industry. Which isn’t the case. He’d happily do more of it for less coin, he’s just selective about where his footage ends up.
His puritanism is reflected in the assembly time of his surf reel, which is currently only sitting at 10-minutes, even with a ton of slo mo, after five years. He has no intention of releasing it until he’s satisfied with the material, which, given the specificity of his remaining wishlist, could take another five years.
“I’d love to get Kelly doing his carving 360, John doing his big down carve, and Mick Fanning doing his classic carve. Or, better yet, a big barrel pass-by shot of Mick swooping behind the foam ball. That’s non-negotiable. Mick is one of my favourite surfers of all time, and I’ve been trying to reconnect with him for years. I actually can’t release my surf reel without him. Beyond his incredible surfing, he’s just such a good bloke to be around. The best energy, and such an inspiration.”
Bryan’s origins are considerably less glamorous than his current equipment inventory might suggest. Before the Phantoms, the television productions and six-figure insurance premiums, he was a drop-knee bodyboarder, with a couple of spreads in the boog rags of the day.
“I wouldn’t say I was good in comps or anything. I had waves here and there in some Chris Stroh videos and stuff like that and photos in Riptide Magazine, but I was always a drop knee guy.”
There’s a peculiar pipeline of bodyboarders becoming exceptional surf cinematographers. Alumni includes: Todd Glaser, Todd Barnes, Tom Jenno, James Kates, Dav Fox and Andrew Kaineder. Bryan’s offered us his analysis of why that is.
“I think it comes from being broke. Boogs always survived off the smell of an oily rag. Probably brought out some passion and creativity,” he laughs.
There’s also the practical matter of being comfortable swimming around in heavy surf, often while wrestling an aluminium housing weighing upwards of 25 kilograms. A good surf cinematographer needs to understand wave behaviour, anticipate a surfer’s line and remain composed when several tons of moving water arrive at an inconvenient moment.
Still, Bryan reckons the most important qualification rarely appears on a cinematographer’s CV. “You’ve gotta be able to hang.”
An ability he honed while travelling as Kelly Slater’s personal filmer and shooting Quik’s Young Guns trips back in the day. Spending that much time around pro surfers, especially on trips often entailing several days of waiting, egginess, beer, and the occasional outburst of entitled princess behaviour, is a unsung skillset in itself.
Technically, Bryan believes shooting surfing remains the most difficult cinematography he does. More difficult, even, than filming high-speed cars with cameras rigged centimetres from the gravel.
“With the 8 mil, they call it the death lens or the bear’s claw, because you’ve actually got to be in harm’s way to get the shot. Otherwise you’re just too far from the action, and slo mo mixed with out-of-focus shots… not a good look.”
A car travelling at high speed may appear dangerous, but the variables can be calculated. Camera positions are measured. Clearances are established. The risks, at least in theory, can be engineered out of the equation.
“That’s all science-based. You measure it out and you know it’s safe. Whereas in surf cinema, there’s so many unknowns. You’ve gotta be in position, have all your settings dialled, and not be a punish to hang with. It’s the ultimate training.”
Speaking of which, that particular 8mm ARRI ultra-wide-angle rectilinear lens costs a cool $40K and was purchased from James Cameron, who apparently had a few spares lying around after shooting Avatar. It’s the only one of its kind in Australia.
What was genuinely jarring to hear was that after decades swimming beneath some of the heaviest seas on earth, Bryan says one of the more violent flogging of his career occurred in a wavepool.
“It was the last day and they put the period up to eight or 10 minutes. The wave just had more thickness, more energy, maybe even more height to it. There was no wind, so the surface became a mirror, which kinda fucked with your depth perception. And I had the 8mm ARRI ultraprime lens to shoot Eithan in the pit, from under the rail. Which meant I had to be right there, and the bear claw is about the size of two microwaves.”
“Long story short, I thought I was in the right spot and I wasn’t. The lip landed straight on top of me and my housing and sent me into a full backflip. I thought I was going to go straight back onto my spine, but fortunately, behind me the pool dropped off pretty steeply. It still flogged the shit out of me.”
Fortunately, Bryan emerged in one piece.
And despite ending the trip with a lashing, he was impressed by what the surfers managed to extract from the pool.
“Initially I was a little confused why four air surfers were going to a pool without a cupping section that bends back at you. But it ended up being perfect for big alleyoops and those things Eithan was doing, body varials or whatever. The stuff Hughie was doing frontside and backside was beyond comprehension.”
“The pool is easy to shoot in the sense that the wave breaks in the same spot every time. And there was a white line on the concrete, and markers down the side I could triangulate with.” Then there was the additional luxury of not having to lug equipment miles across soft sand or swimming sharky waters to change batteries.
“That pool is so well set up. The big screen, pools, golf buggies. The restaurant had incredible food and amazing cocktails. The boys were loving the Moscow Mules between laps,” he laughed.
You can find more of Chris’ impressive work here.
