Is Low-Fi Footage The New Black?

Here’s a novel concept. 

Take a modern surfer to a modern wave. Film him with an aging camera, make the frame 4:3, and add a Bink-182 song. Make sure the resolution stays below 540p and boom, you have a modern-day Y2K masterpiece. 

Kai Hing semi-recently went to Mex and flung a few wild windmills. Some of his best rides were captured between the lenses of Matt Tromberg, Tom Carey, and Dylan Graves. For one reason or another, those clips were uploaded in a true new-millennium fashion, as outlined above.

A unique aesthetic choice indeed, but for some reason we like it. 

“I was lucky enough to visit mainland Mexico at the end of last year with Dylan Graves, Shane Borland and Simon Hetrick,” Kai told Stab. “We got to surf some really fun right-hand points with not too many other people around. A couple of my favourite surf sections to watch were filmed around the zone we were hanging, which was pretty amazing.  We didn’t get much swell but it was such a cool place to surf and cruise around. Looking forward to going back and doing it all over again.”

Perhaps the admission that, “a couple of my favorite surf sections to watch were filmed around the zone we were hanging,” lends credence to Kai’s stylistic preferences. In Billabong’s Trilogy, the holy trio of Andy Irons, Taj Burrow, and Joel Parkinson surfed the Mexican points to Angels & Airwaves (which contains former Blink bandmates) in a lowish-quality 4:3 ratio.

Same same?