Watch: “Jungle” by Morgan Maassen

For the last four years or so, Morgan Maassen’s time for turning his nuanced eye on surf has waxed and waned, as commercial and creative projects have kept the Santa Barbara photographer, filmer, editor, writer, curator, entrepreneur and all around homme de la Renaissance damned busy. 

While getting organized before a trip to Australia for a project last month, Maassen found himself digging through files of footage he’d practically forgotten about. 

“As lame as it sounds, I was re-organizing the media server in my office, and began to realize how much footage had been lost in the shuffle, and ultimately under-utilized,” Maassen tells Stab. “As I fell back into filming in 2013, the majority of projects I worked on involved me mainly shooting photos, capturing video strictly as a hired gun.”

Filmed in Indo, Australia, Europe, Puerto Rico, and all over California, “Jungle” stars Dane Reynolds, Stephanie Gilmore, Noa Deane, Sterling Spencer, Dillon Perillo, Rob Machado, Laura Enever, Alessa Quizon, Bella Nicols, Nat Young, Andrew Doheny, Marlon Gerber, and Lee Wilson.

“Editing video is bar-none my favorite thing to do, so I was struck with a pang of excitement at several these untouched folders of video,” Maassen says. “A few weeks ago, I was heading to Australia for a photoshoot, so I loaded them onto a hard drive and set out to edit something on the plane, if nothing else as an exercise of passion. I landed in Australia with a rough draft of “Jungle,” color-corrected it the following day to the point that you see it now.”