Distilled stoke with Sam Glazebrook.
Sam is a popular young man and his attempts to tell me about his influences are interrupted again and again. Strong Adolfos café is buzzing with beautiful people invited to the premiere of Sam’s first surf movie How to road trip. At the moment Sam’s influence by documentary photographers Alec Soth and Jake Stangel is paused for a tale of tourists swept away in the rip just as the lifeguards were heading home.
Everyone’s keen, but no one’s in a hurry. There’ll still be time for a little jam session with his brother
It doesn’t matter, the whole event is a fairly laid about affair. The screening was due to start at seven, then was knocked back to eight and by the conclusion of the rip-riders tale it’s approximating a nine o’clock showing. Everyone’s keen, but no one’s in a hurry. There’ll still be time for a little jam session with his brother. ‘Yeh it’s sort of all very jazzy. I have a folky bluegrass band called All Good Things’. Available for weddings and bar mitzvahs he jokes ‘but tonight it’ll be just… jazzy’
Music is a big part of the approach. Finding the right mood and flow not only sets the right vibe for the editing, but also the whole project.
‘If I hadn’t have made the film I wouldn’t have found guys like Travis Alder, Bongmaster Inc, Absofacto and Radial Face’… All of which play a perfect part in a solid and apt soundtrack.
After graduating from Falmouth University Sam spent some time in California which is where he started making films. But it was the people that interested him. That’s the documentary photographer.
‘I’m interested in places and people. And people in places, I suppose’. The cut-and-tear shortboard surfing never really meant anything to him ‘Here in the UK I feel that everything is very performance surfing – centric. So I wanted to bust that down a little with a logging movie that had some class to it, and some depth’ Then a combination of One Californian day and Campbell’s canon of ‘jivey soulful sliding’ reverberated so wholeheartedly that How to road trip was only a matter of when, not if.
No airs and graces, simply distilled stoke.
‘I know a bunch of guys who surf longboards really good, and just have a different approach to surfing, so I wanted to highlight that. I also live in the big van which I’m driving around, and just wanted to get out for a bit of an adventure!’ Gathering together Mike Lay, Richard Balding, John Eldridge, James Parry, Jack Whitefield, and Josh Daniel among others Sam produced a soulful beautifully crafted surf film about the pure pleasure of our obsessions.
No airs and graces, simply distilled stoke.
I made it cos I wanted to see it’ and you cant find a better reason to create anything than that.
It’s released on Vimeo today, free viewing with a tip jar ‘if people feel inclined’
The full film is below, feel free to tip the film if you approve!