“In 1999, filmmaker, prolific artist, and trimming enthusiast Thomas Campbell hit the worldwide surf community with The Seedling, documenting “a small pod of Californian logriders drawing out a beautiful line that was dropped off in the late ’60s.” While The Seedling’s careful cinematography, characters, and display of smooth, technical, traditional longboarding style (with a heavy dose leant to the art of noseriding) shows a side of surfing unseen in most mainstream mags and chop-‘n’-drop videos, the subplot quietly alludes to the importance of becoming proficient with a wide range of equipment, and not accepting labels like “longboarder” and “shortboarder.”
Campbell’s new feature-length film, entitled Sprout and shot entirely on 16mm stock with trademark (T-Moe) method, follows a somewhat-new movement in surfing with a diverse mix of surfers, locations, and equipment, where lines of too long and too short are blurred. Five years in the making, (and backed by a good chunk o’ money from Converse,) Sprout travels the world, capturing some of this blue planet’s best surfers.”