Jerry Ricciotti can relax now.

The 25-year-old Annapolis, MD, native sits in Rob Brown’s Wrightsville Beach, NC, home the weekend of the Reef/ Sweetwater Pro-Am Surf Fest nursing a beer, catching his breath, and literally wondering what day it is. This latest grind — a sneak preview of his new surf movie, Spectacular Adventures — is but an after-gust from a half-decade whirlwind of college, filming, editing, and near-constant travel. Disheveled and baggy-eyed, the former Metalstorm Entertainment videographer and co-creator of the critically acclaimed East Coast surfing documentary The Best Laid Plans [2007 ESeMMY Video of the Year] is certainly no spring chicken in this field, but he’s far too young to be looking so weathered. Adding to his discomfort, a suspicious digital voice recorder stares him down with an obtrusive red light. “It’s weird for me to be the focus of anything,” he whispers, scratching his head and picking at the tab on his beer can. “Nobody gives a shit about me. You’re not buying the video because of me, you’re buying it because of the surfers.”

When I tell him I wasn’t planning on buying it anyway, that I expect a comp copy for this piece, he smiles and lets his guard down a little. In my line of work, whether I’m interviewing a professional athlete, a surfboard shaper, a photographer, or a videographer like Jerry, I typically confront two polarized personalities: the rock star and the artist. Jerry’s the latter. In fact, he may be the least pretentious and least self-entitled director I’ve ever met. “There are two things I hate about ‘A Surf Film By Jerry Ricciotti,’” he asserts about the predictable byline on his latest project. “One, it’s not a film. It’s a video. And two, it isn’t by me. I just shot and edited it, planned some trips, and tied it all together. But everybody has a hand in it. Alek Parker’s co-editing it, Ben Bourgeois is producing it, Nick Zegel’s doing the Art Direction, Zander Morton’s been running the website the past few weeks, marketing, copy editing, and handling photos and videos for the companies. And every trip we’ve done, the surfers’ input has been really important. So I don’t really feel like it’s my thing.”

Jerry started filming his friends in high school after he got hurt wakeboarding, eventually bringing his video camera to college at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Seven years later, he’s arguably the most in-demand and worldly videographer on the entire East Coast. And the strange thing is he didn’t even grow up a surfer. But just last night, he greeted a packed house at Red Dog’s nonetheless with one of the most ambitious, action-packed, and beautifully shot East Coast surf film... er, movies, in recent history.

Eastern Surf Magazine: A lot of kids go to UNCW to keep surfing. What attracted you?
Jerry Ricciotti: They say the college finds you, and this is just where I wanted to be. I’m pretty ambitious, so I double-majored in Business Marketing and Film Production with a Journalism minor. I didn’t start surfing until I got here, so I was definitely an outsider. Slater Powell lived in the dorms and surfed really well, so I often brought out my camera. It’s only fun if you’re filming good surfing, so I enjoyed filming guys like Slater, Rob Brown, and Mark Yonkers. Growing up snowboarding and wakeboarding, looking at the footage is different because you’re trading off with your buddy and interacting, but with surfing you don’t do that until the end. I really liked being at the house drinking beer afterwards and watching it. Then Back To The Front [Pat Stublen and Brian Townsend’s 2004 ESeMMY Video of the Year] came out when I was a freshman, which really made me want to do it. 

ESM: When did you get your first acid test?
JR: [Baggage director] Nate Lee was in a film class of mine. I didn’t know him at the time, but I had put up a little video on Surfline, and Nate e-mailed me, “We have a class together. I film these guys, too. Let’s get up!” We put our footage together into this 20-minute movie we called Trailer Trash and advertised free beer at Red Dog’s, which you’re not supposed to do. But there was a huge turnout. Red Dog’s split the door with us, so we made 500 bucks so I could go to Hawaii with Rob over Christmas break. Brandy Faber let me stay at the DVS house, where I met Zander. The waves were shitty and we were going crazy, just catching chickens in the yard and stuff, so Rob suggested we go to Puerto Rico. I hadn’t spent a dollar on the North Shore, so we left and stayed at Aron Gieger’s house for two weeks. It was overhead every day, and we filmed all day, every day. Josh Williams from Metalstorm, who was making The Rising, wanted this good footage I got of Brian Toth and Dylan Graves and asked if I wanted to go to the Dominican Republic. I was like, “Alright, I gotta think about this. It’s already January. Am I going back to school?” I had talked to my parents before about taking a semester off to travel and they said, “No way.” But this time I’d be working on this project, something I was really passionate about, so they agreed, because I had a plan, you know? I had already invested money in equipment and was taking film classes. I wasn’t just trying to be a bum. So we went to the Dominican. Then Josh said he needed somebody to film for his new movie, Burn, and if I wanted to come out to California, I’d have a job waiting for me. So I went there for a year, and it was nonstop travel. I’d be in California for five days and gone for a couple months. It was unreal.

ESM: Did the Metalstorm job compel you to upgrade your equipment?  
JR: I had bought a good camera eight months before that to film surfing, skating, parties, and concerts. But being in California was a huge barometer check. You just see surfing here, not an actual industry, so to learn how to actually make a production from budgeting to editing to meeting other filmers helped me see where I fit in, if at all, which was cool.

ESM: Around 2005, with the Internet and free DVD inserts in surf mags, the bottom dropped out in surf video production, and independent producers found themselves in a YouTube closeout, so to speak. How did you avoid drowning after coming back East?
JR: I spent a year literally filling up my passport, so I felt I could do this for the rest of my life, but at the same time it was important for me to go back and get my degree. I convinced myself several times that college wasn’t on the path I was taking. It’s not like you have to show a resume. But I also saw the other side — being able to communicate well and have something to fall back on. Plenty of talented surfers, once they get dropped, it’s over for them. So I came back to college, hit it hard for two years, and graduated in 2007.

ESM: With all that schooling, how did you begin to work on The Best Laid Plans?
JR: After Burn, I had a bad travel bug after being gone for so long and talking to friends who were in Australia. So for my summer vacation I planned a boat trip with Jimmy Wilson for an ESM story [“Happy Endings,” September 2006, Vol.15, #115] and to get footage of Clay Marzo for Metalstorm’s video, Tomorrow Today. That’s when I met Alek. I had a year left in school and Alek said I’d be perfect for this hurricane video he wanted to do. So I went to my professors with a plan: “I’m making a documentary and I want to take time off for Hurricane Season. I know it’s short notice, but I can get my work done ahead of time.” Every one of my professors was like, “Go for it. Take off.” It was so cool. “The Hunt” was supposed to be a 2007 Hurricane Season DVD, but the best footage got used for Surfline webisodes. So we decided to make a movie about the four seasons on the East Coast, The Best Laid Plans. The next semester, I went to my professors again: “Alright, the documentary is now a year-long thing and, by the way, I’m going to Israel for 15 days... [laughs].”

ESM: In between the webisodes, no established production company pulling the strings, and negotiating content for this new project, was it a cerebral struggle figuring out what to unleash to the public versus what to hold on to? 
JR: It was, especially when your partner’s a professional surfer. It was Alek’s movie, but I wanted these guys to get exposure, too, and Surfline was the best outlet. If we were to hold on to the footage for an East Coast DVD, well, how many people in California actually see that? So you want to show the best stuff. But after Hurricane Season, we didn’t have anything for the DVD, so we realized we had to find a balance. 

ESM: And mission accomplished; after all, TBLP was applauded as the best East Coast surf movie ever.
JR: I liked it and had a lot of fun making it, but it’s just like anything — you look back on it and see a million things you want to change. It’s all about finding people who do what you can’t do, then collaborating. It’s the only logical way to do anything — making a magazine or a movie or running a business. Alek’s a passionate guy who just attracts talented people. He met the girl who edited TBLP, Nicole Orozco, at a bar! He was just so fired up about the idea he’d talk to anybody who would listen, and it worked for us. TBLP came out in November, and I finished school in December. We put it together halfway through shooting, so we were able to be didactic and really structure it. In Barbados, we drew out an outline for the remaining seasons. Studio411 distributed it and their acquisitions guy immediately wanted our ideas for another movie. Alek got really busy, so I took the lead at that point. We had big plans for a Caribbean movie, and Jimmy Wilson called me and said, “If you’re gonna do this, you need to meet Ryan Miller. He went to Haiti last year and wants to go to the Dominican with Benny and CJ Hobgood.” Ryan’s the coolest guy and an amazing photographer and we agreed to a January trip with Zander, Asher Nolan, and Cory Lopez. The Caribbean movie was looking good until Studio411 was bought out by VAS Entertainment. So there went the contract.

ESM: Is that when the idea morphed into Spectacular Adventures?
JR: With all the traveling I had been doing, I had this great network of guys, but everything we had been shooting was... not pointless, but I didn’t know what it was for. I had gotten really excited about the instant gratification thing, so Dylan and I thought it would be cool to do a blog for Surfline from a trip we took to Bali. My buddy Nick Zegel, who did the artwork for TBLP, made a website and for no real reason spray-painted “Spectacular Adventures” on Aron Gieger’s skate ramp one day. We needed a site name anyway, so Dylan suggested “Spectacular Adventures.” That domain name was taken, so Dylan just blurted, “What about ‘SUPER Spectacular Adventures’!?!” It was retarded — a 27-character website name [laughs], but such a Dylan thing to say. We thought we could upload all this footage, but the Internet in Bali was so bad we had to e-mail Surfline saying we had nothing. Once we got back, we saw SuperSpectacularAdventures.com as a way to check in on what the crew was doing, so we started aggregating East Coast news. It was low-maintenance and people really liked helping. Zander’s a good writer and really responsible about updating. Jimmy’s stuff on the west coast is awesome. CJ’s really on it with his blog. But the concept itself is so over the top, which makes sense for these guys. Nobody’s trying to be cool. We were on Zander’s boat this year just losing our minds. We felt like everything we did was a spectacular adventure — boozing underwater, jumping off things... I’ve traveled with Andy Irons before, and I know he wouldn’t be part of something so ridiculous as “Spectacular Adventures.”

ESM: So why not just keep doing blog-isodes instead of transforming this into a DVD?
JR: Alek and I wanted to cut our Galapagos and Israel footage for a television-structured documentary, but the stuff started getting old, so Ben suggested we make a DVD. This was the total opposite of TBLP, which we made after looking back at everything. This was more, “How do we make this section work? What’s strong?” We knew it would be hard to make money, but for me the money had already been spent. I had already traveled, sponsors paid for some stuff along the way, and all we had to figure out was how to package the footage. There really wasn’t another option other than a DVD. What were we gonna do, run Surfline webisodes for a year? 

ESM: How tedious was the process this time around?
JR: At this point, I was living in Colorado and editing sections. I had done edits along the way and lost two computers since the Dominican Republic, so all these thousands of hours of edited files were gone. That was a blessing in disguise, because if I had taken those old edits, the movie would’ve felt really thrown-together. Zander told me he really liked the original edit I did for the Caribbean teaser for VAS, saying it was a better representation of what went down than just straight surf action, so that became my goal — editing the footage according to that trailer — lots of lifestyle clips that show how much of an adventure each trip was. 

ESM: The Central and South America and Caribbean locales are obviously the main focus, but you have some East Coast footage, too (North Carolina, Panhandle). How did you balance that with this year’s “The Hunt” webisodes?
JR: I was in Bali when Alek did the first ’08 webisode, so he had another guy, Danny Jones, filming. Alek e-mailed me saying they just scored Daytona and I needed to get to Florida. So I changed my ticket and got a nonstop to Tallahassee, where he and Peter Mendia picked me up to go to the Gulf. I was just making ends meet, but Alek knew what he wanted for “The Hunt,” and he edited all that POV of himself and Cory Lopez. For Hurricane Ike, Alek went to Africa with Cory, but Shea Lopez called saying the Panhandle would be really good so I went there with Rob, Zander, and my girlfriend to edit that webisode for Alek, while keeping some stuff for Spectacular Adventures.

ESM: Could this be considered a sequel to The Best Laid Plans, seeing as you have an all-East Coast cast, albeit more trip-specific instead of revolving around the seasons at home?
JR: That was the idea — another documentary about what these guys are doing, but more surf porn this time. I’m not trying to do stuff with Clay Marzo. This is just Ben and Asher and all these guys doing what they’d be doing anyway whether someone was filming or not. Come summer, pro surfers usually go on a boat trip to Indo, which we did for TBLP as a celebratory thing. I made an outline on the ferry ride home from the Caribbean trip, wondering how to end Spectacular Adventures, and Jay Dodson said, “That Panama boat you guys got in TBLP was sick! I’d like to book that with my friends and just go fishing.” And it was like, “DING!” So we thought it would be cool to make Panama that final hurrah trip. It didn’t even matter if the waves were bad, because all these guys love fishing, and this place has the best fishing in the world. I called the captain saying I thought we could fill up the boat in May, and he gave me two weeks that would work. I e-mailed 22 surfers to see who was interested and 18 people wrote back. The boat only holds 14 people [laughs]... Coordinating any professional surf trip is hard, because at any given time six people are out of the country, but I really wanted to show Cory the Dominican footage and get his feedback. I already had half the movie edited, and my plan the whole time was to put a trip together where I could get the crew’s feedback. Good waves were obsolete. I had been sending them edits the whole time anyway — like Asher would see the Hatteras edit and say, “take that out,” “that song is awesome...” But then we got sick waves!

ESM: We noticed on that last trip you added some names to your star roster: Sam Hammer, Michael Dunphy, Mike Gleason, etc. How important was having that cast diversity?
JR: Very important, but we didn’t invite Sam or Gleason just so we could sell DVDs up north. We like these guys and Gleason loves to fish, so why wouldn’t we invite them? I wish I had a chance to go up to Jersey and shoot with them, but it didn’t work out. Inviting them wasn’t a conscious thing. As long as we had enough beds on the boat [laughs]. It’s stressful enough doing a trip with six guys. Try 18!

ESM: Which brings us to now. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you look like shit. 
JR: I know [laughs]... Ben was trying to get sponsors for a summer tour in Panama and said, “You should do a sneak preview for the Wrightsville contest.” I was like, “Shit, that’s a month away. Considering that we did TBLP in two months, it might be a little rough but we can have something.” I moved back to Annapolis from Colorado, where I had been living all winter, editing by myself. It was the first time I didn’t have a sounding board of my friends. But Alek knows Final Cut Pro now and can fully edit, so I was calling him a lot and doing screen sharing so he could see my timeline. Finally, I was like, “Dude, you need to come up here. I’m not gonna be able to make this deadline without you.” He flew up and we were cranking — working 18-hour days nonstop. I was still editing as we drove down here on I-95. The last day, we edited for 36 hours straight until 11:00 am, slept until 4:00 pm, got in the car, stopped in Virginia to buy an inverter so I could edit the titles, and blew through town. The movie had to go up in five hours when we got here. Burning DVDs isn’t hard but compressing for that format takes some time. We had three laptops going, and it was just a race between the three to see which computer could get it done the fastest. Meanwhile, I was at Best Buy on the phone with Benny, who was at Red Dog’s. In case we couldn’t compress the DVD, maybe we could run a cable long enough to play the movie through the computer. At one point I was thinking of dangling my computer from the ceiling. But come 6:59 pm, Zero Hour, it was finished, other than the captioning and some minor audio issues.

ESM: What now? 
JR: I’d be lying if I were to say I don’t want to work on bigger things and grow as a filmer, because I wasn’t born a surfer. But at the same time, I don’t want to lose these close friendships I’ve made. Besides, if I were to go work for National Geographic tomorrow it could take me 10 years to get to the Galapagos if I’m lucky. It’s such an amazing opportunity to do this and have all these people helping me. The thing I like most about surfing is the travel and camaraderie involved, and the appreciation of good surfing. I figured out at Metalstorm that I could work and still live in North Carolina. I could also go to college, get good grades, and still go to Panama and the Galapagos. Now I’m able to live in Colorado, snowboard my head off, still do boat trips, and make a movie. Being from the East Coast, I loved traveling for Metalstorm but hated living in California. It’s cool coming back and being around people who have so much pride about where they’re from. So I’ll still do the site, and I’ll probably say yes to the next trip I get invited on. We’ll try and sell Spectacular Adventures to VAS Entertainment and Mutiny Media, and also sell it independently. In fact, this August, my brother Danny and I are riding our bikes cross-country, and I want to sell it to dealers from my cell phone... on my bike. That’s the next challenge. The next grind.

To purchase the DVD, stay up to date with the summer tour, and read blog postings from all of Jerry’s kids, visit www.SuperSpectacularAdventures.com

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