Surf’s Up @ AEAF

On Wednesday, November 14th I’ll be presenting a detailed look at the making of Surf’s Up at the Australian Effects and Animation festival. If you’re going to be near Sydney this November you might want to include AEAF in your plans–this has been an excellent conference in the past and it looks like another great lineup this year as well.

AEAF attendees or others with interest can download the referenced course notes from Sony Imageworks [14.3 Mb PDF].

Surf’s Up DVD #1

The Hollywood Reporter reports that Surf’s Up was the #1 seller on DVD in the first week of it’s release making $8.1 million.

Surf’s Up on DVD

Surf’s Up is out on DVD (Widescreen Special Edition) this week (also available on Blu-ray). The DVD has a lot of special features and I’ve noticed a lot of great reviews: (more…)

Wrangling Waves

J.P. Beeghly: Hey Rob, can you get down to Dana Point within 3 hours?

Rob Bredow: Uh, yea. It moved up?

J.P. Beeghly: Yup, Sean thinks the swell is coming early. Jamie Stirling and Carlos Burle are already in the air from Hawaii. We’re leaving tonight.

Rob Bredow: I’ll grab my camera and I’ll be on my way.

The next 48 hours were my first-hand introduction to the world of big wave surfing. I tagged along, invited by award winning cinematographer and producer JP Beeghly as his sound guy and grip on an expedition out to Cortes Bank with several professional surfers.

Cortes Bank is a break 100 miles off the coast of California created by a giant underwater mountain that makes the water shallow enough to create breaking waves with 30-60 foot faces in the right conditions. Sean Collins, who runs surfline.com, is the master at predicting these waves and had just moved our timetable up by another 30 hours so we didn’t miss this swell.

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FxGuide features Surf’s Up at Siggraph

John Montgomery from FxGuide.com caught up with me at Siggraph to shoot an interview. It makes for a nice summary of some of the wave techniques we presented at the course. The Surf’s Up part of the interview starts about 1/3rd of the way in of “Netcast #6″ on this AWN media page.

Surf’s Up Course at Siggraph

On Monday, August 6th, the Surf’s Up team will be presenting a half day course detailing The Making of the Animated Documentary.

If you can’t make the course, you can download the course notes [14.3 Mb PDF file].

Update: The PDF file is now hosted here by Sony Imageworks. [14.3 Mb PDF file]. Enjoy

Mundos Digitales

This coming Saturday, July 7th, I will be speaking on the making of Surf’s Up at Mundos Digitales in A Coruna, Spain. I plan to post updates from the trip as possible.

Surf’s Up at Siggraph

There is a new trailer for the Siggraph Electronic Theater posted on myspace which includes a few seconds of Surf’s Up. Enjoy.

AWN Chronicals the Visual Effects in Surf’s Up

AWN has published an article that I wrote about supervising Surf’s Up. Visit for some cool pictures and a couple of stories from the production.

Surf’s Up Review Are In

The reviews for Surf’s Up are in and, for the most part, everyone loves it:

The consensus from Rotten Tomatoes:

Surf’s Up is a laid back, visually stunning animated movie presented in a witty mockumentary format.

From Peter Debruge at Variety:

Much effort was expended in getting the waves to look just right — do they ever — but pic’s true innovation is the ability to approximate handheld camera work, allowing the directors to “discover” the action within each shot, just as they might in a live-action film.

Film Geekz at IESB.net

Surf’s Up is the most enjoyable film of the summer…In a summer filled with lengthy sequels this movie really comes ashore with something a little more fresh and original. The writers and directors really make use of the surfer mentality to entertain and deliver a message and Sony Animation has moved up quite a few notches to become a contender in the animated CGI world.

David Edelstein at New York Magazine:

The kids won’t know how terrific Surf’s Up is…And they’ll love all that surfing, which is astounding and hilarious, if you can appreciate that the sight here of a penguin sailing through a scary-colossal “pipe” has more verisimilitude than the computer-generated head of Kate Bosworth on top of someone else’s body in the go-for-it female surfer picture Blue Crush.

And one to keep me humble from Joshua Tyler from Cinema Blend:

If Surf’s Up accomplishes anything, it will be to bring families together, in boredom. Take your kids and be bored together.

4 out of 5 isn’t bad.