Family Room Q&A.
Ahead of the all Boxy film premiere of “Family Room” we had chat with Dally Singer about the coming together of a boogin’ community around the project.
What was the inspiration behind the creation and filming of ” Family Room”?
Initially it was time spent with the local boys at this years teams challenge event in Port Mac. Mitch woodland had just returned to the bay having spent good part of a decade living in WA, I talked him into competing with us as well as The Dog ( Matt McCann). The 3 of us on the first night went through every local clip on the internet and made all the younger fellas watch old footage of us 😂. We started to appreciate the history of the boogin’ scene at Boxy,there’s clips on YouTube of boxy crew going back 20+ years.
Part 2 was the conversation I had with Tahnee Sams and Cheggas ( Alan Chegwiggen) a week later, they both shot and edit video of themselves skating now and we started spitballin’ an idea of a 3min boxy clip from this years season. They were both really keen and had the gear to shoot with.
We understand that the film was a real community venture, who was involved behind the scenes in pulling it all together?
Yeah it was s total community effort. Mitch Lees put all the pieces together for a prem event and has done an amazing job so far.
Basically anyone that wasn’t surfin’ on a good day at box this year was either shooting video or spotting for someone who was in front of a cam. That’s the biggest investment for a vid like this is the simple act of filming your mates and taking time out on a cooking day to stack clips. Tahnee nailed a lot on the good days, massive shout out to him for that. He adopted the role of director early on, so I think he knew wanted he wanted to get once we started finding some momentum on the vid.
Aside from that District 5 basically sponsor most the boys in the video so they deserve a lot of praise also.
Who was ripping during the filming?
For me Woody ( Mitch Woodland) was a stand out. I Love his approach. Everyone has their own thing going on though, there’s so many different ways to boog boxy, I think everyone has their little connection to the place. Having everyone surfing together bought the best out of the crew, Brewer, The Dog, Nathan Price all were ripping so it’s hard to lock it down to just 1 or 2. It was really cool to see Chegs and Tahnee out there this year after long stints away, they get what good boogin is.
It was a pretty great run of waves over this year, how did the Bay area fare during the filming period?
Ah yeah I guess it was a delayed start, usually see the best surf is in autumn, but the winter had a bunch more favourable swells this year. It’s hard to say though, every year there are 2 to 3 super memorable session – this year was no different. I would love to do this vid for the next 5 years and be able to compare. The cyclone swells are usually the best and more often hold better in boxy.
What was been the impact of the creative process on the local boogin’ community?
We had a group text going which was the creative motivator for everyone. I still can’t really believe we even got a movie together to be honest.
You put your hand up to be the producer, but we understand there was an approach to a legend within the sport , can you give us the back story there?
Yeah early on I threw down on a $30 Dropbox subscription for everyone to donate footage too. The only way I could give every one access to the account was if I set up a family account then I could send out invites to the boys to do weekly dumps. The auto named folder on the Dropbox account as ‘Family Room’. Everyone thought that felt right for a title.
Early on in the piece I know I really didn’t want to edit the vid. This was before Tahnee put his hand up. I had a bright idea to ask Stoker to edit the video for us.
At first I thought he might be keen, but I think that was my optimistic hopeful inner grom voice speaking to me. I hit him up on a DM, tried to sell the idea as best as I could even offered money I didn’t have haha. He got straight back to me and respectfully declined, he has a lot of stuff on his plate these days, little too much to be editing local boog videos for randoms.
We had a bit of a convo, he’s right into Moto X/ MTB now, also has a really cool youtube channel (stoktogphy on YouTube). Such a legend guy, he doesn’t get the credit he deserves in surf film making, I think the greatest of his time. It would have been so cool to drop his name in the credits ‘Edited by Stoker’ . We were lucky Tahnee jumped on board no long after though.
Okay, give us all the deets on when and where people can watch the film?
25th Nov 7pm Broughton of the bay (dalbora marina). Its free for all ages.
Any shout outs or information you’d like to include feel free here.
Everyone that made it happen I guess. Tahnee for sure, been a total hellman on the edit/direction side, Infoamed for the Poddy shout outs and this interview and Riptide for the bar tab.
