As a kid, no one in my family surfed or made art or expressed themselves creatively, but they recognized that I had a passion for both, and did their best to cultivate a meaningful environment for my passions to grow. Knowing I was in need of some mind expanding, they put as many surf films in front of me as they could find. It's only with hindsight that I understand how impactful they were.

These days, I do my best to create similar meaningful environments for the next gen of surfers. One 11yr old who appears to be as much of a sponge as I was at his age, is Hunter Williams. Hunter's a fantastic surfer (no doubt you'll see a lot of his surfing in years to come) but he's also a great story teller.

The 'Yin & Yang of it' was born out of a desire to run Hunter through the creative process of making a surf film: start with a loose idea, brainstorm and build upon it, make it mean something, and then go out an execute. We've been talking about doing something like this for the last two years (yes, since he was 9) but the AM Surf Edit Contest was the excuse we needed.

The vision for the vid was to try and express not only the joy that both Hunter and I receive from surf vids and pumping surf, but from surfing as a whole. The good with the bad, the yin with the yang. In the end, we made a kind of meta-surf edit - it is a surf edit, but it's also about a surf edit - it is surfing, but it's also about surfing.