Jungle

Filmmaker and Photographer Morgan Maassen Combs Through a Tangle of Archives

Filmed in Bali, Mexico, Nicaragua, Maldives, Mentawaiis, California, Barbados, Australia, and France… I created Jungle as a tip of the hat to my passion for surfing and to create a long-form edit of some of my favorite adventures from the last several years.

Editing video is bar-none my favorite thing to do.

As lame as it may sound, I was re-organizing the media server in my office when I began to realize how much footage has been lost in the shuffle, and ultimately under-utilized. As I fell back into filming in 2013, the majority of projects I worked on involved me shooting photos and capturing video strictly as a hired gun. Editing video is bar-none my favorite thing to do, so I was struck with a pang of excitement at several of these untouched folders of video. A few weeks ago, before taking off to Australia for a photoshoot, I loaded them onto a hard drive and set out to edit something on the plane—if nothing else as an exercise of passion. I landed in Australia with a rough draft of “Jungle,” and color-corrected it the following day to the point that you see it now.

Featuring: Marlon Gerber, Lee Wilson, Noa Deane, Sterling Spencer, Dillon Perillo, Rob Machado, Laura Enever, Alessa Quizon, Bella Nicols, Nat Young, Andrew Doheny, Dane Reynolds, and Stephanie Gilmore.
Additional footage (Stephanie in Mexico) by Andrew Schoener
Music:
Rostam Batmanglij, “Doc’s Song”
Broadcast, “Lunch Hour Pops”
Los Monstruos, “Hey Monstruo”
DJ Shadow, “Six Days” instrumental
East Village Radio, Mystery Song
Domenique Dumont, “La Bass et Les Shakers”