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By
BEN
MCCARTY
News staff writer
Tyler Shortt, a videographer and HRVHS graduate who splits time
between
Portland
and
Hood
River,
went to the Mavericks Surfing championships last week to get some
footage for his portfolio.
He got some video all right, just not the kind he was expecting.
The Mavericks Surfing Championships, held every year at Half Moon
Bay in northern
California,
feature some of the biggest waves in the
U.S.
This year, they were even bigger than normal.
During the competition a series of tidal surges crashed over a
jetty filled with spectators, sweeping hundreds of people into the
water and injuring dozens.
Shortt first found himself right in the middle of the action,
bracing against a log and filming with his tiny Flip video camera.
After he moved himself to higher ground, he found himself in the
middle of a bidding war for his later footage, a slow-motion video
of yet another wave sweeping over the jetty, sweeping away even
more spectators and pushing vendors’ booths out into the bay.
“I saw it coming when it swept out and then the wave just doubled
up and those people got hammered,” Shortt said of the experience.
Later that night he was at the hotel used as a base for the
competition, going through his video for the day. The shots of
surfing had not turned out to well — conditions were too hazy and
the action was too far away, but he had a perfectly set up-shot of
one of the waves rolling across the jetty.
He waved over a media relations co-coordinator, who saw the video
and pulled over a representative from the local San Francisco NBC
station.
Soon enough he was on the phone to his bosses and buying Shortt’s
footage.
“He saw it and said ‘Do not go anywhere,’” Shortt said.
That night his footage was on the local news. The next night a
friend called him to say he had seen one of Shortt’s clips on the
NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams.
Shortt, a 2000 HRV grad, has been messing around with cameras
since the age of 9. After bouncing around a few schools, he wound
up at Cal State-Northridge and got a degree in cinema and TV arts.
Since graduating he formed his production company “All Exits
Productions” filming sports events up and down the West Coast and
many in the Gorge, including the 2008 Gorge Games and the 2009
World Moth Class sailing championships in Cascade Locks.
“The Gorge is the perfect place for it because I love shooting
action sports,” he said.
Shortly after the Moth sailing championships his YouTube video of
the event began drawing thousands of views, with invitations to
cover more sailing events.
Over the last few years, the breaks have been slowly coming, as he
hops from event to event.
“You just start out as small as possible and climb your way up,”
he said. “Even if you are not making money it’s a great field to
be in.”
He has slowly been gaining footage for his portfolio but has still
been waiting for his big break.
With his wave footage, he may have found it.
Shortt made a last-minute decision to go the surfing event,
getting his media access a few days before, filling up his car
with gas and driving the 700 or so miles to Half Moon Bay the
night before the event.
He arrived early in the morning, bored, lonely and hungry; and
when he saw his position relative to the surfers, he wondered if
the trip had been worth it.
The competition started at
8 a.m.,
with high tide scheduled for
10 a.m.,
but the huge waves came rolling in long before that.
“I really wanted something I could shoot as part of my portfolio
and then this just kind of took the spotlight,” Shortt said.
The waves came crashing in, and soon enough, Shortt found his
footage swept onto the national news.
“Having stuff like this where something just goes off and so many
people start watching it is just amazing,” he said.
Even if this wasn’t Shortt’s big break, he still figures he still
has a good 14 minutes, 39 seconds left of his 15 minutes of fame.
“Now I say was buddies with Brian Williams for 21 seconds,” he
said.
n
To watch Shortt’s video of the Mavericks Surf Competition rogue
waves, visit the All Exit’s Productions YouTube page,
http://www.youtube.com/allexitspro.
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