One challenge for any surfer with a social media following is trying to claim your space in the relentless content churn. One minute your clip is going viral, the next your moment of fame is being snatched by a longboard riding bulldog cutting up the line-up in Malibu. Content creators also face the battle of sticking to authentic storytelling versus producing sensationalised content which they know will attract instant attention.
Two brothers who were recently faced with this questions was surfing South African farm boys Murray and Dave Armstrong. The lads, who grew up on a farm on the East Coast of South Africa and also rip, started their own YouTube Channel titled ‘Skunk Aversion’ and have been posting regular short form content from their strike missions for the past three years.
However, their most recent offering ‘Where the air is thick with glory’ delves deeper into their upbringing in and around South Africa.
“Basically, about six months ago, we watched The Ugly Duckling, that new Torren Martyn film, and we really loved the slow pace and the prioritizing of cool landscape shots, just slowing things down and telling a proper story. Up until now, we’d been producing a lot of clickbait videos for our YouTube channel to try and get views, and we just kind of grew tired of that. We really wanted to tell the story of our home on the East Coast of South Africa and give people a sense of who we are and where we come from,” said Murray.
“We run through some different locations that are home to us: one is my parents’ place in Mozambique, which we’ve always gone to and which is really special to us; then our family home in KwaZulu-Natal on the East Coast of South Africa, near Durban; and then finally Cape Town, where we now live.”
He added: “We live on a farm on the East Coast of South Africa, so it’s quite a unique experience. We live about 10 minutes away from the coast, but we’re also on the sugarcane farm, in a real farming community. So it’s quite an interesting and unique experience growing up like that, and then having the coast so close. We’ve always loved surfing and we’ve always been drawn to it. We’ve got such amazing waves around us, north and south. It was a blessing to get to go home this year and spend a bit of time there and try to score some waves.”
Hit the link above to watch.
