Surf History Needs Saving Before It Disappears

In 2014, Derek Hoffmann was filming the Survivor TV show in Nicaragua when he received news that his good friend and long-time collaborator, Sonny Miller, had died. It would have been a seismic event in his life in any case. The pair had spent five years travelling together, filming on Rip Curl’s Search program in the early 1990s. Miller’s films, The Search, The Search 2, and Searching for Tom Curren, were just some of the iconic films that came out of the pair's time together. Sonny would shoot the land footage, direct and edit, while Hoffman was usually shooting in 16mm from the water.

What the Hawaiian couldn’t have predicted, however, was that it would be Sonny’s death that would lead him down a path to the rather large task of attempting to preserve all the iconic analog moving pictures and still images of the surfing world.  

Once he heard the tragic news, Hoffmann headed to Miller’s house in California to help the family. Sonny had died of a heart attack at just 53, just six days after his mother had passed away. 


“It was a traumatic experience, but Sonny had kept everything. He’d been filming and photographing for decades, nonstop,” Hoffmann told SURFER. “With so much material, Sonny’s father, Bud Miller, and his uncle, Bill Gilliland, asked my good friend Richard Cheski and me to help protect and oversee Sonny's creative work.”

The initial work was purely physical. It took several weeks to load up and haul the sheer weight of the films, tapes, and slides to a climate-controlled storage facility where the film and slides wouldn’t degrade. He didn’t know it then, but that would be the start of Nalu TV, and later the Nalu Foundation, and the protection, digitizing, and organizing of not just Miller’s footage in a database, but a pipeline of surfing’s most iconic filmmakers.

“My first thought, though, was what on Earth could I do with Sonny’s archives?” Hoffmann said. “There was a literal physical burden of looking after all that tape. But I also wanted to honor my dear friend Sonny, and make sure this rich historical period of surf discovery with Rip Curl on the Search with Tom wasn’t forgotten.”

The answer lay in the 1996 film Searching for Tom Curren. Before his death, Miller had told Hoffmann of his wish to digitise and remaster the seminal film. It only existed on VHS and DVDs, which, even by 2014, were obsolete. That meant Curren’s near-mythic first waves at J-Bay, his paradigm-shifting Fireball Fish session at Bawa, and famous hand-jive exit at Backdoor were effectively under a analog lock and key.

Hoffman initially went to Rip Curl, with a plan to split the costs and profit 50/50, as Miller had always done. Despite some initial assurance of a deal and funding, it never materialised.

Miller, along with his brother Craig and the Nalu archivist Cheski, ploughed ahead with the task of digitising and re-issuing the classic film and launching it on the new Nalu (Hawaiian for wave) TV platform. In 2022, in Encinita, they re-premiered the film and sold out four nights straight. “Tom Curren came, and there were all these young groms asking for his autograph,” crackled Hoffman with emotion. “To see Sonny’s name up in lights and a whole new generation seeing his work was incredible. I felt that I’d honoured him and his legacy.”

In 2023, when another good friend, and legendary surf filmmaker Larry Haynes, died, Hoffman, Nalu TV, was far better set up to take on, preserve, digitise and distribute Haynes’s body of work that included the Fluid Combustion film series. Later, Nathan Fletcher would ask Derek to take on his dad Herbie’s stash, which was even more extensive than Miller's. Nalu.TV now offers films from Fletcher, Chris Bystrom, Don King/Jeff Hornbaker, Chris Klopf, Tom Boyle and the Hoffmans brothers' own Fibreglass and Megapixel documentary. You can buy or rent any of the films on the platform, while some films are offered for free.

Yet as the scope expanded, so did the Nalu Vault, and the man-hours needed to keep the fragile analog recordings  from turning to vinegar, as well as the tech and machinery needed to digitise and catalogue. As Hoffman transported the archive in 100-pound luggage bags from Hawaii to the vault in California, he was slowly, and almost inadvertently, creating one of surfing’s most precious archives. Perhaps some of these classic films would have been remastered by the individuals or family members, but without Nalu, there’s no way they’d be so well looked after or so accessible.

That’s why he recently started the Nalu Film Foundation, a non-profit arm of the business. Its aim is to not only preserve the iconic moving pictures and still images of surfing and the action sports world, but also look to the future. “The goal is to provide the next generation of filmmakers with archival resources, grants, and mentoring for films and digital media content.” It has recently licensed footage for a Jack Johnson documentary and another for a Kelly Slater-based film. There are also film grants, internships, and educational programs under the foundation.

With his decades of experience in high-quality TV production, coupled with his love of surf history and culture, Hoffmann feels he can help the next generation of Sonny Milers help create their own stories. With access to the sport’s history, archival footage, often one of the highest costs and biggest obstacles to making films for young filmmakers, the Foundation can help make the path smoother.

“I believe we are doing something positive for the surf world, and we really want to just inspire more people to create,” finished Hoffmann. “The goal is to tell great new stories about our culture by leaning on our great history.”

To help support or donate, head tohttps://nalufilmfoundation.org/