Armed with a 16mm camera and a wetsuit, Alan Gibby has helped bring surfing to Middle America.
His San Clemente-based DynoComm Productions Inc. produces sports programming and syndicates shows to ESPN, USA Network and others. The company’s work ranges from its own X Surf Series on ESPN to covering surfing events and marathons that air on Prime Network, Fox Sports West and ESPN.
“Alan takes surfing beyond the core audience to somebody that lives in Kansas City,” said Pete “PT” Townend, a championship surfer and publisher of the Surfing magazine group in San Clemente. “Here I sit as a publisher who reaches core surfers, but we don’t reach Kansas City dirt farmers.”
Gibby, a recreational surfer himself, oversees 11 employees. DynoComm produces roughly 65 to 70 shows a year and has done 1,200 shows since its inception in 1982. Through coverage of events such as the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing, Gibby has helped make stars out of top surfers such as Mark Occhilupo, Ken Bradshaw and Kelly Slater.
“TV has reached the wannabe market,” Gibby said. “A kid in Nebraska can still be into Kelly Slater and his career. It’s pushing the edge.”
DynoComm has built up a library of surfing footage in the past 18 years. The company recently acquired rights to the Professional Surfing Tour of America and plans to expand the event’s U.S. coverage and syndicate programs worldwide.
Gibby said early surf film pioneers such as Greg MacGillivray, Jim Freeman and Bruce Brown and their 1966 surfing classic, “The Endless Summer,” are his inspiration.
“They had a real impact on the sport and opened the door for people like me to come through,” he said. “Endless Summer did an amazing thing for surfing.”
Surfing and other extreme sports are a natural for television, according to Gibby.
“Extreme sports are so visual that you don’t need to explain a ton of rules because viewers can make it up. If somebody makes a drop on a 45-foot wave they get a perfect 10,” he said.
“Alan has been a huge component to the success of the surf industry and spreading that surf is cool,” said Townend, who’s hosted shows for Gibby and is heading to Hawaii this month to anchor the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing for DynoComm’s ESPN show. “It’s often underestimated the impact that DynoComm the company has had.”
Gibby has expanded DynoComm’s focus beyond surfing to other extreme sports such as skateboarding, BMX, snowboarding and wakeboarding. A year ago, Gibby launched an online venture, Extremesports.com Inc., which is based out of Dana Point. The Web site features articles, photographs and video clips. Eventually, Gibby said he hopes to stream shows over the Internet.
But Gibby faces competition on the Web, where the future of extreme sports sites is uncertain. Similar sites have closed down, including HardCloud.com, which had offices in San Clemente and San Francisco, and Broadcom Interactive Group Inc.’s Bluetorch.com, which shuttered most of its operations in September. Among those still standing is Swell.com, which has offices in San Juan Capistrano and San Francisco. Gibby says he’s realistic about Extremesports.com.
“Ours is a different focus. We are not after global domination,” he said.
DynoComm started out in the dinosaur days with 16mm film cameras, but high-quality digital cameras have helped the firm cut costs, save time and produce better quality shows, Gibby said. But technology also has increased competition, he said.
“As a result, there are a lot more players in the marketplace now,” he said.
Gibby 42, was born in Fullerton and grew up as one of five boys in a family of eight who regularly went surfing and skateboarding. His father, Neal Gibby, a high school football coach, loved the beach and sports.
“He would take us down to the beach at five-years-old and teach us how to body surf,” Gibby said.
Gibby’s break came in 1983. He was hired to produce his first show for syndicated television, a one-hour production of the OP Pro Surfing Championship in Huntington Beach.
“I proved that surfing could fill an hour,” he said. “We were hired by OP and we went out and KABC in Los Angeles got a 7.1 Nielson rating with a 30% share. That’s when the world changed for surfing. It blew everybody away. We have never had a tough time getting airtime for surfing ever since. It really opened the door.”
But Gibby’s coverage of the events is dependent on more than perfect waves.
“Quiksilver puts on an A-1 event and that’s what makes good TV,” he said. “Vans is top of the line with its events. It would not work on TV if it were not for these top-of-the-line events. I’ve got to hand it to these surf companies that have extended the brand of surfing by having the vision to create these events for TV.”
Covering surfing isn’t like filming other sports, Gibby said. Conditions, more than schedules, dictate when a shoot takes place.
A decade ago, DynoComm was hired to cover an event sponsored by Huntington Beach-based Quiksilver Inc. at Waimea Bay on the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii. After watching weather patterns for weeks, Gibby said he got a call from a scout in Hawaii telling him it was time.
Trouble was, Gibby was off covering a snowboarding event for Ocean Pacific in Mammoth. He couldn’t break away. Instead, he got on the phone and assembled a crew of more than a dozen cameramen and others to make their way to Hawaii. There, they braved rough seas on the backs of jet skis and boarded helicopters to cover surfers riding some gigantic waves.
“We pulled off one of the greatest days in the history of surfing,” Gibby boasted. “There were 45-foot waves with 25-foot back ends.”
Gibby and his crew were pressed into service again by a big swell on New Year’s Eve in 1998. This time Gibby took the red eye flight from New York to Hawaii to be on the beach ready to shoot by 3 a.m.
“It’s unbelievable to see waves that big in person,” Gibby said. “You can’t do anything about the weather. What you get is what you get, but we have had some good promoters over the years and had some really good luck.”
In the early years, selling surfing content to television networks was tough.
“I would be in a meeting with program directors and they would say ‘We want it if you have a monster truck race, but surfing skate and BMX,there is no market for that,'” Gibby said.
Dennis Deninger, ESPN’s coordinating producer for remote production, calls Gibby an innovative and thorough producer.
“He did this surfing show from Vietnam. It was a ground breaking show,” he said.
In one of DynoComm’s more unusual assignments, Gibby took a camera crew and a group of surfers to China Beach in Vietnam. They were scrutinized by the Vietnamese government as they entered and left the country, spending hours in the airport as officials went over dozens of tapes.
“The government had to watch every minute of the show,” Gibby said. “They sat and watched wave after wave.”
Steve Pezman, co-publisher of Surfer’s Journal in San Clemente, said that Gibby’s specialty is creating television segments on competition surfing and using professional surfers as spokesmen to make the shows interesting, whether surf conditions are good or bad. He credits Gibby for brining surfing to cable TV along with Ira Opper of Opper Sports in Solana beach. Opper produces the Surfer’s Journal for cable’s Outdoor Life Network.
“Ever since surfing left the Wide World of Sports (in the 1970s) it went away and there was no surfing on TV,” Pezman said. “But Ira and Alan brought it back.”
Gibby’s company has been nominated for nine Emmy awards and won four for sports events coverage. But don’t expect to see him strutting off to Hollywood to attend the lavish ceremony.
“I’ve never shown up at the place to get them,” he said. “I thought it was nice to have my peers say I did a good job, but I am always focused on the next show.” n
