They've been popular since the mid-1950s but the world's newest teen surf movie, Rip Tide, has two distinct Canberra connections.
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Firstly, the $3m film was edited and sound engineered by Canberra production company Silversun Pictures, which included "ripping out half our editing studio" and transporting it to Kiama during shooting late last year.
Secondly, the shirtless hunk who plays Tom, the love interest of lead character Cora, is actor Andrew Creer, whose family is based in Canberra.
Andrew, 24, grew up on a farm just outside of Tamworth, but the Creer family moved to Canberra in more recent years.
Rip Tide will be released in cinemas globally in October by international distributor MarVista Entertainment, but post-cinema rights have been secured by Disney.
Rip Tide will become a feature film on Disney's brand new and as yet unnamed streaming service, due to launch early next year.
The film is the single biggest project Silversun Pictures has worked on in its 20-year history, and a tight deadline meant a small team on location at the south coast was forced to act more like a start-up.
"We rented a house at Kiama and literally planted two edit suites and a DIT (Digital Imaging Technician) suite in the lounge room," Silversun Pictures partner Rohan Taylor said.
"We were providing edits in real-time - as soon as they shot a scene, the guys would cut it for the director's review and to be sent to the US for review by MarVista.
"It was absolutely the most challenging thing we've ever done."
Rip Tide tells the story of Cora (Debby Ryan), a teenager whose mother is the head of a major modelling agency in New York. When a humiliating modelling video of Cora goes viral, she departs for Australia's east coast for some "time out" with her aunt Margot (Genevieve Hegney).
The majority of Australian scenes for Rip Tide were filmed directly on the beach, according to Taylor, meaning Silversun Pictures had to sound design the bulk of the movie "from scratch".
"All the stuff that was shot out on the water was mute, for a variety of reasons they couldn't get any sound out there," he said.
"There's a big storm scene in the film where one of the lead characters almost drowns and that was entirely produced in the audio suite - nothing's real.
"We had three people working solidly on sound alone for a good 10 weeks."
Silversun's work on Rip Tide looks set to kick off an exciting few months for the film industry in Canberra.
Taylor and fellow Silversun Pictures partner Andy Marriott last year founded The Film Distillery, a Canberra-based film and production studio with a vision to film and distribute four $1.5m films out of the ACT each year.
The Film Distillery's first feature film, a horror/thriller entitled Killer Instinct, is due to begin filming at Bywong Town at the end of November. A second film, Reunion, is due to start shooting early next year.
"Rip Tide's been a big learning curve in the sense that, you know what? We could easily shoot a film like that here in Canberra, it wasn't magic," Taylor said.
"It was a normal crew, things went wrong like they do everywhere else, and we fixed them.
"It's not rocket science, we can easily make movies.
"We're doing a lot of learning at the moment and when Killer Instinct kicks off later this year we'll be ready for it."
