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This one is not a review and it is not a how-to. It runs five minutes and nine seconds, it is set to a song called 4000 Miles Away, and the song was written years ago by a friend named Sanne, who has since died of cancer. The video is a tribute to her. There is also a genuinely useful piece of camera work in it, and the note that went out with it explains exactly how that was done.
What the video is
The whole thing is one rider on an eFoil, filmed from above, turning slowly in open water while the song plays. There is no commentary and there are no chapters. The note underneath it is short and does not try to turn the loss into a lesson. It lands on three things: that cancer is awful, that the distance between people is worth closing before it closes itself, and that a cassette tape of a song somebody wrote for you should be copied to a lossless file before you play it a thousand times and wear it out. Sanne’s own advice, as Stephan remembers it, was not to carry regrets around and to get on with living, which is what the video does rather than says.
She had also spent years telling him to write under his own name, with no agent, editor or advance shaping it. He has been doing that, and the first book is into its final chapters.
How the orbit shot was made
This is the part worth taking away. The footage came off an Antigravity A1 flying a single geostabilized pass, roughly three minutes out and back, holding its own position rather than chasing the board. The rider then gave the eFoil a few sustained boosts, enough to keep turning in the water underneath the drone instead of riding away out of frame.
The effect comes from the second half. In After Effects the rider was tracked and pinned in place in the frame, which inverts what you normally get from an orbit. The subject stops moving and the horizon, the water and the light rotate around him instead. It reads as a slow burn rather than a flyaround, and it holds for five minutes without going stale, which a conventional circling shot will not do.
Two things make it repeatable. The drone has to be stable enough that the only real motion in the plate is yours, and you have to stay roughly in one spot, which on an eFoil means short deliberate throttle inputs rather than a line across the water. Get both and the stabilizing pass has something clean to lock onto.
Worth doing before you need it
The practical note buried in all of this is about the tape. Analogue media degrades a little every time you play it, and the one copy of something nobody else has is exactly the thing you will play most. If you have a recording that exists in only one place, a cassette, a camcorder tape, a card you never offloaded, copy it to a lossless file now, while there is nothing urgent about it. That costs you an afternoon. The alternative is not recoverable.
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- Efoil Propulsion TypesJul 20, 2026
