Wrangling waves.(3D Animation)(Sony Pictures Imageworks)

JP Beeghly: Hey Rob, can you get down to Dana Point within three hours?

Rob Bredow: Uh, yeah. It moved up?

JP Beeghly: Yup, Sean thinks the swell is coming early. Jamie Stirling and Carlos Burle are already in the air from Hawaii. We're leaving tonight.

Rob Bredow: I'll grab my camera, and I'll be on my way.

The next 48 hours became my firsthand introduction to the world of big-wave surfing. I tagged along, invited by award-winning cinematographer and producer JP Beeghly as his sound guy and grip on an expedition to Cortes Bank with several professional surfers. Cortes Bank is a break 100 miles off the coast of California, created by a giant underwater mountain that makes the water shallow enough to create breaking waves with 30- to 60-foot faces under the right conditions. Sean Collins, who runs surfline.com, is the master at predicting these waves and had just moved our timetable up by another 30 hours so we wouldn't miss this swell.

In the summer of 2003, I found myself sitting in a pitch meeting during the early days of Sony Pictures Animation. The first pitch was a detailed series of 10 or more boards full of illustrations featuring a bear and a mule deer, who we all know today as Boog and Elliot, the stars of Open Season (see "Bearing Up," September 2006). The story was well under way, and the movie already had the momentum of a picture going into production. Almost as an aside, the story artist wandered over to a single board that contained some of the first drawings illustrating the next movie in the production pipeline. At that point, the story team was still working out whether the story was "West Side Story meets The Endless Summer" or something else entirely But one thing was clean We were making a movie with waves and surfing penguins. This was the movie that I wanted to be a part of

After meeting up with everyone on the boat, the night was spent trying to sleep below deck as the vessel made its way 100 miles out to sea in large swells. There was a reporter from New York who, unfortunately, didn't take any seasickness pills ... he was literally green.