Red Bull Big Wave Surfing Review – Apple Immersive Film Puts Vision Pro Viewers Under Teahupo’o’s Waves

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by Nino LeitnerToday

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The second episode of World of Red Bull takes Apple Immersive Video to Teahupo’o, Tahiti, and it contains some of the most impressive water cinematography I have ever seen. The underwater shots of those waves breaking overhead left me wondering how the crew pulled them off. I researched the production to find out, and the answers are only partial.

Apple first announced this film more than two years ago. World of Red Bull: Big Wave Surfing is now in the Apple TV app on Apple Vision Pro, and I watched it in the headset ahead of release. It runs for roughly eight minutes; it was shot by Mike Prickett’s Salt + Air Studios together with Apple and Red Bull, and it is captured in Apple Immersive Video, which means stereoscopic 3D recorded in 8K with a 180° field of view and Spatial Audio. The cast is a who’s who of the sport: Olympic gold medalist Italo Ferreira, 2025 WSL World Champion Molly Picklum, Tahitian local Michel Bourez, Lucas “Chumbo” Chianca, Jack Robinson and others.

This is a review of the viewing experience plus everything I could establish about how it was made. It is not a technical breakdown, because neither Apple nor Red Bull has published one.

Under the wave is where it gets special

I have watched a lot of Apple Immersive content by now, and most of it impresses through access: you stand somewhere you normally could not stand. Big Wave Surfing does that too, from the boat and from the channel next to the break. What sets it apart is what happens below the surface.

The underwater shots of the big sets are what stayed with me. In a flat surf film, a wave seen from underneath is a beautiful abstract texture. In stereo, across your full field of view, you get a sense of the volume and the mass of water moving above you that a rectangular frame simply does not deliver. I honestly have no idea how they did some of these shots, and I say that as someone who has spent years around specialized camera rigs.

Above the water, Red Bull points to the footage from inside the barrel. The company argues that immersive capture lets you read a surfer’s movements against the real size of the wave, instead of the compressed view you get from a long lens on shore.

What we know about the production

Red Bull’s press material describes the central problem well: in this format, the camera position becomes the viewer’s position, and every movement of the camera becomes a movement of your head. On a boat in the Teahupo’o channel, that is a serious stabilization task. The release says a stabilized gimbal system was used so that viewers feel like they are sitting in the channel without inheriting the motion of the boat.

Water on the lens was the second issue. On a conventional surf shoot, a droplet can ruin part of a frame, and sometimes the shot survives. With lenses this wide, one drop affects a much larger share of what the viewer sees. Mike, who won a Creative Arts Emmy for his work on HBO’s 100 Foot Wave, puts it like this in the release: “We had to put ourselves in the right spot even if it meant getting swallowed, because one drop on the lens ruins the shot.” He also says: “Any little shake and you lose the viewer.”

According to Red Bull, the crew spent several weeks on the water waiting for swell, wind and light to line up, with testing and engineering completed beforehand so that surfers, water crews and cameras could move the moment a window opened. Cameras were placed on the boat, in the channel and inside the breaking wave. The official stills are credited to photographer Ben Thouard, and Red Bull’s behind-the-scenes images show him underwater during the shoot.

Salt + Air has since posted behind-the-scenes images and clips from the shoot on its Instagram account. The studio describes the goal as putting “cameras where only surfers ever get to see” and says that a lot of R&D went into making that work in Apple Immersive, a format that “pushed us as filmmakers.” The credit list in that post gives more detail than the press material. Mike is credited as director of photography, Patrick van Weeren as “chief camera pirate,” and Lightcraft handled the drone work, while Ben Thouard shares the photography credit with Tim McKenna. Freefly Systems and Immortal Camera appear among the technical producers. Given the stabilized gimbal that Red Bull mentions, Freefly is an interesting name to see there, but the post does not say what either company contributed.

Which camera, and how did they do slow motion?

Here the official information stops. Red Bull only speaks of a “camera system capable of operating in salt water, breaking surf, and rapidly changing conditions” and of newly developed methods for capturing slow motion for Vision Pro playback. No camera model, no housing and no frame rates are named.

The slow motion deserves attention. Apple Immersive Video is a 90 frames per second format. Slowing action down for a 90fps deliverable means capturing well above 90fps, in stereo, at this resolution, inside something waterproof. How Salt + Air did that is exactly what I would like to know. (Apple, Red Bull: there was a making-of for Backcountry Skiing, the first episode. This one deserves one even more.)

The film itself offers a clue. In some shots, operators on jet skis carrying a 3D camera rig are visible on the fringes of the stereoscopic frame. I could not identify the camera with certainty. The image quality made me think of the Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive, the camera behind many third-party Apple Immersive productions, including the Cirrus Aircraft film we discussed on Focus Check. The dates complicate that, though: Red Bull’s behind-the-scenes photos are dated August 5 to 7, 2024, months before that camera became available for pre-order. So either the crew had early units, or this is Apple’s own 8K 3D camera, which I wrote about when the Submerged behind-the-scenes footage revealed it. Both are guesses on my part.

Two years from shoot to release

Apple first listed the film in July 2024 for release that same year. A few months later it moved to 2025, and in September 2025 it was folded into the World of Red Bull series with a 2026 date. Backcountry Skiing, announced more than a year after it, came out first.

Neither company has explained the gap. What I can say is that the result does not look like a two-year-old test. The water sequences are the strongest I have seen in this format.

Eight minutes are not enough

My one real criticism is about what is missing. The film leaves you wanting more of everything: more waves, and above all more of the people. Apple counts 10 surfers, and Red Bull’s release names nine, and in a runtime this short hardly any of them gets room to become a character.

I wanted to know how somebody gets to the point of paddling into a wave like this in the first place. What does the preparation look like, who decides which wave is makeable, what goes through Molly’s head in the channel before a set? Apple’s own description of Backcountry Skiing promises athlete moments and preparation alongside the action, and this episode would have gained from the same approach. The format is clearly capable of carrying a longer story, and Teahupo’o with this cast would have been the place to try.

Where to watch it

World of Red Bull: Big Wave Surfing is available now in the Apple TV app on Apple Vision Pro, as the second episode of World of Red Bull. Backcountry Skiing is in the same place. If you ever get your hands on a Vision Pro, this is the film you should watch first.

For more information, please visit the Red Bull website.

Have you watched Big Wave Surfing on Vision Pro, and would you sit through a longer cut that tells the surfers’ story? Let me know in the comments below!