Going Tandem with Ainara Aymat and Sophie Bell

Ainara Aymat is quickly becoming one of our favourite surfers.

While we have a multitude of talent in Australia and the US ensuring we’re overloaded with new parts, films, shots, stories and scores just about every week, we’d be completely stupid to overlook all that there is coming out of one of our favourite parts of the planet, AKA, Europe. Having joined Ballet last year (a brand that is always on the money when it comes to acquiring extremely brilliant people before anyone else tends to catch on), Ainara is equally exceptional both in and out of the water. She’s one of those people that genuinely make you say ‘wow she is so cool’ out loud, which is hard to do these days considering everyone seems to be going to all lengths to get in front of a camera and appear much more impressionable than they probably are. Ainara is actually in this year’s class of Bright Young Things, a series getting to know our pick of the brightest doing it right now, but she also premiering a clip alongside Sophie Bell called Tandem which makes for four minutes of beautiful viewing pleasure that we think deserves its own little chat.

Hey Ainara, how are you?

Hey! I’m fine thank you.

How has it been living the dream?

It’s been a nice chapter of my life. I feel like this is the dream job I never knew I wanted or even existed.

You’ve been all over the place now, I feel like you’re everywhere. Are you everywhere? Where are you now?

I love being at home with my dogs and cats, it’s a quiet place, but surely not the place to feel surfed out. I try to go on surf trips for time to time. I just came from Portugal and headed straight to Milan, where the first Tandem premiere is happening.

Kylian Castells is cool- what an edit. I’ve actually never heard of him before this – how do you know him?

I met Kylian when I was super young, somewhere in Spain when shooting for a surf project which came up really nice. Since then we’ve been in touch and we have done Sambal Sambal with Lee Ann Current and now and the latest one Tandem.

And you did all the animations in it too?

Yes! It has always been something I enjoy doing with my phone, but not with a proper set up. So I thought it could be fun to create some animations for the first time on this project.

I see that you’ve made a little Tandem Instagram page – does this mean we can expect more things coming out from this project?

I hope so! I think the Tandem idea is such a fun way to create more projects, adding more people into it, changing locations and maybe creating a series out of it.

Tell us about the premieres. Where can we catch the Tandem?

The first premiere has just been at the Surf Fest in Milan. It was such nice event to be part of. Next one will be next weekend at Haven Surf event in Belgium. I have never been to this one so can’t wait to see what’s going on. And third one will be at San Sebastian on the 10th of June.

And for the rest of us plebs who can’t get over to Europe, when will it be live on the big bad web?

We are thinking of releasing it mid/end of June. But will keep you guys posted.