Finding and Sharing Stoke’s Universality 

“What makes you stoked?” Filmmaker Darieus “Dar” Legg wants to know. He’s sitting on the stage at Encinitas’ La Paloma Theatre, being interviewed by film festival host Taylor Steele. And now he’s turned the question back on the interviewer. 

“I get stoked seeing people come together for an authentic experience,” replies Steele.

Legg addresses the audience next, producing a bag of hand-drawn cartoon cels from his film to get them going

“Shredding,” says a kid up front. 

“Surfing with friends.” 

“Glassy waves.” 

“Travel.”

 “Ice cream.”

The answers seem simple and obvious. But it wasn’t always this way for Legg. After 10 years of living his director’s dream in Hollywood, he couldn’t answer the question himself. 

 “When you achieve all your goals and you’re still unhappy,” he says, “that’s a really dark moment. Because where do you go from there?”

Legg went home to Kona, on Hawaii’s Big Island. Working remotely (thanks to pandemic lockdowns) while nursing a broken heart and a dying grandmother, he realized he’d lost his stoke. 

Legg grew up on a sailboat until he was almost 9 years old.

“My only friends were characters in the books I read,” he says. He found surfing when his parents settled in Hawaii, partly thanks to fellow Big Islander Shane Dorian. 

 “I was such a weird kid,” Legg says. “I ran up to him and gave him my phone number and said, ‘We should go surfing together.’” 

Dorian called him the next day, picked him up, and taught him about waves. And life. Within a few years, Legg was sponsored by Billabong and on the WQS. He earned a section in Chad Campbell’s Surfer Poll–winning 5th Symphony Document. 

“People made fun of me because it was about how I liked to read and meditate,” he says about his part. 

Anyway, his dreams had come true. But he wasn’t stoked. So he went to Hollywood, slept on couches, and fetched coffee on the sets of Martin Scorsese and Michael Bay films, working his way up to executive producer with his own show. Still no stoke. 

Legg decided to make a film just for himself. “An audience of one,” he calls it. He opened his heart to the possibility while removed from the world back in Hawaii. And just then, a voice shouted up to his second-story window.

“Yeah, Dar, check out this board I just picked up,” said Chad Campbell. His old friend. His new landlord. Surf-movie director. Part-time yoga instructor, hip-hop artist, and amateur shaper. Campbell enjoys finding old boards, stripping them apart, and finding something new inside the old foam. He dawn-patrols every day, often returning with stories.

That day’s tale included a chunky, yellowing 6’4″ thruster with an email address, a phone number, and “Stoker Machine” printed on the lam. They took the board for  a surf. The way it rode made them stoked.

“Sometimes a board will show up in  your life and just teach you something,”  says Campbell. 

Legg felt something stir inside him, and he started filming. And drawing. Stoker Machine is partly an animated film, a new medium for him. Frame by frame, all drawn by hand, Walt Disney style. And it was coming together nicely until the hard drive crashed and he lost everything. Eight hundred hand-drawn images, gone. 

“It was one of those moments where you either give up or say, ‘Great, now I can do it better,’” Legg recalls. He tried redoing the animations on a computer with 3-D models. But, after a year into that, he decided the hand drawings served the story better. Back to the beginning, again.

At La Paloma, the theater lights finally go down, three years after Legg started his process. The movie plays. Stoker Machine is only 12 minutes, but there’s much to absorb. Animated characters explain the meaning of stoke while Legg and Campbell track the mysterious origins of the magic board. The threads converge in a way that has won awards at mainstream film festivals like Cannes, Paris, and Toronto and recognition at rootsy surf festivals like Florida, Dana Point, and Encinitas. But, sitting in the theater’s tiny, darkened projection deck, the genuine laughter, excited hoots, and warm applause are more validating than Legg ever dreamed. 

“This began as a selfish endeavor,” he says, “but it’s turned into this amazing conversation. The question ‘What makes you stoked?’ is a powerful tool for introspection and, ultimately, gratitude.”