ABOUT

WHAT MAKES YOU STOKED?

Darieus Legg has been telling stories since he held a camera at five years old. That impulse — to watch someone closely, to find the story they can't see about themselves, and to hold it up like a mirror — has guided everything since.

He grew up on a sailboat, and in Kona, Hawaii, which is its own way of learning to watch the ocean instead of just being in it. Under the tutelage of legendary surfer Shane Dorian, he competed on the World Qualifying Series for three years before trading the competitive circuit for the arts full-time. Dorian remains a close friend and mentor to this day.

Darieus has led creative productions across documentary, branded content, and experiential events for Red Bull, Johnson & Johnson, the Hawaii International Film Festival, Cornerstone OnDemand, and the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center. His surf documentary Stoker Machine (2023) won Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Animation, and Best Sports Documentary at festivals from Paris to Toronto to Cannes. That same year, the Hawaii International Film Festival named him Featured Artist and gave him carte blanche to direct its animated trailer and rebrand its visual identity — the year's other honor was a TEDx stage in Vancouver, where he delivered the closing talk, "What Makes You Stoked?"

Surf cinema has a lineage: Bud Browne, Bruce Brown, and John Severson built it from nothing in the 1950s, hauling cameras into the water to film a sport no one else thought worth filming. Greg MacGillivray and Jim Freeman carried it forward in the decades after. In 2026, MacGillivray commissioned Darieus to build "20 Great Waves" — a hand-animated, 60-film interactive installation for the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center, telling the story of twenty of surfing's most significant waves — and told him directly that the torch was his to carry next. Darieus doesn't take that lightly. It's the same job Browne and Brown and Severson had with a camera in the water seventy years ago: watch closely enough that the story tells itself.

He founded Stoker Machine Studios in 2024 to keep doing that work at scale — using documentary and animated storytelling to help audiences of all ages fall in love with surfing and the ocean. The long version of that mission is Stoker Land: a place built the way Disneyland is built, except every ride, every room, exists to hand people the same wonder for ocean life that's kept Darieus in the water his whole life.

He believes to serve is to live — that we're here to be useful to one another and to be stewards of the Earth. It shows up in the small print of his life more than the big statements: fifteen years of daily meditation, a documentary he's currently directing and producing on Jamie O'Brien with Red Bull, a friendship with the man who taught him to surf competitively that's outlasted the competing itself. He splits his time between California and Hawaii, and outside of work, he travels, reads, draws, watches movies, and surfs — the same impulse from the five-year-old with the camera, just pointed in more directions now.