I attempt to create a movie by looping through frames in MATLAB.
Refering to mathworks.com documentation at http://www.mathworks.com/help/techdoc/ref/movie.html, I\'
This works perfectly for me.
What if you tried putting a drawnow in the loop after the surf? (This flushes all the events and updates your graphics figure).
drawnow
surf
Could it perhaps be your movie player, or codecs? Could you try VLC/Windows Media Player/etc etc?