Nice place to go snowboarding.
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Nice landscapes.
Au Vieux Campeur held the summer mountain film screening event at the Batiment des Forces Motrices in Geneva. They introduced the event as being the opportunity for them to share the passion of the mountains with people who may not be aware of the activities that are possible. They then went on to say “but as we’re having the screening in Geneva we know that you’re just half an hour from the mountains so many of you are practitioners and today we may even have participants from the cancelled Patrouille Des Glaciers.
Four films were shown at Montagne En Scène. The films shown were A Line Across the Sky, a documentary following two less experienced climbers as they attempt the Fitzroy traverse during a rare good weather window, Chasing Niagra, a documentary about Rafa Ortiz and his preparations to shoot the Niagra Falls in a Kayak. The third film is Mont Rebei Project, a documentary looking to achieve a new Rope Jump record.
The Last film, and my favourite is Valley Uprising. It takes a look at the American climbing scene from the fifties up to the Modern day. This documentary is great because it provides us with a deep understanding of the American climbing psyche. Mountain climbing is a sport of passion and so to see how different groups helped this passion progress over the years is interesting.
Film screenings are in Switzerland, France and Belgium
Physical video gaming is coming of age thanks to the HTC Vive and related Games. Cosmic Trip is one of these games. You can use both controllers to prepare machines that will prepare robots for mining and defence. These two sets of robots are autonomous. The more resources you mine and the more robots you have. These robots are attacked on a regular basis so defence is important. The laser robots provide some assistance. You can attack the enemy bots by throwing disks at them as if you were throwing frisbees. Most people should find this instinctive.
In the last 17 hours more than half a million people watched the video on how to play this game. The game is still in development and building up hype for when it is released properly. The creator of the video above now has eleven million subscribers on youtube. When he produces a video eleven million people are notified that there is a new video to watch.
Out of those 11 million subscribers on youtube only 1.6 million follow on twitter and a quarter of a million on Facebook. Within the next year or two I would like to see social networks such as Youtube and others expand and become niche communities where people can find content of interest without using Facebook or Twitter. I found Jack Septiceye content when I was searching for VR demos. I use youtube rather than Twitter and Facebook because I don’t want content creators and sharers to tell me how to feel or why the content is of value. I want to make that decision for myself. Youtube and social networks that allow us to browse and discover content based on niche interests are going to become increasingly important.
The creators of the game have just two thousand eight hundred followers on Twitter and approaching one thousand on Facebook. When youtube personalities make videos about products they provide companies with a lot of extra visibility. You reach game players, people who want to see what new technology such as the HTC Vive can do and people who like to watch gameplay videos without necessarily being game players themselves.
Twitter and Facebook have focused on broadcasting rather than niche audiences. As a result of this strategy they have lost their stickiness. This leads to people spending less and less time on their social networks. This opens up opportunities for Youtube and other content aggregation sites. The more content you watch on Youtube the more recommendations you will get based on your taste. This cuts out the middle man, in this case Facebook and Twitter. We reduce the signal to noise ratio. We increase the user’s Return on Investment.
Yesterday I bought a series of six of Broomfield’s documentaries and I watched one of them today. Chicken Ranch is interesting because Broomfield lets the camera appear in shot, through mirrors and more. He also allows himself to appear, although only fleetingly, at least in this documentary.
He makes observational documentaries and allows the viewer to come to his own conclusions. This is a style of documentary where the action happens in front of the camera, with no use of voice over. Intertitles are enough, similarly to people like Vertov.
They are interesting documentaries because you can see that they have not been scripted. they document life, becoming more biographical and reflective of reality.
They do not strive to tell you what to think but rather encourage you to see and intuit from them.
How many documentaries do you watch that breath, that do not tell you what to think? Most attempt to say “he believes that” whilst “they believe that”. This is a more mature form of documentary making, one where the characters are the story.
I still have another five documentaries to watch and we’ll see what else I learn through watching them.
I found another documentary book today. It’s got many interviews with a variety of directors and I really hope that they help me understand the question that I want to ask and research without it being too broad.
I sometimes envy people who produce gameplay videos because the barrier to entry is so low. In theory all you need is a microphone, a gaming PC or console, a capture card and the ability to talk without being asked questions. In essence you are providing an interior monologue whilst staring at a screen and playing a game. Prison Architect Game Play are an example of this trend.
The purpose of this game is to plan and then build a prison. You make sure that you stick within the budget, that the prison is clean and that you make enough money to survive and possibly even thrive. As you build one prison you can then sell it and keep the money to build a new prison.
Some game play videos are interesting because you discover a story at the same time as the person whom you are watching play the game. In other cases you watch people build parks or prisons and you get to live their experiences through the video. It brings us back to our youth when we watched our siblings play computer games. In this case though, the game player can have from two hundred thousand to four million people watch their videos.
On youtube these videos are monetised but I have not researched how much they make but view. I also noticed that if you watch these videos via Chromecast you do not see any of the adverts so I question how they monetise these videos when they are viewed on a television.