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FIFAD Day 1
FIFAD Day 1
From the 6th to the 13th of August 2016 The International Alpine Film Festival, FIFAD, is taking place in the Alpine town of Les Diablerets. This is a week long festival of Alpine films covering the environment, extreme sports, adventure and more.
Alpland
Alpland is a photo exhibit outside of images of Alpine life in black and white. The images were taken by Romano Riedo
The Flying Frenchies arrive
The image gallery below shows the Flying Frenchies arrive at the film festival. The drummer flew with his drum kit, the guitarist flew with a guitar and amp and the saxophonist arrived with his instrument. They played their instruments while up in the air. Watching this in person is interesting.
Metronomic
Baraka Films and the Flying Frenchies worked together for this fun and entertaining film. This film looks at the Flying Frenchies coming together to combine slack-lining, parapentes and other extreme sports with musicians. The Flying Frenchies arrived at the event on parapentes.The film metronomic shows cliff based stunts. It combines acrobatics on a cliff face with slack-lining and rope based stunts. At one point the guitarist, the drummer and the Saxophonist are swinging in space and playing at the same time.
The Freeride evening
The evening was dedicated to freeride sports, mainly extreme skiing and a discussion with the Falquet brothers and Jérémie Heitz. One of the images that really marked me was the climb up to a pyramidal peak so that they could ski back down. The reason they climb rather than use a helicopter is to assess how good the snow is and whether it is safe to sky down. Some of these films had some impressive images, including at least one unsuccessful descent.
The films on this day showed the beauty of extreme sports both with skiing slopes that are over 50° as well as with flying musicians. As people get habituated to certain sports so the scope for diversity and creativity expands.
Automotive Narrowcasting
Thanks to cheaper cameras, cheaper editing systems and cheaper means of distributing video content automotive narrowcasting has become an entertaining way to cover the subject. Everyone knows about Top gear, the flag ship of automative journalism and mischief but there are dozens if not hundreds of lower budget and fun alternatives. One of these alternatives is by Motor Trend, an automotive magazine that provides written reviews of new cars and other automotive news. Their about page ignores their video activity and yet this is the part that I enjoy.
When I watched this specific episode it reminded me of articles from Popular mechanics because it is about reviving an old vehicle that has been dormant in a garage/barn for many years. They show us the steps that were carried out in order to make it road worthy and then they throw in a road trip and fooling around for good measure.
Some of these projects are light hearted and fun. The idea for the PreRangerRoverLandeRunner is amusing. “…they combine an old Range Rover with a Ford Ranger to build an overlanding prerunner that can also play in the mud and rockcrawl with the help of Maxxis’ Bighorn MT-762s.  The build process uses the eyechrometer and by the end of the video their machine is broken.Â
The stats for this channel are impressive. They have 50 channels and twenty four thousand videos. The average views per video is fifty five thousand two hundred views although globally they have one billion three hundred thousand views overall. Those figures are no longer about narrow casting.
Network statistics
- 50 channels
- 24,792 videos
- 1,369,423,239 views
- 5,235,424 subscribers
What I like so much about niche content and narrow casting via youtube is that the barrier to entry is low in terms of cost and sustainability can be achieved relatively quickly. There is little need for pitching and getting funds.
In the video above they make it clear that this is a side project that they are working on over two weekends. They are doing this in their free time, in between articles. This is a side project video that has been viewed six million times.
Printed Media are said to be suffering as people move towards the world wide web for news and information. From what I observe the world wide web is great because it provides a place for writers to write articles, radio shows or podcasts and scenarios for videos. As people with skills or passions unite with video producers so new markets can be tapped. The beauty of websites such as Youtube and Vimeo is that they share that revenue with content creators. Websites such as facebook still want to pay to distribute content and be seen. They have not shifted to the new model.
FLYER THE ESSENCE OF E MOUNTAIN BIKING
Mountain biking is a sport that is growing in popularity. We see that technology is keeping up with the riders. Between suspension, specialist tires and safety equipment the sport has had the freedom to become more adventurous. Bigger jumps, more travel, stronger components all allow the sport to become more extreme.
Usually there are three ways to get to the top of a mountain. The first option is to ride up but with a mountain bike that can be tiring. I have an area where I can mountain bike near home but it’s a 12.7km ride up with a 10 percent grade. It takes two hours to get to the base. I could of course take the car up and cycle around at the top but this requires removing the front wheel and putting the seats down. Another option is to head to specialist resorts where the remontée mécanique are equipped to take bikes to the top of the slope. The third option is to walk up and push the bike.
In this video we see a fourth option. An electric mountain bike. I like the idea of mountain biking this way. I like the notion that the mountain bike will assist with getting up the hill more efficiently. Several times I have cycled up a 10% gradiant for a distance of 12.7 kilometres. With the mountain bike I use it takes 2 hours of almost non stop pedalling. It leaves me with little energy to enjoy going off road at the top. With a flyer I’d let the bike get me to the fun part and then use my own power to play up there.
I won’t buy one of these bikes but the video is interesting to watch.
Sending HTC M8 phones to the Middle of the Stratosphere
A few months ago I saw the video of a mobility scooter going fast across snow. The video was shared as an anim gif with no context. As I explored the diversity of content on Youtube I came across Colin Furze videos. In one project he sent mobile phones to the Middle of the Stratosphere at about thirty three thousand meters.
He usually produces at least two videos. The first video usually shows him building his latest project and the second video shows him using the finished project. To celebrate the million subscriber marks he creates fireworks contraptions. He has created a hover bike, a centripetal chicken cooker, an underground bunker, magnetic shoes, a jet powered barbecue and has tried to set fireworks off in the stratosphere.
When you look at individual videos you see that they can get up to nineteen million views. He has just over three million subscribers at the time of writing this blog post. I suspect that he has more video views than subscribers because of the subject matter. As the projects vary from jet propulsion to mobility scooters to cooking content is compelling part of the time. Youtube also recommends his content so we might watch it through recommendations rather than direct searches for specific terms or keywords.
In the video where he tried to make magnetic shoes to walk across a ceiling we see him try and fail several times before he finally manages to achieve his goal. Once his goal is achieved the video ends and you can “wait” for next week’s video to appear online. When you learn about youtube personalities weeks, months or years in to their “career” the more content you can watch in a single sitting.
What unique or eccentric topics or projects could you document?