OK, let's get everyone interested in shooting part of this video to check in so we can get an idea of how many people we have and what geographic locations are covered.

I'm leaving for Winter Park, CO on Christmas day and will be taking some gear. If I get anything worth keeping I'd be happy to contribute.

Rick

i have hours n hours of footage, i'm sure i can submit something...

Count me in on this one. I can cover most of Vancouver Island.

You guys should recruit someone to go shoot some footage of the snowboarders in some of the big sand dune areas, too (Monahans State Park, White Sands National Park, etc.)

I'm off to Nagano Christmas eve and then a 2 week road trip through the NZ South Island fields next Aug/Sept

I'm off to Whistler/Blackcomb in early January, the first of three monthly trips.
Sandy

OK, I'll have footage from Cypress, but I also plan to hit Mt. Baker Big White and Fernie.


Sandy, send me an e-mail before you go to Whistler. There's a 50/50 chance I'll be there.

John, sand dune footage would be fun if anyone is willing.
Any good Mt. Fuji footage?

Maybe we can get Rik Sanchez's goth club sex video to cut into it. Rik, where are ya? :)

I might be able to get some East Coast Ice Pit snowboarding this year.

The sound of scraping alone will make your ears/nerves rattle.

Cheers!

Derrick

And, I'm off the whole week of x-mas <:P

I'll be in Cabo... a little Mexican snowboarding anyone?

Jim Wiggins

Dylan,

Fuji-san would be an awesome hill to ride. Unfortunately it's strictly forbidden. There is no way to get to the yop in winter as it's too dangerous. I guess you could do a heli drop but the avalanche danger is too high.�@Fuji is a pretty constant gradient of about 35-38 degrees and just asking to slide.

There are a couple of small resorts on the base of the mountain that have some good freestyle facilities so I'll have some good footage from them.

I can't find the original beginning of this thread, but I'll jump in anyway.

I have hours of powder skiing footage from Japan, including Nozawa Onsen in Nagano, Kanazawa Seymour, and Nisseko Hirafu in Hokkaido. Most of it was shot on a TRV-900. I'll be off to Nisseko again on the 22nd for a week, so can possibly bag some more face shots.

As regards Fuji-san, I think even helicopters are forbidden as it's a sacred mountain. Whether or not any area would slide depends on a lot of factors, including the steepness. Be sure to get local knowledge anywhere, learn about avalance awareness and carry beacons, probes, shovels, etc whenever going off piste. Three foreigners were killed in Nagano last year snowboarding out of bounds despite posted warnings and without appropriate gear.

Since the original post seems gone, what are you all planning to do with your footage?

Ken

Adrian,

What fields will you ski in NZ? I went there last year (2001) at the beginning of September. Not a great snow year where I went (Queenstown and Ohau near Mt. Cook) but hopefully you'll have better luck. Beautiful mountains and great people!

Ken

Ken, the idea is this:

Since so many people here are ski/snowboard fanatics, we figured everyone interested could shoot a 3-5 minute segment of their local hill and cut it to music frrom a local band. We would then find a distributor for it, and sell enough copies to get a fresh coat of wax for our boars and skiis.
I'm sure it will be a fun, and everyone involved gets some recognition and exposure.

who to send the cuts to...i could certainly provide server room to upload everyones stream, and host the project, i can stream all clips, and keep a log of who sent what ...this sounds like a great project even without profit

anyone who wants to take this further e-mail me skyonic@aol.com, i'm going to look for snow in vermont (killington, mount snow, and maybe even jay peak) for the next week and half but will be back jan 2 to answer any and all emails...

Ken,
My wife and I are planning to hire a Maui van and spend a couple of weeks driving around the different hills. I want to take her to the Canterbury club fields, Porter Heights, Cragieburn etc, then we'll head down to Wanaka and then back to Mt Potts for a few days cat boarding on the way back to Christchurch. Hopefully it will be good season, Nz can be fickle, it's either going off or everyone is going home.

As to Skyonic's question, I'll be happy to cut everyones footage together and create a final master with titles, credits, colour correction etc. As I said in the other thread NTSC DV would be the best format as it's better to convert PAL down to NTSC than convert NTSC up to PAL.

Yep, NTSC DV should be the way to go.
Adrian, if you have the time and can make the "final cut" that would be great. I'd volunteer, but knowing my luck, the tape would catch fire in my DV deck or camera.

So who do we look to for distribution? I think this is going to be a novel idea, we should look for someone with major coverage.

As mentioned above, we need to setup a place to send our footage.

I would suggest a FTP server that we could bounce in and out of when needed. I would host, but I don't have enough monthly bandwidth via my home cable modem, to support multiple transfers of this size.

I've got the picture now and I'm pumped! This is getting way cool! Especially nice would be if someone out there who is good at promotion could snag some interest from a sponsor or two... perhaps the ones who sponsor this list! Or ski sites or whatever. I've never actually heard of such a communal project (though it's probably been done one way or another) and it certainly fits the DVi 'COMMUNITY' theme.

As far as quality goes, it would probably be best to each edit the local segment, then copy it back to miniDV and send the actual tape snail mail to the final assembly editor. Especially if the final product ends up on tape, as well as streamed to cyberspace. Whaddya think? Should everyone title their own segments or would the assembler do that with written instructions (this would give a certain continuity, but on the other hand, the sheer discontinuity might be cool).

This is looking good, a kind of ski/board tour of the world that could not have happened without the internet. IMHO, this kind of thing is the true potential of the internet. How many different countries can we get? I count Japan (twice), Canada (multiple), US (multiple), others?

Anyway, let's get the video happening. Oh, is there any way to ensure that everyone who contributes gets proper credit and, with luck, a share of whatever gains come from it? Given the organic nature of this project, I hate to sound too business-like, but perhaps it's a good idea to have some kind of agreement?? I'd be happy to write something up, though I'd bow to anyone who has any experience.

To Adrian,
Great if you could do the final assembly! Sounds like you are hitting some great spots in NZ. I wanted to go to Craigieburn, but didn't make it. Oh, by the way, they have opened our local hill (Kanazawa Seymour) to boarders this year. We had an awesome opening day last weekend with face shots on every turn. But with all the boarders, it got skied out real fast. Looking at the hill on paper it looks small and uninteresting. But when it gets snow, it is one of the best hills I've skied in Japan, albeit short runs and short season. Off piste is great in January/February.

Merry Christmas to all. I'm off to the powder fields of Hokkaido tomorrow. See ya all in the New Year with stories of snorkel cams.

Ken

Everyone would edit their own footage and have complete control of their own segment. I like the idea of the individuality of each segment showing through.
It would certainly be interesting to try and get sponsorship, but before people will generaly put money into it, they will probably want some assurance that it will be distributed. This means locking down a distributor, which will probably be hard to do without something to show.
Who has experience with distribution?

We would have to have a finalized agreement for how any profit is split. Shouldn't be too hard to agree on, since I think most of us are in this for the fun of it.

I agree, sending material from one person to the next is probably best done by snail mail and DV tapes.

Adrian,
I used to snowboard Mt. Fuji 3,4 years ago.. we would go to the shin-5go parking, and just climb an hour or so from there to find huge natural quarter pipes. And the terrain up there is so good up there. Really good stuff if you're fit for the climb. I didn't know it was prohibitted to go up there, i didn't see anyone up there.. but you would DEFINITELY get better footage up there than the resorts below.
12ed

As far as titling, each person could do their own or I can do it in After Effects. I think that maintaining consistentancy in the titling will make it look more professional. Credit wise, I was thinking that each clip should have the shooter's, the rider/s', and the band's names as well as full credit and information in the final credits.

Ken's idea of an agreemant of some form is a good one. I think porfits, if any, hsould be divided up evenly between everyone who contributes a clip. By clip I mean a 3-5 minute clip including music, I don't want to hear people bitching about "my clip was 5 mins and his was only 3 so I should get more money". This is about having some fun combining what what we enjoy, if that's not your deal then thanks but no thanks.

I'm quite happy to put together some kind of website so everyone can keep upto date with what is going on as this is going to going to be a faily long term project. The site could contain everyone who is contrubiting as well as any news.

Distribution wise, Dylan, rock on down to Westbeach or some of the other snowboardshops in Vancouver and have a chat to those guys. See if you can find out who might be a good distributer. Here in Japan the main guys seem to be Champion Visions and in Australia/NZ, they've got Aerial Distribution.

12ed,

bro, if your keen to do a session, I'm more than happy to do some hiking. Should be able to hook up some guys to huck themselves into the breeze. Might even lay down a few myself. Maybe Ken would be interested in coming to?

As far as titling, each person could do their own or I can do it in After Effects. I think that maintaining consistentancy in the titling will make it look more professional. Credit wise, I was thinking that each clip should have the shooter's, the rider/s', and the band's names as well as full credit and information in the final credits.

Yeah, I think everybody should submit their edit clip with no titles but provide sufficient information for ones to be made by the final assembly editor, so you get that consistency.

<<<-- Originally posted by Alex Taylor : Yeah, I think everybody should submit their edit clip with no titles but provide sufficient information for ones to be made by the final assembly editor, so you get that consistency. -->>>

Seems to be people are liking this idea. It's OK by me.

I'm going to see if I can get some distributor's names from the local ride shops. Once we have some tangible material, we can start contacting them and hopefully get it picked up.

Another thing we can do, is once we get a website up (which requires a little discussion) we should be able to contact whichever hills we are planning on shooting, tell them what we are doing, let them check out the website, and hopefully get free lift passes out of them for us and some riders.

Dylan,

That's what I had in mind when I said I would put a site together. One thing though, I think we should do all the decision making through the boards so everyone can see what is involved. The website can be for a background on what we are doing as well as keeping everyone up to date on final decisions etc.

Anyone with site ideas please post them.

I think we'd want a basic outline of the project, a list of everyone involved and where they are shooting, along with status of their project.
A little section to interest distributors.
A little section ski hills can check out on us so they can hok us up with passes would be nice.
Those are the easy ones, any other thoughts?

Just got back from three days in Nagano but unfortunately didn't get any footage...because it didn't stop snowing!!!!!! We had 150cm/4 feet of dry Japanese pow. The only thing I shot was us digging the car out the night before we left.

Same for me in Hokkaido. Snow, snow, snow, no video. But I have plenty of good footage from previous years and hope to add more locally as the weather cooperates.

Ken

Apparently Scotland has the best snow in Europe at the moment thanks to high pressure over Scandinavia and a lack of snow in the Alps.

Just doing my bit for the Scottish Tourist Board :-)

Oh why oh why did my family move from Scotland to Canada???


Is the much in the way of good ski hills in Scotland?

Do you think we can get some footage of skiers in kilts?

I might be able convince someone to wear a kimono over here...

Ken

"Do you think we can get some footage of skiers in kilts?"

Would that be scored to the "Blue Balls" I mean the "Bluebells of Scotland"?

Rick

<<<-- Originally posted by Dylan Couper : Oh why oh why did my family move from Scotland to Canada??? -->>>

'cause they were smart! Believe me you are fine where you are. Scotland - nice place for a holiday.... but you wouldn't want to live here.....

I would *love* to bring my family up in Canada.

Ross ;-)

I know. I've seen lots of video. Miserable weather in the winter, miserable weather in the summer? Compared to here I guess anyway. Still I hear there are a few decent golf courses...

Back to snowboarding. I'm going riding tomorrow. Not bringing a video camera, I'm waiting to see if there is any terrain yet. Probably not. It's been pretty precipitation free here the last week.

<<<-- Miserable weather in the winter, miserable weather in the summer? -->>>

mmmmmmh... summer? Not certain if I am familiar with the concept...

Ross :-(