Monthly Archives: July 2009

Thrasher Magazine Wanna-Be Correspondent for a Weekend

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It all started with a simple, frank message to Thrasher Magazine on Twitter last Wednesday:

@thrashermag: got anyone covering the @ZooYorkInst AM Getting Paid contest in Montreal by any chance? Tell them I’ll buy them a beer if so.

If it wasn’t blatantly obvious yet, despite being a web geek and dad of three, I’m also a life long skateboarder, bmx rider, snowboarder, and so on. I’ve resumed spending my spare times riding most of them a few years ago, now that (at least some of) my son(s) are old enough to follow along. These sports bring me balance in a life which could have otherwise turned “static”, to say the least.

In other words, the latter tweet was a humble attempt at ceasing a symbolic opportunity to show my gratitude and appreciation to this iconic magazine, for having been such an integral part of what makes me… well, me.

I’ll assume you will understand how I could barely contain myself when I received a direct message back, stating they had in fact no one on location and asking if I might want to cover the event or know someone who could.

Nothing out of the ordinary if you work in the publishing industry, which since it is far from my case, turned into an all out challenge I just couldn’t refuse. Project and team management is not only what I’ve done most of my career, it’s my true vocation. I happen to practice it in the software and web industries, but projects are projects, and I truly felt this was something I could manage with the crucial help of my oh so precious network.

Through the software/web world as well as through being a regular at most of Montreal’s riding spots, I’m very often given to interact and become friends with very skilled and talented photographers, cameramen, filmmakers, such as Eva Blue, Jereme Deme (Presence BMX) and many others.

I also realize that I’m very lucky to know an ever increasing ratio of the people who make up the local (and inter/national, online) extreme sports community and industry to be able to succeed with such a task, out of the blue and with only a couple days notice.

So armed with all this, and with the help and guidance of High Speed Productions and Thrasher’s creative director Kevin Convertito, I embarked on a mission to round up the right people to score the best possible footage and photos, planning on focusing on the organizational aspects such as getting full access press passes to the event for all of us, and everything else my team might need.

Unfortunately, being summer and all, it turned out that all of my contacts in this realm, except for Eva, were either already long booked on other events and/or out of town altogether… This could have put quite a wrench in the operation, but Eva and I decided that we wouldn’t even let it slow us down. I’d be handling the video footage, as well as the final video editing.

And shoot we did! We both spent most of Saturday and Sunday at the Taz, taking hours of video (over 16GB) and thousands of pictures (over 20GB combined), thanks to the freedom accorded to press passes, provided to us by Philippe Jolin through my friends Charles Deschamps and Marc André St-Jean.

Eva took some amazing photos and provided us both with mid to high end still camera equipment, but I had no choice to resort to using my recently acquired, cheap, barely appropriate pocket HD cam to handle the video. I mean, aaak, pistol grip form factor, low end processor and fixed lens, no fisheye, no real means of (or time to) color correct the video, etc. A challenge to say the least, but quite an ode to “gettin’ her dun, no matter how”.

And then of course, came the tedious, but rewarding, post-processing of all that media… Eva and I processed our photos Saturday and Sunday night, while I was also scrubbing through all the raw footage for valuable parts. There went a couple of 4AM bed time nights. Not that unusual for both of us, being night owls.

And finally, I ended up *forgetting* to sleep entirely in the night of Monday to Tuesday, as I painstakingly edited the videos (1, 2) and photos you can see on this blog. Talk about getting out of your comfort zone! I hadn’t done any such editing in over three years, and never beyond the obviously amateurish realm.

All that to, in the end, getting scooped by the Zoo York pro crew releasing their edit only a few hours before I was able to send them to Thrasher, and only because of my aging MacBook pro chocking on the final exports, upload time and the fact that I do have a day job that keeps me busy busy bee-zay. Oh well!

All in all, the entire experience was nothing short of a BLAST. Can you feel the hype on that bold uppercase? Can you? :)

Given the opportunity, I’d do it all over again on a moment’s notice! Actually, scratch that, I’d do it all again with a bit more advanced notice next time, so I can really make the most of it and book the best people for the job instead of improvising it all. Seeing what we achieved in the short time and with the means we had, just think what we could have produced with even the smallest of budget: real-time online reporting, interviews, professional-level editing, the whole nine yards.

So if you’re a skateboarding, BMX or snowboard brand and are looking for a Montreal hookup to cover such events, you know who to ping. :)

Note to self though: next time, get a quick and dirty edit out extra fast, then work on a nicer cut. Heh heh, lesson learned. :)

Related content:

Zoo York AM Getting Paid 2009 – Semi-Finals and Finals

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Zoo York AM Getting Paid 2009 – Sunday from Stephane Daury, for Thrasher Magazine.

Related content:

Zoo York AM Getting Paid 2009 – Saturday

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Zoo York AM Getting Paid 2009 – Saturday from Stephane Daury, for Thrasher Magazine.

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On Twitter Follow Fridays and Why I Rarely Participate

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I’ve been feeling more than a bit guilty about very rarely returning the favor for people who include me in their Twitter “Follow Fridays“, so I felt a short explanation was in order. Please do keep in mind that there are the exceptions that do break the rule and do not fall under the following umbrella, but:

  1. I find this practice loses most of its impact as posters try to cram as many users in 140 characters as possible, therefore not explaining why you should or might want to follow the people they list. This ultimately shifts the effort to whoever decides to go investigate the suggested users on their own, which in and of itself rather defeats the purpose of human-powered suggestions at its base.
  2. Compound the latter with the fact that people do not want to offend anyone and end up posting (or reposting) dozens of them throughout the day, and the value of such a practice is now quasi-entirely diluted, often annoying even.
  3. An increasing number of people (aka: spammers) really use the #followfriday (or #ff) tag to ultimately bring their own follower count up or similarly, to increase the follower count of users that are in fact directly tied to themselves (pseudonyms, their clients, etc) and for their own benefit.

In the end, you pretty much end up with two types of new followers through the above patterns:

  1. people who will not take the time to find out why they should follow you and will just follow anyone in a sheep-like fashion (meh, rarely valuable from a conversational perspective)
  2. or people who once again will simply add you in hope that you will automatically follow back and possibly bring their own follower count by one more person.

All this said, I do truly relate to the concept of recommending people as subjects of interest to your friends and I in fact do follow a few very good individuals discovered through the Follow Friday meme. This is in part why you will find me reposting (retweeting, redenting, etc) other people’s posts maybe more than others do (or would want), which I think gives a much clearer indication of why following (or sometimes avoiding) a person could be valuable to you.

So there you have it. Since I’m not against the concept, just its increasingly usual application, I’ll try to add my own twist to it all instead, aiming to retain its intended spirit while making it as valuable for you, the subject(s) and myself as possible. The other perspective here is that I’d also very much like to do the same for services other than Twitter, such as Identica, Vimeo, Flickr, etc.

So in the end, I have decided to start proceeding with something that I somewhat did in my post on WordCamp Montreal 2009: I’ll use my blog to not only tell you why you might want to follow the people I’ll showcase, but also why you maybe should follow them on some services rather than others (EG: someone might post incredible photos on Flickr, yet be a total waste of your time on Twitter).

For this week, you can refer to the post on WordCamp Montreal that I’ve mentioned above, the subject being rather self-explanatory, and I’ll start the series next week.