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Check out details of this trip that an old college friend of mine is organising to Vietnam. Details.

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I received this email from a friend today and thought I would share it. If you live in or near Sheffield then it will be of interest.

Dear All,

I’m writing to you because either you live here in Sheffield or you have an interest in Sheffield’s cultural wellbeing.

As you may have heard Museums Sheffield (who run Millennium Gallery, Graves Gallery and Weston Park Museum) have been dealt a devastating funding blow this week when they failed to get Renaissance funding from the Arts Council, you can read about it in the Guardian here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/culture-cuts-blog/2012/jan/24/museums-arts-funding

Not getting this funding means a 30% cut in Museums Sheffield’s annual budget which in turn means redundancies, a reduction of learning activity and none of the high profile collaborations with Tate, V&A and the British Museum which have resulted in a first class exhibition programme over the last few years rather than the sort of stymied municipal displays you can often find in regional museums and galleries.

Clearly it's a major blow to Sheffield if our museums service degenerates in this way and will have a damaging ripple effect on the rest of the cultural scene.

If you feel moved to, it would be great if you could register your displeasure at this decision and persuade the powers that be to think about other means of supporting Museums Sheffield:
http://www.museums-sheffield.org.uk/blog/2012/1/help-us-make-the-case-for-culture-in-sheffield

This amounts to interrogating the Arts Council on their decision:

Email ACE Yorkshire at enquires@artscouncil.org.uk marking it for the attention of the Yorkshire Office.

You can also email Alan Davey the head of the Arts Council chief.executive@artscouncil.org.uk

I’m sure you can compose your own email but salient points might be:
o Museums Sheffield provides an excellent and museums service which will now be compromised – you might want to include your favourite exhibitions of the past few years.
o Museums Sheffield serves a diverse and large audience – ‘Great Art for Everyone’ in the words of the Arts Council.
o A decimated museums service will have a degenerative effect on the wider arts scene in Sheffield.
o Why were York and Leeds chosen over Sheffield when both cities have a stronger tourist economy, more robust arts infrastructure and greater investment from the Arts Council already – surely Sheffield needs this support most.
o ACE’s allocation of Renaissance funding is unbalanced – central England inc. Sheffield, Nottingham, Derby and Leicester all unsuccessful in their bids. London, Oxford and Cambridge all successful – rich cities and services getting richer and poor ones getting poorer.
o Finally a call to reverse the decision/ find other ways of supporting Museums Sheffield.


If you’re a Sheffield resident its also worth contacting your local councillors and MPs imploring for local government to support Museums Sheffield in the absence of Arts Council funding.

You can find contact the relevant contacts here:
https://www.sheffield.gov.uk/your-city-council/mps-and-meps.html
http://councillors.sheffield.gov.uk/index.asp?pgid=215818#end

Salient points might be:

o Museums Sheffield provides an excellent and museums service which will now be compromised – you might want to include your favourite exhibitions of the past few years.
o The people who will suffer from this are Sheffield residents from all areas and backgrounds.
o A decimated museums service will have a degenerative effect on the wider arts scene in Sheffield.
o Despite difficult budgeting decisions it’s time for Sheffield City Council to invest in culture in Sheffield in order to enjoy economic and social returns.
o Finally entreat them to protest at the Arts Councils decision and support Museums Sheffield via local government funding.

Thanks for standing up for Culture in Sheffield!

Please pass the message round friends and colleagues you think would be interested.

Best wishes,
Sarah

--
Louise Hawson
Partner
SustainableBalance
www.sustainablebalance.co.uk

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The Nick Estcourt Award for 2012 has been awarded to Talung North Pillar (Gavin Pike, James Clapham and Dave Searle). The Award will be £1500 and the Trustees wish them every success with their plans. 2011 saw a record breaking 10 applications which made a big change for the trustees.

Trustee Sir Chris Bonington said: “It was a very difficult decision, but in the end Talung got the vote as it so nearly fits ALL our criteria. It really is a superb line. The team has a good mix of technical ability and experience in the Alps and Alaska but this will be a good first Himalayan trip. This is exactly the sort of expedition that the NEA was set up to support.”

All applications were better prepared and largely on time than in previous years (possibly in response to this Blog posting by award administrator Matt Heason?)

http://www.heason.net/News_&_Blog/Blog/2011/01/13/Tardy_Mountaineers/

Note the closing date for future applications has changed from 31st December to 31st January to bring the award in line with the Mount Everest Foundation and the British Mountaineering Council.

http://www.nickestcourtaward.org/index.htm

For more details please contact Matt Heason on 01433 529 219 or 07966 529 219

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 Sometime towards the end of 2011 I was sat in a pub with some friends and the subject of a decathlon came up. Not the sports store, though I was doing some work for them at the time so it may have stemmed from there. No, an actual decathlon as in an Olympic event. I did a fair bit of athletics as a teenager – high jump mostly. Being 6 foot 5 I was pretty good and broke a few school and county records. Along the way I tried my hand at all the other events, even include a short session at pole vault once. However I never tried them all together. Not being daunted by a little organisation I suggested to those in the pub that we ought to look into the possibility of doing one. The next day I called the Don Valley athletics stadium. They suggested that it may be a better bet to call the English Institute Of Sport who have an indoor stadium with 200m track, hurdles straight and all the field event apparatus to boot. It costs £900 to rent it for a day. A bargain I reckon. So I set about recruiting 29 other likeminded individuals to part with £30 each and take part. The big day was last Saturday. We had the place from 10am until 4pm. 10 events. 30 minutes each with an hour for lunch! There were a few drop outs mainly due to illness and injury, but on the day we ended up with 11 women and 9 men. We split into the two obvious groupings and got on with it. At our disposal were two staff members who organised us and gave us a bit of tuition / coaching on each event. Things started off well. I ran the 100m in 11.2 seconds and won. 11.2 seconds! Blimey. In retrospect I think that we used the wrong lane markings and I perhaps ran a shade under 100m. But running off a bend at speed was really pretty exciting. With each event the practice sessions became shorter and shorter as we tried to conserve energy. The javelin was a bit of a let-down as we were given flimsy foam things that had a tendency to veer off to the side unless you were lucky. The discus was amusing as they gave us metal rimmed proper ones which proceeded to eat up bits of the paintwork as the odd one went wayward. Pole vault was never on the cards so we substituted triple jump (3 runs, 3 jumps and 3 throws, plus the hurdles) which was perhaps the wrong event to have at number 8 as people’s legs were definitely looking a bit wobbly by then. By the time the bell came on the 1500m at the end I’d been lapped by marathon (in a cartoon character costume) record holder Johnny Morgan (no surprise there then), but also lost enough ground to fellow giant Chris Hutchins (of Stanage Summer Challenge partnership) to relinquish my lead and finish an overall very creditable 2nd. We chucked all the numbers into a spreadsheet we’d cobbled together from the net which used IAAF formulae to generate a set of scores. The world record is 9,026. Chris scored 2,387 to my 2,426. The ladies winner was ex British climbing team member Kat Love with 1,923. What an awesome way to spend a day. I ached for 3 days afterwards, but now feel pretty fit compared with this time last week…

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The North Face Superlight Sleeping Bag

Kozi Kids Softshell Jacket 

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 As director of ShAFF one of the things I like to promote is the number of trailers that we screen in any given year. Obviously a true premiere is something that has never been screened in public anywhere in the world. It’s fairly common for film festivals to advertise a UK Premiere, or even a European Premiere for a film that’s already played in the States for example. It was always pretty easy to differentiate between such geographical screenings, though we did stop short of Yorkshire Premieres ;-). However, over the last couple of years as Youtube, Vimeo and other video hosting websites have gathered pace it’s become quite commonplace to launch whole films, especially short ones, online before they’ve ever been screened ‘in public’. Let’s face it, any filmmaker trying to pay back a sponsor for backing a film is going to choose to go online and attempt to woo the masses on Twitter and Facebook rather than wait for a film festival somewhere to screen it to a hundred or so people. A good chunk of the films screening at film festivals are now actually online if you go looking for them. It’s something we festival directors are having to face, reminding audiences that there’s nothing to beat a big screen and sound system, a packed audience all oohing and aahhing together, and sharing a pint in the bar afterwards. So, in order to simplify things, where it is indicated on the ShAFF website that a film is a premiere this means that it has not screened at a festival in the UK before.

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Late on Tuesday evening we posted the 2012 ShAFF trailer to Youtube. It’s a cracking film, edited by award winning filmmaker Al Lee of Posing Productions. Al was juggling editing and packing for an imminent trip to Venezuela (another film project so watch this space…). When I saw the video on Wednesday morning it had received a few hundred hits overnight. I was pleased enough with this. Then something strange happened. Despite the Youtube hit counter sticking on 300 and something all day long Twitter was indicating that rather a lot of people were enjoying the trailer. A quick Google uncovered the fact that Youtube are fairly hot on spammers posting videos multiple times on auto-repeat to boost numbers, so they are slow to show the true count whilst they check out the authenticity of the hits. Clever stuff. Anyway, by the end of the day the hit counter suddenly jumped from 300 to 5,000. We were blown away. And then we went to bed. And that means that America and Canada wake up! The following morning it had more than doubled to 12,000. Crazy. Last year’s trailer had 28,000 hits in a whole year. Well last night, exactly 48 hours after launch, we matched last year’s total, and this morning we’re up to 34,000.

So has it ‘gone viral’?

I did a quick search this morning and found a few definition. Here’s one:

“Viral means becoming extremely popular in a very short amount of time.”

Here’s another:

“According to Wikipedia viral means, an object or pattern that is able to induce some agents to replicate it, resulting in many copies being produced and spread around. So basically if you have something (like a video) and you share (or give) it to your online friends, there’s two ways to make something go viral. You can ask your friends to share it with their online community, or your video can be so good that they automatically share it and those people share it, and so forth. The latter would be a perfect example of something “going viral.””

I guess it’s more a question of scale. When some guy accidentally allowed his dog to chase some deer in Richmond Park recently and his son filmed the ensuing panic on his mobile and then uploaded it to Youtube it did something very similar to the above, but on a vastly different scale with millions of hits instead of thousands. Still, we’re excited to have produced a video that’s captured people’s imagination within our world of adventure and extreme sport. Thanks Al for a sterling edit, and thanks also to Hey Sholay, a Sheffield Band who kindly let us use their one of their tracks for the score.

Here's the video:

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We launched the 2012 ShAFF trailer a shade over 24 hours ago and it's been viewed by over 14,000 people in that time! Check it out. 

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So it's been a long haul this year, choosing the films that will screen at ShAFF 2012. I've watched in the region of 200 of them and had to whittle that down to something a little more manageable. The current short-list is 73 films long. That's a few more than the last few years, but is largely due to the fact that the average film length has dropped significantly, from around 35 minutes to 21 minutes. We still have a similar length programme to fill so we need a few more films. The good news is that it will make for a better festival than ever. A while back I blogged about how film festivals generally work better with shorter length films. I guess people haven't exactly been listening, but we are obviously on the same wavelength.I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that more and more filmmakers are producing films either directly for the internet or at least with the internet in mind, by producing shorter edits which suit festivals. Hooray. 

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 In the light of criticisms levelled at the BBC for the fact that there are no women on the shortlist of the Sports Personality Of The Year this year I thought I’d take a look at the films submitted to ShAFF for 2012 to see how well women are represented. Of the 200+ films there are 127 that could reasonably be examined (others I either haven’t yet seen, or they are animations, time lapses or have other non-people based subject matter). Of those 127, 11 are actually about women, 18 are about couples or mixed sex teams, and the rest (98!) appear to feature either no women at all or perhaps a token giggling onlooker as some guy does something ‘extreme’. In fairness in quite a few of the 98 you rarely get to see the people behind the helmets, but the credit lists and captions very, very rarely feature women. Pretty damning stuff. I’m not going to start hypothesising why this is, suffice to say that it is a frustrating state of affairs. Exit surveys at ShAFF 2011 showed that the male / female split in the audience was roughly 65% to 35%. We’re definitely interested in addressing this so please drop us a line if you have ideas / comments on what we can do to rectify things.

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So the National Geographic are running a competition again this year for the adventurer of the year.

http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/adventurers-of-the-year/2012/vote/

It got me thinking about what makes a good adventurer. The first thing that struck me was the obvious paradox: most of the adventurers we read or hear about we do so because they have published stuff about their adventures / true adventure – at least to my mind – is much more personal. I get to watch a shed load of films in preparation for ShAFF (around 60 hour’s worth so far this year) and all of them are about adventures. It’s in the title I suppose!

Here are three definitions lifted from an online dictionary:

an exciting or very unusual experience.
participation in exciting undertakings or enterprises: the spirit of adventure.
a bold, usually risky undertaking; hazardous action of uncertain outcome.

An adventurer, being:

a person who has, enjoys, or seeks adventures.
a seeker of fortune in daring enterprises; soldier of fortune.

Millions of us qualify as adventurers. Many thousands would probably qualify as hard-core adventurers. You could argue that the list of adventurers on the Nat Geo site are really those with the best publicity. Take Danny McAskill for example. Sure he’s done a lot of travel this year, biking in some amazing parts of the world, but he’s had the support of Red Bull behind him. He’s probably flown business class and stayed in nice hotels along the way. His film from last year ‘Way Back Home’ was of him supposedly biking back to Skye, whereas in reality it was clearly a nicely edited montage of tricks along the route. Don’t get me wrong, it was an amazing film, and we showed it at ShAFF, but it wasn’t really adventure in my book. I would imagine that Danny is a little bemused as to why he is on the shortlist, as are others no doubt, but his publicity machine will be relishing in the pages and pages of coverage he’s getting via retweets and plus one’s as the cycling world rally behind him. 

Cory Rich is another of the candidates. Last winter he made the first ascent of an 8,000m peak in winter. Mind boggling. Really mind boggling. A true adventure. What made it even more adventurous was that Cory managed to film himself and his two teammates along the way, even doubled up in a coughing fit on the summit. Sorry Danny, but in terms of suffering they beat you hands down. Suffering is often trumpeted as an indicator of the level of adventure. You can’t appreciate the good times unless you experience the bad times. And the worse the bad times are, the better the good times feel. That sort of thing.

I won’t dissect all the candidates, suffice to say that some are more deserving than others, but will go so far as to say that the real adventurers of the year aren’t even on the list. I watched a film a few days ago called Journey To The Wild Coast about a young Canadian couple who travelled, under their own steam, from Seattle to the western tip of Alaska over the course of a year. The film is amateur by comparison to Cory’s and Danny’s films, but the adventure they had along the way was truly amazing. The film won an award at the recent Banff Mountain Film Festival. In fact it didn’t win an award becasuse it didn’t really fit into any of the categories so it got the Special Jury Mention. At ShAFF a few years ago faced with a similar situation – we had an Irish film about climbing on the Emerald Isle which didn’t fit any of our categories, but which displayed such a spirit of adventure that we invented a new category called just that ‘The Spirit Of Adventure’. Each year since then it’s gone to the people who we think ought to be winning the National Geographic Adventurer Of The Year competition…

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 Details.

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Details.

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Details.

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 I’m in the throes one more of watching a lot of adventure films as part of the selection process for next year’s Sheffield Adventure Film Festival (9-11 March). Each year the number of filmmakers who send in their films rises. However it’s still a massive task to go out there and find films, track down the filmmakers, ask them if they would like to submit, and get them to do so. The vast majority are more than happy to oblige, viewing festivals as a necessary route to exposure through screenings, awards and general chatter. However, the vast majority are also incredibly busy (presumably making films) and find the task of sending across a film a bit tedious. Fortunately things have become a whole lot easier as most now opt to upload them digitally for me to download. This means we get high definition copies which we can then screen at their intended resolution as opposed to DVD. In the last two months I have downloaded over 100Gb of film and expect to download a fair chunk more before the official closing date of December 1st. To all the filmmakers out there that I hassle – please accept my gratitude, and excuse the perseverance by way of multiple emails! It definitely pays off in that I believe that ShAFF, because it comes at the end of the winter (i.e. film festival) season, has the best selection of any adventure festival, anywhere.

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Just added details of 3 family fun days at three new Decathlon stores opening in the next month in edinburgh, Bolton and Warrington. Details. 

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 This Thursday's The North Face Speaker Series is to be streamed live to the web via their site. Starts 19.30

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 Details.

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The programmes for two Best Of ShAFF screenings in December and January at the Showroom Cinema in Sheffield have been announced today. 

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Here.

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