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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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 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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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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