Homemade Mountain Movie Awards – Videos of the week AND the month! May 2 2008

Competitions and offers

02 May 2008 14:46

It's time for the third, weekly, round of the Homemade Mountain Movie Awards. Also this week is a little bit special as it's time to announce the first, monthly winner of the awards. Without further ado, it's over to our expert to give us the lowdown on (and reveal the winner of) his pick of the week.

Click here to see Round 1.
Click here to see Round 2.

‘Our Attempt on Yr Wyddfa’ ‘ Attempt’ looks like a bit of an exaggeration.  A film about rounding off a hard day of arseing about in a bothy bag with an ill-deserved chip butty. But as the voiceover says: “a fun time was had by all” and it shows. High scores for atmosphere, but more storytelling would be great.

‘The Langdales’ is a beautiful slideshow of stills, but we aren’t fooled by fancy wipes and fades into thinking it’s a valid entry to a set of movie awards.

We have a minor gripe, too, about Dr Cheese’s ‘Great Gable via the Climber’s Traverse’, which is that it’s nearly eight minutes long (rules: max three). There are some great sequences in it, but it would really benefit from a fierce hacking. It can be hard to cut scenes that mean something to you as the subject/film-maker/editor, but can be a good idea to make a version for yourself and one for innocent bystanders. Simple tip: ask yourself what really adds to the film, second by second, and chop the rest. Another short that will mean a lot to the person who took it, but manages to convey a lot to the viewer thanks to its narrowness of focus is ‘Striding Edge Uncovered’: one man’s trip across the tricky bit; simple but very effective.

Winner of the week is ‘The Dales Way in 60 Seconds’. Map of walk graphic: check. Voiceover telling us what we’re looking at: check. Nice views of steep hill, river, waterfall, bridge, stone circle, ecclesiastical ruins, swardy valley, scree, bloke in cag: check. A neat little travelogue and commendably pithy for Ilkley to Windermere. They’d be round the world in 80 minutes.

That’s it for this week’s entries. Winner for the month of April is terrybnd’s ‘Pavey Ark via Jack’s Rake’, which won in the first week of the competition. It has drama, pace, imagination, entertainment, inventive use of graphics, useful information about the route and generally looks fantastic. Well done Terry.

Steve Buckley