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Short Snack #5 | Melbourne Bikes & Beaches 🇦🇺

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I'm very fortunate.

Over the last few years I've been all over the world. Continents and cities I never thought I'd visit. Sometimes it's a great experience, & sometimes I can't wait to get out of whatever random place I've landed in. Either way, I feel beyond privileged to get the opportunity, good or bad to fly around seeing the world through my lens.

This was one of those good ones 🇦🇺👍.

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This latest job had me flying 17,000km around the globe to Australia to shoot the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race. Working with a new client I was putting my editing and shooting skills to the test to create several stand alone videos as well as a highlights of the day incorporating footage from 12 GoPro's mounted on the riders bikes.

Work flow was tough - and while there was tonnes of footage, that's not always the easiest thing to deal with - especially when you're trying to get your video live in four hours. Thankfully it all worked out, & I (plus the client & teams!) are happy with the results!

 

Then, because I'd flown 17,000km and it felt a shame to travel one whole day to only spend three in that country, I decided to stay another two days and explore Melbourne...and there happened to be another bike race to watch 🙈 #CantKeepMeAway

Enjoy Short Snack #5. Really tried to push the boat out on this one in the shoot, testing some new techniques to bring into the edit.

 
 

Melbourne is an awesome city. Seriously one of the best I've ever been to. Somehow it was chill while also keeping the feel of a bustling metropolis. It had everything you needed from a city, the transportation was incredible, and you were 20 minutes from the beach. I've never been to a city that was so sporty either. Multiple pro arenas, and every park was full of people playing soccer, doing yoga, softball, kicking a rugby ball around.

It made coming back to the never ending winter of the UK that little bit harder! It's a place I could move to tomorrow, and a place worth visiting if you get the opportunity 🇦🇺

Melbourne

 

I'm not a city person. Give me a field, a beach, anything - cities are all the same worldwide...well, that's what I thought until I went to Melbourne.

 
 

Macca's on the signs, arvo said on the radio, news stories ranging from shark sightings to spilt milk and all the puns you'd imagine. Australia has a unique attitude, & doesn't hide any of it.

 
 

A green city. Full of juxtapositions, people enjoying the sunshine and..a lot of weird things if you looked hard enough.

 
 

The place felt similar yet different. You still had the crazy pigeon lady, but also a true feeling of multiculturalness. I've never eaten better Chinese, and in a restaurant where no one spoke English.

 
 

The place was buzzing. It was active. You could stray from the path in park for the sport being played almost non-stop. Street music & small crowds formed on nearly every corner. I sat & watched a community of mismatched people wander up & away around a game of outdoor chess.

I left Melbourne thinking about how it had everything London had - with better weather, less people and a much more calm demeanour.

I could move there tomorrow.

 

Cadel Evens Road Race

My main event. Named after Australia's only TdF winner - the race start's in Evans' hometown of Geelong, races down the Great Ocean Road before returning to the finish. Sadly I was stuck around the start/finish & media centre - so never got to see the ocean road...but it's something else to do when I come back!

 

I'm used to doing races in the Northern Hemisphere...so this scenery & sun was quite a nice change of pace!

 
 

My main role was video...but I still managed to take & end up sharing a lot of my photography over the week...

 
 

One for the fans. It's not every day the Pro Tour comes to 🇦🇺...and the fans were rewarded & then some by the generosity of the riders. Big shout out to Esteban Chaves for keeping his trademark huge grin despite everywhere wearing a mask of his face all week

 

Winners & grin-ners. 

The Champagne Moment! 🍾🍾🍾

 

I'm usually filming for these...but with no formal requirement I thought I'd take a turn at snapping Ruth Wilder enjoying a much deserved moment in the sun

 

Herald Sun Tour

Can't beat a bike race through a major city CBD!

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Focus from DVP before eventually riding to the podium on the TT

 

Froome & Chavez were two of the nicest people all week. Taking selfies with fans, signing everything & generally being awesome people to fans who were just excited to see their cycling heroes on the other side of the world

 

Thank you for cycling slowly.

What did YOU think of Melbourne? And did I overdo the transitions in this video? If I was thinking of making a tutorial on how to do some of the cuts, would that imterest you or not? 👇

@THEREALRHODRI

RHODRI@CONTENTISKING.CO

VIEW MORE SHORT SNACKS HERE

All images taken either on a Sony A7sII with 85mm or 24-70mm

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Short Snack #4 | New Year Bulgarian Snow and Sunshine

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2016 was crazy. 30+ flights, two World Cups and a Paralympics along with marque events like Henley and the NFL International Series in my hometown of Twickenham. So, to round out the year, I planned for a New Year relaxing skiing trip with my girlfriend and a few other friends of hers and mine from Primary School in Bulgaria 🇧🇬.

Normally a ski trip for me is just an excuse to make a skj movie. But this week I took it easy. My Sony only came out onto the mountain one day and the GoPro made a brief appearance, mostly to get the ski lift group shot. However...old habits die hard, and the transfer saw us sitting in the quiet town of Bansko for a good couple of hours with some hours to kill...

From the 36 GoPro shots and a spare hour where I'd honestly just gotten a little tired of the incessant Uno games 😜 I threw together a quick edit. The first Short Snack of 2017.

 

Uploaded by Rhodri Williams on 2017-01-04.

 

Not bad for a half day's worth of random video & an hour or two's editing! I'm aiming to make one Short Snack a week for 2017 - a goal I've had for a while. I've toyed with doing a video a day, like my #PhotoPerDay project on Instagram from a few years ago - but I don't know what that achieves. This is also a great way to work out the "other" clips from jobs and push some editing boundaries.

As for Bansko? I can't recommend it more! It's a little bare and small in terms of difficultly...but I went early season - I've heard it is a great off piste resort when the snow does fall, and I could see the tree runs being pretty awesome on their day. Food and drink are fabulous and cheap and accommodation gives you a lot more bang for your buck vs a French resort. It's going to be a struggle to convince myself to pay the extra £200-300 for a "premium" resort anymore.

Squad 🤛

The little puppies & their parents at the lower lift station kept us coming back 🐶

 
 

Have you been skiing in Bulgaria? Where's the best place you've been skiing? Let me know 👇

@TheRealRhodri

Rhodri@ContentIsKing.co

VIEW MORE SHORT SNACKS Here

All images taken either on a Sony A7sII with 85mm or GoPro Hero 4 Black & edited in Lightroom

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SHORT SNACK #3 | Welsh Forests & Dog Walkings

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I'm spending Christmas with the girlfriend this year. The town she grew up in is a lovely little place in Mid-Wales surrounded by incredible areas of wide open land, forests, lakes and dams...a stark contrast to where I grew up in London! It's also a mecca for some incredible drone shots just waiting to happen.

While the weather has been awful, I took the Phantom up to the local forest while walking her dogs with a few friends crossing fingers we'd get lucky. Winds gusted, and rain fell...but as we entered an open clearing the weather calmed and I took my chance.

 
 

I'd love to have been up for longer - but as we continued along the walk, the wind picked up and rain didn't let up. Huge shame...but for Wales in the depth of winter I'm very happy to get the flight I did! A great end to my flying for 2016 and a positive step into 2017, where I'm looking to do a lot more flights like this!

I did however take my A7sII with me - which is much less weather reliant, and took some photos of friends & dogs while they enjoyed the wet and windy conditions. I enjoy shooting sport - but it's always great to get out into the wilds & test myself with something a little different.

View More SHORT SNACKS Here

All images taken on a Sony A7sII with 85mm & edited in Lightroom

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Social Pet Peeve: Keep Clicks Simple

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The social space is congested.

This isn't news - you have a maximum of 4 seconds for content to capture your audiences attention or they're scrolling on. It makes sense your followers also don't want to have to type or click to much to hunt down your content away from where they currently are.

Searching for page: Min 4 Clicks

Direct Link: 1 Click

And this doesn't count someone who doesn't have the website bookmarked or needs to switch apps on a phone and search. You can add easily 10x more clicks than from a direct link, and that's still including some shortcuts - all while not guaranteeing they even find your page at all (or don't get distracted on the way).

What's strange as well is that teams haven't always just thrown a post online. A lot of thought has gone into grabbing the audience's attention - but not necessarily on the next step, driving and guiding them to your desired destination.

 
 

I see this an awful lot on Gameday, and across most sports. Generally this lack of direct links doesn't really make sense either. If you had an article on your website you wanted to make your audiance aware of you wouldn't just put in the copy "head over to our website" - you'd add a link. It shouldn't be any different for informing someone of something happening on another social platform.

Social media & Google might make it easy to find your official page on other platforms - but why create the extra effort when you can take all and any effort out and add the direct link? It's not like it looks messy either.

In the constant fight for attention and relevance, those who streamline the process and make the experience easy for their audiance will come out on top.

Don't add extra work - make it easy.

Keep It Simple (on Social) Stupid.

Do you agree or disagree? Do you have some reasons I may have missed why you may not put a direct link?

Follow this direct link & let me know on Twitter 😉

Most Retweeted 2016.

This week Sports Illustrated released a list of the top sporting tweets...and there was a significant oddity

 
 

That one team account was this iconic tweet from Leicester City the moment they overcame all the odds to be crowned Premier League Champions. Also included in the most retweeted the MLB account and the emotional Dee Gordon’s home run after Jose Fernandez’s death - which contained the video of the moment which the league owns. 

The list is an interesting read - if for nothing else to see how simple some of the tweets are. Second most retweeted in the USA and fifth globally was Marshawn Lynch's retirement tweet - which is nothing more than a blurry image and one emoji. It's very Marshawn in it's style - but also very telling of what today's fan craves on social...

 
 

James Royner, Director of Digital for the Kanas City Chiefs pointed out👇

 
 

It's an interesting topic. It reminds me of what I was told while studying about chasing "viral" videos;

"you can strategise all you want & pump in all the money you like, but if a kid bites a finger or a panda sneezes on camera and it is uploaded to the right place at the right time, all your planning and dollars don't stand a chance"

Difference here is you have a chance to control the conversation. To direct and capture attention. This isn't a catchy pop song with a random dance move which has gained notoriety overnight from nowhere, but someone on your team who you can activate, enable and help to tell their story.

I always hear the "turn your audiance into advocates" line at any social conference I go to...do the same with your players, managers, support staff. Embrace their humour, personality and spontaneity.

What are some of your favourite spontaneous moments from sport? And what are your thoughts surrounding players vs team engagement on social? Send me a tweet, let's chat!

 

CFB Spectacles - The Hurricanes

Snap's Spectacles are one of the most intriguing products to pop up inside the social media space for a while. Think of them like a GoPro on your head...only much smaller and integrated into a pair of stylish glasses. The kicker? They link directly with Snapchat & on other social media output a strangely immersive circular video. They also might solve the horizontal vs vertical video debate on social single-handedly...

 
 

They've been floating around for a few weeks now - but have been near impossible to get hands on. So far the only way to purchase a pair has been to track down one of the vending machines which can drop anywhere across the US (or world). Snap did recently open a store in NYC...which has queues that wrap around the block, starting the night before. It's marvellous marketing, but has restricted where you can actually watch people using Spectacles.

However, on Saturday morning Spectacles dropped a vending machine in Florida...and on Saturday evening, the Miami Hurricanes tweeted 👇

 
 

And how did it look?

I was already pretty much sold before - but seeing them in action has pushed me right over any edge that remained. It was so cool to be able to interact with the video, and turn it when it needed to be turned - or view it the way I wanted to view it.

Sure it has it's small downsides - so of the text got a little lost and some things are only viewable from certain places...but for a first story, and one of the first using this tech on that platform? Awesome. Huge kudos to the Hurricanes social media team for being willing to jump on and try new tech!

Check out the full story for yourself via the Miami Hurricane's Snapchat...be quick! You have less than a day 👀!

Buuut if you did miss it, that's fine - I've got you covered 👇

Yeah. It's pretty awesome.