You can vote by going to the contest’s YouTube page HERE. Then click the “Vote” tab, and look for my video in the “Vote for these Videos” window to the right of the current video that’s playing.

I created this short mainly between the hours of midnight and 3am for about a week and a half since I am a full time student at Vancouver Film School. I just couldn’t pass up this opportunity with the skills I’m learning here.

I always find it interesting to see how far I can push myself and see what quality I can produce in a short amount of time, especially when others are given the same task and I can compare what I’ve done with what is possible. Maybe it’s me living out some subconscious desire to be like MacGyver, but in a film contest: okay, you have 30 seconds to create something with the theme of escape, go.

I chose this story because I could get the animation done in the amount of time given. They are simple shapes, easy to model, rig and animate, relatively, but the relationships implied create a deeper story. So even though they’re simple, the story doesn’t have to be sacrificed.

There are three rounds to the competition, with only one winner that gets flown to Sydney for their short to be screened at a festival and also awarded $20,000. The top 10 winners for the first round will be announced July 25th.

I also just cranked out a short hang gliding video from a recent flight. I was going to hold onto the footage to use later, but decided it might get lost in the shuffle of school work so I just needed to cut it together and get it out. Hope you enjoy, that day was a great flight, although I’m a little rusty on the wingovers they’re always fun:

I love this affect of seeing trees from overhead, how everything splays out from the center.

Here are some of the images I took from my two hour flight today at Mount Woodside. It was a great little flight. Mainly ridge soaring.

The highlights were playing in the clouds, watching a family of eagles fly around, flying around with them, seeing two eagles grab their talons and tumble together, and meeting new pilots and flying a new site. I love any site that lets you see or fly over some water and this one has a gorgeous view of a river convergence.

Since my car wasn’t able to make it up the mountain I had to leave all my expensive camera gear behind and I just used my old trusty Canon PowerShot SD870 for these shots. I used this same camera to win my first YouTube contest back in the day too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nZfJjRrEb4

Launch is to the right in the photo.

A Bald Eagle going into the clouds.

My favorite moment from today, even though I felt like the ugly duckling trying to keep up with them.

My second favorite moment.

The scenery from this site is terrific.

Always enjoy finding terrain like this while flying. It's like looking at a painting . . . while flying a hang glider.

The first video is from this year’s Flytec race in Florida, and the second one is from 2009′s race (on a day off from racing). There are more photos from this year’s trip at my tumblr blog. Oh, and the music I made in Garage Band.

Around 1:15 in the above video, I was freaking out. Or, I guess I should say, I had just been freaking out and was now relieved. Before gaining this much altitude, there was no good place to land, it was all swamp, and the high winds were pushing me into them and I was only at about 1,400′.

Then I saw a bird turning and raced to it and caught the thermal he was in and saved it!

That thermal drifted with the wind, and me, over this unlandable terrain, but luckily I was safely in a thermal. I was not about to loose track of it and fall out of the thermal over this area.

I looked below me and was happy I wasn’t in these person’s shoes (see the photo). They had drifted over this area fairly low. The day before a pilot had landed in a swamp and gotten chased by an alligator, at least that’s what the story was. So I was happy to be up in a thermal climbing, and not down low sweating.

Luckily, the pilot in the photo made it out of that area, but that’s the risk they chose to take, that’s competition flying.

Below is a video from the previous year’s competition in Florida. The winds were to strong to compete so we went off to find some fun. The day before I shot this short video, we had been on another windy day off and were soaring an abandoned hotel on the beach, see that video here.

I also just made a playlist on YouTube so all my hang gliding videos can be grouped, viewed, and shared all together. Here’s the link to the playlist:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=1B350C54D54B3C57

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You can find and download a copy of these photos at flickr: HERE.

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If you download any (or just enjoy this website) and are feeling generous, you can click the donate button in the sidebar to the right to help maintain this website.

Steve’s picture deserves to stand alone because, after hearing about Dan Lyons from my blog a few days ago, he cut and donated his hair to Locks for Love.

Steve cut his hair for Locks of Love.

I’m really enjoying my experience with the new lens. I’ve never had a telephoto zoom so I am learning where I need to position myself (usually pretty far away) to the subject to get the shots I’m looking for. It is pretty heavy but I also have a Manfrotto monopod that I’ll use for it on any wedding jobs, etc. to take the weight off of my arms.

The flight from yesterday was incredible. My best climb was at 6:30pm! Everyone launched after about 5pm. It’s crazy how late in the day it was. I was cruising at cloud base (6,000′) towards Chattanooga for several miles before I turned back and did some aerobatics. It was enough that I could hardly lift my head up when I landed, my neck was so tired from holding my head up during the aerobatics because of the G’s I was pulling. I did wingovers all the way down from about 4,500′.

This is a quick little video I threw together of the couple of flights that I actually set up my camera on over the last few months. It’s typically such a pain to set a camera up on my glider, in addition to the stress of usually when I do want to set one up it’s because I’m doing something a bit over the line like a speed run or aerobatics, so then I don’t want to throw another factor into that mix. So for these couple of clips I’ve taken over the last few months I’ve had many more similar flights to these that I didn’t capture.

I’ve started to spin my glider, get a little more over the top on wingovers, and am really enjoying early morning speed runs very close to the treetops (watch my shadow in the video).

The video was made using my gorillapod on my keel with my Canon 7D, and another mount that I set up using a fisheye on my Canon HF100, see a picture of that mount on my other blog. I’m not too keen on fisheyes because they distort the image so much it makes trees that I’m inches away from look like they’re many feet away, so it’s hard to get a grasp on what is really happening when you watch things through a fisheye.

I will be moving soon so this may be my last hang gliding-related video for a while, hope you enjoy.

I just rotated this image from the video so you can see what it looks like if the horizon is oriented properly to my position.

I’ll go ahead and apologize for no in-flight pictures, my wife took our little camera on a relief trip to Haiti (good excuse huh).

We launched a little late, about 3pm, I landed around 6pm and had a great flight overall. Below is a screen shot of FlyChart which comes with a 6030 vario and lets you get all nerdy with your flight – you can see speed, altitude, and vario all plotted and aligned together.

Oh and I titled this with the “Milk Run” because that’s what Ollie calls flying this route, I think he stole milk as a child or something . . .

Click it to make bigger

I used my Canon 7D to film the launches at 60fps and then conformed it to 24fps to slow it down. You can do so in Cinema Tools and go to ‘Batch Conform’ and select the folder with all the video files, but make a backup first because it doesn’t keep the originals.

I also helped get Eric in the air when the sun was setting and picked up my newly delivered Glidetrack which is how I got a couple of those dolly shots at the end. I will post a video talking about my tripod and Glidetrack set up soon.

This is a very short promotional piece for hang gliding I wanted to do. It’s just something very simple that I thought might stir some interest in people.

I used old footage from when I was making my Nikon Festival Contest video and color corrected in an interesting way to me using Magic Bullet Looks. All the footage used came out of my Canon HF100 too.

I also posted this to my new Youtube account LucasRidley. I thought it would be easier for people to remember than my other account, alta8bird. So I thought I better make the switch before I get any more subscribers. It’s really something I’ve been putting off because I’m afraid none of my current subscribers will make the switch.

The name alta8bird came from my first AOL account a long, long time ago and when I signed up for Youtube in 2007, I thought, eh, what’s this thing, Youtube? I’ll just use that random name I had back in the day . . . even though I really didn’t like it, it’s not memorable, and I don’t think I’m doing myself any favors by keeping it if I’m planning on posting more videos to youtube, plus everything else I have, like this website, vimeo, twitter, etc. is in my own name too.

So you can click HERE to subscribe to my new Youtube account, I hope to post a video weekly, but we’ll see . . .

Thanks for watching!

Well, I thought about it and decided I might as well put together a shorter version of the Avatar video considering people’s attention spans these days (mine included).

So I used a couple new clips that weren’t in the original and recut a shorter version that might be more conducive to people sharing the video around to their friends. Also, most videos that go viral aren’t almost 6 minutes long like the original version of this.

So maybe this will be easier for people to get through, hope you enjoy!

Also, I noticed after last night that the view counter on the original version was stuck at 304 views as it was the night before. Apparently they’ll freeze your view counter if you get too many views right after uploading to make sure you aren’t cheating somehow and clicking over and over on your own video just to make it look popular.

This afternoon the counter would jump by like a 100 views at a time, but now it seems to be stuck again at 925 views, I think that’s a good sign that it’s stuck, which means it’s getting a bunch of views. Thanks for watching!

Avatar came out while my wife was on a trip to Haiti, and since I promised to see it with her, I waited. And waited. It was an epic adventure that rivaled the movie itself. Well, maybe not, but it was hard waiting. It had been out almost two weeks by the time I saw it, not to mention the time we went to the theater with her family over Christmas. [edit: the shorter version is now in the player above, if you want to see the longer version of this video goHERE Thanks!]

My wife and I were the first in line of our family to buy tickets. I had the tickets in my hand! That was a done deal! I was going to see Avatar finally! BUT, I had purchased the last tickets so the rest of her family wouldn’t be able to go. So I held back the tears as I got a refund and thought, I’m never going to see this movie. My commitment to family was really tested that night.

Well, the time came and we eventually saw it. My palms were so sweaty during the flying scenes I got dehydrated! Or it could have been the fact I refused to drink water until the family agreed to go back and try and see it again? Anyway, I knew that I had to do a spoof video related to hang gliding. It was just too perfect.
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You're going down Scott - I pretended he had to land because I shot his glider, but really he had to land because . . . it's a glider. I think I started to like the costume too much at this point.

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But it was one of those thoughts you have and think I ‘should’ do that. Like checking your oil when filling up at the gas station but you’ve just bought two delicious ice cream snickers bars while your car was filling up and your brain can’t fathom putting them down for something that you ‘should’ be doing. Well, my ice cream snickers bars this time was my apathy towards the effort it would take to create such a video, but I sat it aside like two melting ice cream snickers bars on a hot summer day and I went for it and I did what I thought I ‘should’ do, and I made an avatar spoof (confused yet by the metaphor? me too, I just like ice cream snickers bars).

If I could just wrastle some more help from my friends Scott and Eric for another video endeavor I thought “I could do this.” With Eric’s horrible acting skills, Scott’s ability to paint my face, and their combined experience and expertise in making fun of me, they were perfect for the job. And lucky for me, agreed to do it.

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Eric (left) and Scott (right) were really commited to this job. They even put in overtime and kept making fun of me after the shooting for the video was done. Now that's commitment! But what are friends for? No, seriously, what are friends for? I'm beginning to think I have a distorted definition of friend.

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Normally, I will storyboard something out and get everything just right, but in that area I picked up those ice cream snickers, devoured them, and threw the wrappers on the floor. I took a different approach so the footage might seem more natural. I had a general idea of what I wanted the outcome to be and a couple specific references to the movie, but other than that nothing was written out so everything would seem more natural. Scott and Eric did a good job playing along considering I didn’t really fill them in a lot on all my ideas.

One challenge was giving it that documentary and ‘The Office’ -look with only three people because the camera would be stationary on the tripod any time we’re all three in the shot. But it seemed to work out and get that natural feel as we traded off each being cameramen so we’d get that little camera shake.
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Me jumping on Eric's glider. This was one of those shots where you only have one chance to get it right and we were lucky enough to do just that.

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Getting the costume together was half the battle. I had to go buy the longest wig I could and braid it myself. My wife called while I was doing it and I couldn’t pick up the phone. That was one of the weirdest excuses I’ve ever had to miss a call. Oh, and don’t ever expect to find blue lipstick anywhere if it’s not halloween, I probably visited like 5 different stores and couldn’t find it. I actually made an iron-on tshirt that says “Let’s make Tsahaylu under the Tree of Voices,” with the image of the movie poster below that. My character was going to wear that, but I scrapped it at the last minute because I thought it would clash with trying to look nerdily identical to the real movie characters.
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We shot this in my front yard (thanks for Kurt's help too). My Vietnam vet neighbor thinks I'm crazy now though.

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All in all it took about 4 or 5 hours to film and a little over a full day of editing to put together. I’m going to make another short little video of outtakes and other funny stuff I didn’t use too. I’m hoping this video will garner a lot of views, a similar Avatar spoof video got 800,000 views in it’s first week. I couldn’t imagine getting that many views, but you never know. Pass it around to friends and family and it might get there, you never know until you try.

So put down whatever your excuse is for that project you’ve always thought you should do, and go after it! You just might want to avoid that project involving having your friends make fun of you or you might end up in tears that are soaked in blue body paint running down your face. I mean, I’m just saying, not from experience or anything, just a word of caution.

But seriously I think it went great and appreciate everyone’s help from Eric and Scott, to Kurt, Rex, James, Mike B, Jen, and George for showing their support (James had that cameo at the end, hope your eye is better . . .) to the guy who took a picture of me on his cell phone as he drove by to let me know I was doing something special. And thanks to my wife who not only puts up with these random ideas but supports me. So share this video around to everyone you know, I’d really like to see how many views I can get out of this thing, and I think it is an interesting way to expose people to the sport of hang gliding who might not every look for it.

(Everything was shot on my trusty Canon 7D)
Don’t forget to check out my photoblog: http://lucasridley.tumblr.com
And the new clothing I started making: http://borntofly.spreadshirt.com

Oh and if you do the Digg thing too, then Digg this video: http://digg.com/movies/Avatar_Goes_Hang_Gliding

And most definitely subscribe to my Youtube videos!

If that’s not enough . . . don’t forget to brush your teeth either!