False Advertising.
by trivialmtb
More like #yesbad.
To give a comparison on how bad that was I present you with the following experiment:
1A- I like mountain biking.
1B- I do not like yard work.
2A- I watched that 90 seconds of slow mo camera jerk offery and it took all of my patience to sit through it, wishing that it would be over sooner.
2B- I then looked out my window and watched 90 seconds of the grass in my lawn growing in real time and found myself calm and rejuvenated, feeling refreshed and ready to go about my day, despite knowing that 90 seconds of grass growth was bringing me ever closer to having to do more yard work. It was so much nicer, in fact, that I continued to just stare at the grass growing, in real time, for what turned out to be an additional 5 minutes.
Conclusion – yes, bad.
All the cinema toys in the world of video production cannot make something inherently interesting.
——————–
Edit- Just saw the Robot formula and it is accurate in its equation but not in its numbers. It’s more like this: 1 / 7 person crew / 125 (or at high as 300) / 2 = .057% to .023% watchable.
Anyone can decide to purchase an Epic over say, a substantial down payment on a house. Anyone can rent a Phantom and an op for a day over say, purchasing an S-Works Demo. And anyone can put the camera on the end of a fancy pants jib when they still don’t know how to work a tripod very well. And they can point that camera with Canon lenses on it (because no one in mountain biking could be bothered to invest in good PL lenses, and who could blame them considering the content is just going to end up on the web anyway) at one of the world’s best bike riders.
But are you kidding me that no one can hire a writer for a few hundred dollars to at least rough concept a story? It’s the same thing we talked about in that Avid video with Squirtis Keene (still love you ‘Dream). There are only about 5-7 people in the world currently making bike videos (professionally) that I would trust to have the good sense to know that a pencil and a few sheets of paper is worth more to a good video than all the new camera bullshit combined.
It’s good to know we’re not the only assholes that see this kind of thing as a problem and that Robot seems on board.
MTB “journalism” writes at the 5th grade level, with all the frequent typos, mis-spellings, and mis-used words that implies.
The other day I saw something on Stinkbike where the “journalist” used the word _rampant_ in a totally wrong manner.
What can you expect from a segment of society that thinks the plural of product is “product” ?
I guess the badazz photo/video/keyboardbanging “honches” think it’s weak-sauce to know how to write well, or to care about doing that.
Most newspapers are written at a 4th to 5th grade level. I guess that makes mtb journalism ahead of the curve ever so slightly. Rare typos don’t bother me a bit. Complete lack of effort in even trying to write something for a project is shameful.
Well yeah, typos are a fact of life and not some indicator of shitty writing. But they are an indication of lazy editing. And somewhere on the continuum of “what is the purpose of writing?,” they help dumb-down the quality of the thing offered up for reading.
Don’t pay attention to me, though. I used to piss and moan at Bill Bowles and his “The Old Coot” column, which was just shitty writing with lousy pseudo-phonetic spelling designed to show “hicks ride bikes too.” Not really funny, not really empathetic toward those “hicks” either. In other words, not satire, thus not worth my time.
But seriously — is it really that hard for an “MTB journalist” to admit humbly, “I can’t write for shit,” and to ask someone with 10th grade English editorial skills to look it over before publication?
So many times I see great photos undone by shitty written comments below / between them. “So many,” meaning 95% of the time.