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NEWS
26 Feb 2010
PREMIERE FILM FESTIVAL SCREENING Tri Cycling Africa has been selected for screening at the New Hope Film Festival in Pennsylvania! The festival is on in late June 2010. More info on the festival here: http://www.newhopefilmfestival.com 7 Feb 2010
PHOTOS FROM CHANNEL 31 SCREENING A great night was had for our first TV broadcast on saturday night in Melbourne. We bribed a few friends with free drinks to come around to Jeff's place to watch it and help us celebrate. Some photos from the night are on our facebook event page here . Which reminds me, Tri Cycling Africa now has a facebook page! http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=287309806964 1 Feb 2010
3CR RADIO INTERVIEW Jeff has just had a chat on radio 3CR 's YarraBUG (Yarra Bicycle Users Group) program in Melbourne. He was asked about the tandem recumbent tricycle trip across West Africa and the subsequent documentary film, his previous tricycle journey from Vietnam to England, and the important things he learned while travelling overseas. You can hear the interview here (11.1mb). 20 Jan 2010
TELEVISION BROADCAST DATE ANNOUNCED! Tri Cycling Africa will screen as a single feature film on Channel 31 in Melbourne on SAT 6 FEB at 10PM with other capital cities in Australia to follow. The film will be screened under the film festival banner "Cheap Thrills". This is very exciting news for Jeff McLean and I who have nurtured this ugly ducking for quite a number of years, refusing to let it slip into obscurity. If you're in Melbourne that night and you're around a telly, we'd love you to tune in to bump up the numbers and make this black sheep feel more popular than it is ;) If you're not in Melbourne, we're assured it will play in other capital cities, so we'll let you know as soon as they tell us. We're also in the process of making it available on DVD as a 2-disc set with the obligatory deleted scenes and whacky crazy outtakes. It'll be just like the real thing! 19 Dec 2009
Just recorded a five minute intro for the Channel 31 screening. Jeff explains the journey to camera whilst riding his treddly ;) Looking forward to seeing how the final product is presented on the telly! 16 Dec 2009
Tri Cycling Africa will screen as a single feature film on Channel 31 in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide! Currently looking at late Jan or Feb. 17 Sep 2009 WEBISODES NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE ! Jeff and I choofed off to West Africa all those years ago with big hearts and even bigger intentions, but unfortunately with little knowledge... just a big bundle of passion. Jeff loves travelling and I love photography, but it seems a lot more is needed to write, pre-produce, shoot, edit, produce, pitch, sell and promote a television series or feature film. As good as we were at our areas of specialty, it was about 1% of what was required. And thank heavens we didn't know that, because if we did we never would've started. Bliss is lovely, we had plenty of ignorance, so imagine how we felt. Over the years, the doco morphed from fifty hours of footage down to a TV series of ten 1-hour episodes to six 1-hour episodes to four half-hour episodes to two 1-hour episodes to a 95 min feature. It was pitched to various networks and organisations both in Australia and overseas - in some cases by us and in other cases by parties more suitably skilled to the task. To say the whole process was an incredible learning experience is a hideous understatement, as I look at how we did some things and how laughably different I would do them now, if I had the chance. And therein lies the problem. Sometimes you only get one chance to make an impression and being ill-prepared, particularly when you think you're being the opposite, can be fatal to a project. Through all the stumbling and knockbacks, Jeff and I always held a feint glimmer of hope, probably because we were (and still are) too close it. But regardless of its lack of success thus far, we've always felt that the doco had some merit and that there was an audience for it somewhere. Finding that audience... that's the trick. Or perhaps we're just naive. Money was never a motivator in this endeavour (perhaps it should have been) and we always went with the notion that we may come back with nothing. If it got picked up, that was a bonus. It sounds like a pathetic excuse, but it's true nonetheless. But we did want people to see it. That was the main driving force. Jeff had the idea many moons ago of releasing it episodically online for free, but we decided to try other avenues first. I'm not even sure what prompted it's resurface, but while Jeff is coincidentally off travelling overseas again, I have started uploading short episodes of Tri Cycling Africa to YouTube. They're in high-quality bite-size chunks and parts 1 and 2 are 'now screening' (I would've preferred to see that on a Tri Cycling Africa poster in a cinema, but never mind). There's also a trailer to give you a taste of what it's all about. We had a semi-public screening in Melbourne a while back... if there's enough support for it, we'd love to do it again. Cheers and thanks for reading, |