Cascade Adventures DVDs
Now that I’ve found a great production and distribution system for these DVDs, it’s very easy to offer them to people who are interested! I’m simply offering all four of the Cascade Adventures DVDs (2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007) for a single price, which includes shipping and handling. I’m not doing this for money certainly, but to share these DVDs with the small set of Northwest climbers and hikers who would love to see firsthand movies of some of the great climbs in the Cascades and environs. The estimated proceeds per year will be enough to cover the costs of this site and production.
You can see most of these movies already on this site. There are a few movies and bonuses that I have not released here, mainly just because I haven’t gotten around to it yet. If you like the movies, you might enjoy seeing them on a bigger screen. The movies don’t cover how to climb the mountains or give any beta. It’s just us in the back country climbing these amazing peaks (usually with a well-placed soundtrack).
So what’s on each DVD? Here’s a breakdown:
2004: Johannesburg Northeast Buttress, The Brothers Traverse, Stuart Glacier Couloir, Serpentine Arete, Wilmans Spires, Sahale Peak, Mount Stuart North Ridge, Tomyhoi Mountain, Ride the Lightning, Condorphamine Addiction, 2003 Slideshow
2005: Colchuck Northeast Buttress, Mount Redoubt, The Torment Forbidden Traverse, Slesse Northeast Buttress, Snowking Mountain, Sperry Peak, Washington Pass, Winter Flying in the Cascades, Terror Dreams, Music Videos
2006: East Ridge of Forbidden Peak, Eldorado Peak, Mount Assiniboine with Fred Beckey, The Tooth, Pigeon Spire, Bugaboo Spire, Mount Cruiser, Summer Flying in the Cascades, Lake Serene
2007: Mount Sir Donald, Vestal Peak Colorado, Black Peak, McClellan’s Butte, Enchantments Slideshow, Nooksak Falls
The DVDs are in separate cases with high quality artwork. Each one has the same style and level of quality. Have a look at these sample from the 2007 DVD:
Folks who have graced these movies include: Michael Stanton (of course), Robert Meshew (of course), Aidan Haley (of course), Ken Whittenburg, Dan Singhisen, Daniel Tomko, Ari Lazier, John Scurlock, Fred Beckey, Mark Tomko, Kevin Smith and David Dault.
If you’re still reading, I suspect you’re interested in the technical details of creating these movies and DVDs. Don’t wanna disappoint, so here’s the inforamtion: We shot these movies on a small Panasonic 3CCD MiniDV camera. For those of you who wish to film your own climbs, my best advice is not be tempted to write to flash or a hard drive, but to use MiniDV cassettes. It’s much more resilient and battle ready than other formats. (FYI, Hi Def can also write to MiniDV…I’ve since upgraded). It also doesn’t suffer from the proprietary format that other formats often enforce. MiniDV all the way!
I edited these movies using Adobe Premiere and a plugin for still photos by Canopus called “Imaginate”. Michael’s wife Kris turned me on to this editing duet. Each DVD was created with Adobe Encore. I experimented with several DVD authoring packages and found that Encore, despite it’s frustrations, was the most powerful and flexible. What drove me nuts about the consumer level ones was that you had almost no control over the compression and your movies came out pixelated and ugly! Well there’s none of that here. The movies are all in high quality. I was also able to create good looking animated menu systems and even got super nerdy in the latter DVDs with custom cursors shaped like Mount Terror. There’s some extreme trivia for you.
A couple of movies (not to mention all of the menu systems) were created with original music: Slesse Mountain and The Brother’s Traverse. Creating an original soundtrack for a movie was an immense amount of work, well beyond the normal editing time of a single movie. I’ve since discovered applications like GarageBand which make this much easier. So, perhaps I’ll return to the notion of original soundtracks. Oh, for Slesse, Michael had since moved to Germany, so I’d send him synth chords over which he could solo. He’d send back the solos and I’d overlay them onto the synth parts. Fun stuff.
