Robert Danger Byrd’s Ice Bucket Challenge

Robert Danger Byrd’s Ice Bucket Challenge

Pardon the non climbing post, but I could not pass up the opportunity to participate in the social media phenomenon that has the likes of  Bill Gates and George W. Busch dumping ice-water on their heads for charity. And the results are staggering. Typical annual donations to the ALS Orginization are in the 2 million range, jumping to 94 million since the ice bucket craze and is climbing 10 million per day. There are just over 500 of you on this list, so you may all consider yourselves officially challenged. If you do it, or have already done it, comment back to this post with your video link.

My Version of the Ice Bucket Challenge
Given that I’ve crossed more than one icy mountain river wearing only my hat, swam in glacial pools and bathed in streams
directly fed by melting snow, just dumping a bucket of ice-water on my head didn’t seem like all that much of a challenge. 

I wanted to do something a little different, and make it more of a technical challenge. So here is my best effort, and I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed creating it.

Technical Notes
I don’t typically work in video, but favor stills, so I was a bit out of my element here. Nevertheless it was an interesting project that gave me the opportunity to put my new Black Edition  3+ GoPro cameras to good use. I shot the footage in 720P Ultra Wide at 100 frames per second to allow for the slow motion effects employed. I shot a variety of angles and takes and stitched it all together in the GoPro editing software which I had wanted to try out. Being my first project with this software I was pleasantly surprised to find the software easy and intuitive. There is not a single frame at normal speed, I tinkered with the frame rate to smooth out movement and add drama and I subdued the color to unify the footage and give it a classic feel.

And thanks to my good friend and climbing partner Rick Overholt who issued the challenge to me.

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