An occasional blog on topics related to my work. For a behind-the-scenes look, subscribe to my Patreon page.
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We’re nearing the end of this long and exhausting journey. 12 days of intense campaigning have resulted in over £15,000 in micro-investments from more than 350 members of the adventure community! The show of support has been incredible for a project which is as much about questioning the status quo as about telling tales of adventure in far-flung corners of the globe. Travel for long enough and you start to realise that remarkably few people truly want to do this. Questioning the status quo risks discovering that the world isn’t like you’ve been told. Dealing with that revelation and its consequences can…
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Is Kickstarter Still Viable For Small-Scale Independent Creatives?
Kickstarter seems to have changed dramatically in the couple of years since I successfully crowdfunded Janapar. Back then it was the domain of creative eccentrics eager to launch passion projects that wouldn’t stand a chance of being funded in any other way. Through Kickstarter, they could reach out directly to like-minded people and ultimately create something that sidestepped the commercial world, often with no particular financial value at all, just because they could, and because enough other people wanted to help them do it. Fast forward to today and Kickstarter seems to have transitioned into a full-on business model. Looking through the featured projects on…
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Q&AA (Questions & Attempted Answers) About The New Film Project And The Kickstarter Campaign To Fund It
We’ve almost reached 25% of our funding goal in less than 4 days! 155 (and counting) of you absolute legends are responsible for this. Check it out here. This is an amazing effort by everyone – but we’ve still got a stupendously long way to go. In this post, I’d like to share some answers to the questions I’ve been receiving about the project. These range from pure curiosity to valid concerns about the films which I simply hadn’t considered. If you’re unsure about pledging, it may be that you’ll find your concerns addressed here. Let’s begin… 1. Am I…
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Why I Waited 4 Years To Make My Next Two Adventure Films
“Will you continue travelling? And are you planning any more films?” These questions always came up after screenings of Janapar. And I always answered them… vaguely. I replied that I’d keep travelling regularly – but only while it remained relevant to my life. And I replied that I’d definitely consider making another film – but because filmmaking is incredibly difficult, immensely time-consuming and remarkably thankless, it’ll really have to be a story I feel passionate about, just as Janapar was. Well – you know the joke about waiting hours for a bus and then two coming along at once…? Last…
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A Week In The Life Of A Western Traveller In Iran
As part of the publicity for our ongoing Kickstarter campaign A Tale Of Two Rivers, I published a week’s worth of my Iranian escapade for Nora Dunn’s website TheProfessionalHobo.com. Here’s an excerpt from the full article… Day 1 6:00am: The alarm goes off. I never set alarms. But I know how long it’ll take to get through Tehran to the bus station, even at this early hour. 7:30am: The coach is late. So Leon and I sit in the wintry morning sun, watching old men shelling sunflower seeds with their teeth. 3:00pm: The coach drops us at the edge of Esfahan. I’m…
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Announcing a community-backed project to make TWO brand new adventure films (about more than just heroics)
Link: The Kickstarter campaign is live! Click here to see what’s happening. Welcome to today’s blog post. I’m just going to go ahead and casually announce the biggest and most ambitious creative project of my career to date. OK? OK. So… I sometimes describe myself, when pressed, as an adventure filmmaker. (Among other things.) And for years now, Leon and I have both been honing not just our skills and experience in this field, but our reasons for wanting to work in adventure filmmaking in the first place. Last year, on two expeditions to Iran and Patagonia, we found (and…
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Just released: Watch my latest adventure film, KARUN, for free!
At the end of last year, Leon and I sat down with our editor and spent the best part of a month producing a short film of our adventure in Iran, during which we followed the river Karun from source to sea (or tried to, at least!). Today I’m happy to be able to share the full 15-minute film with you – for free. We’ve had a fantastic response from film festivals so far, even managing to win the People’s Choice award at Edinburgh Mountain Film Festival – the best kind of award we could have won, in my opinion, because…
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In Which I Become – Technically Speaking – A Tramp
tramp noun 1. a person who wanders from place to place without a home or job. Last night I slept rough in London for the first time. It wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. In fact, as urban stealth-camping goes, it was one of the more pleasant nights I can remember. The most difficult thing was committing to doing it. In the same way as ‘cycling round the world’ is an awful lot scarier than ‘cycling somewhere new today’, ‘being homeless in London for months’ is an awful lot scarier ‘camping out tonight’. It amounts to the same physical, tangible actions on any…
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On The Stigma Of Homelessness And The Dilemma Of The Creative Non-Conformist
The other day I went to a birthday party here in London. I knew the host through a mutual friend in the adventure world, upon whose fringes I seem to drift. The guest-list read like a who’s who of young Brits who’d devoted themselves to exploring and asking questions of the world. It was just the kind of crowd to whom I could field some burning questions I’d feel rather uncomfortable bringing up anywhere else. What I heard in response was… surprising. As mentioned in my last update, I’m in the UK to work on two new films based on…
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Adventure Versus The Status Quo: Diary Of An Ongoing Conflict
I dream of another big adventure. Constantly. This is probably not something that will ever change. I believe that I am forever destined to fantasise about the far side of the bend; the life of pure simplicity engendered by being on the road with the wind at my back and no particular reason to do anything or be anywhere or tell anyone about it. That is not where I was this time last year. Another big adventure was long overdue. But there were obstacles. In particular, I was feeling increasingly trapped by circumstances. A little over three years before, Tenny and I had made the…