I started film-making back in 2008, when I began the slow and often painful transition, from documenting my life as a power-kiter through stills, to looking at the world through the lens of a video camera.

At the time I was using a Canon HF10, a camera I invested in before giving any thought to what happens after you press record. What followed was a tortuous learning curve; I was a complete novice, dealing with interlacing/progressive issues; not understanding frame rates; never having heard of a “codec”, and tearing my hair out as I repeatedly failed at “logging & transferring” footage into Final Cut Express (another product I’d bought without sufficient research).

I went through the inevitable phase of “experimenting”. As a power-kiter this means attaching cameras to kites. I trashed more cameras than I care to recall trying to see the world from my kite’s perspective.

Those early experiments rarely made it into a finished video: you’ll see why if you have a look at the later part of one of my very first attempts: “Snow-kiting in New Zealand”

As you can see from this video, my first attempts at videography, were, ahem, ham-fisted, if I’m being polite. The filming itself was secondary to the event being filmed. This didn’t change for some time; I was too absorbed in the kiting, and too frustrated with my equipment to feel comfortable committing to the time it deserved.

As I had no medium to deliver the results of my efforts to an audience (I didn’t, and still don’t, have any time for youtube) and vimeo was only in its infancy, I spent a great deal of time developing my own flash/.flv video player; tinkering for hour after hour, on a player that very quickly became obsolete. It taught me a very valuable lesson though. I was fortunate enough to find out, very quickly, where my real love lay. No more web development! Hooray!

I began instead another slow transition; I found that as time passed my film making began to live a life of its own, and take on a weight of importance in my life that once had belonged solely to my power-kiting. The first evidence of this was, I think, seen in a snow-kiting film shot in Iceland (May 2009):

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