Mark Victor from Biker Bits Australia has been out doing what he calls "Rambles" all over the Australian countryside. My bike isn't designed for as off-road as he gets on some of his trips but with the right tyres on the bike it should go most places. I was watching one of his adventures where he went out to Birdsville and I think that I'd like to do the same. I started looking at just how far away that way and how many days it would take me to do that trip and I think that I'd need close to two weeks to do it, so just a little more than I should try to bite off just at the moment. I then started looking at the map and wondered where else I could go that isn't as far away as Birdsville but still somewhere that would be an adventure to get to. I think I've decided on Bourke as the destination for my first multi-day trip. If I push myself I could probably do Bourke in one day but it would be better to do it in two, so a three night trip. Hopefully I could get kind of two thirds of the way to Bourke in the first day, that way I'd have a chance to look around when I got there on the second day and then head off in the morning of the third day and stay at somewhere about two thirds of the way back so the last day is a bit easier too. I think I'll set myself the goal of achieving this before the end of April 2019, it'll have to probably be in April or it may be too hot to travel out there, I may be able to go out in March but it's been pretty much like Summer for most of March the last couple of years. I'm not even sure what there is in Bourke, it's just one of those places that all Australians have heard of, maybe it's Opal mines or something like that but I think the Opals are in Coober Pedy. Don't know but all I know is that when someone is way out in the middle of nowhere, they often say that they are out the back of Bourke somewhere. I do still want to get out to Birdsville, Coober Pedy or at least Cameron Corner but I don't want to set a time frame for them yet, I want to see how I go getting to Bourke, it'll probably be just one big trip away each year for the time being, two at the most. Bomber. wanting to taste red dust.
I have edited and uploaded both the intro videos. I had a lot more footage that I wanted to add in but time was getting away from me and I just wanted to get them done. I think that they are alright, I can always update them later as I get better at filming and editing. I managed to do some colour correction and enhancements using Davinci Resolve 15. So without further delay here is the first intro video.
That is the Patreon intro, but the YouTube one is the same footage, just a slightly different voice over. That's a goal ticked off the list, it's about two weeks later than I'd hoped but that's OK, especially since I won't be going camping again until daylight savings and it warms up a little more.
I've been going through all the footage from the weekend and have been trying to put together the intro video. I did one version but I'm not really happy with it so I'm trying to do another version but I just can't seem to engage. I've had a bit of a cold today and I am definitely a little under the weather. As soon as I have something I'll post it up here too. I want the intro video to be something decent and not just something I've thrown together, it needs to represent what I am trying to do and put it in the best possible light. Going camping has certainly taken some of the desire to "get out there" out of me, it's kind of like I've now had my hit so I'm good for a little bit. I'd started drafting another post about heading out again but it honestly feels to soon and I don't really want to think about it at the moment. I was watching another YouTuber last night and he was giving an update on what he was doing and what's coming up in future episodes, he's already got 7 motocamping videos that he is working on uploading and is hoping to get another 3 done by the end of his camping season. So 10 videos in total. I don't think he splits his videos up like I'm planning to so that's 10 nights of camping that he's managed to get in, that really is quite an achievement and his video editing skills are just awesome so it makes me want to try harder. I really think that I may have bitten off more than I can chew at the moment, I didn't really know what I was in for and now that I have a small idea of what will actually be involved, I'm starting to make excuses to myself. I will wait until daylight savings starts before I head out again but that's only 3 weeks away so I need to start planning. I have an idea of where I want to go and it's kind of a cool place to visit. I need to work out just what I want my videos to be about and if I want to talk at all or do voice overs. I wasn't comfortable talking when I was camping by myself so I either need to make sure that I'm a little more remote, or decide to just do voice overs later. Hopefully it becomes more natural with a little more practice. Bomber talking to myself
Going solo motocamping on the Sunday night opened my eyes to a few things. Firstly it's hard to film everything to keep things interesting. I had to remember to stop and film, I didn't know where the best spots to film were so I probably too way too much footage of boring parts of the trip. Secondly, charge the batteries as often as possible. There were a number of times where I could have done some talking but either the camera was dead or my phone was almost dead so I couldn't record the audio to it. In the end I didn't do any audio at all and will most likely just end up using the footage that I got for the intro video and maybe for B roll stuff in the future if needed. Third thing was that it still gets dark really early in September, I really should wait until daylight savings starts before I try and so this again. I ended up having dinner at 5:30pm as I wanted light to try and film it by and not just use the little camp light that I have. Fourth, no one wants to watch an overweight middle age man heat and then eat a can of chilli, it wasn't a good look so that won't be going into the video. Fifth, it was really cold, They said it was only going to get down to something like 6°C but it got down to 4°C on early Sunday morning. Early Monday morning wasn't as cold (9°C) but it was still cold to me, my feet froze, the rest of me was ok but I kept waking up because it was cold. I did forget to take a beanie which usually help to keep my feet warm but my sleeping bag has a hood that I had on tight and if it did work then I would have hate to have tried to sleep without it. Sixth, 3 hours from home is too far for this video shooting business to work on a regular basis, 2 hours maximum otherwise I'm spending too long just riding and not even taking any footage. Seventh, 2 nights will be tough, yes I did three nights but it would have been basically a 2 night trip as I stayed in the one place and didn't film much on the first day at the campsite. Eighth, I didn't like filming at the campsite when there were people everywhere and I certainly won't be talking to the camera in the campsites, I think that I'll do more time lapses and things like that in the camp grounds. Ninth, I need a better plan and need to stick to my plans. I forgot to do somethings and didn't feel like stopping to do others. I need to put the filming first on these trips and realise that if I want to make these good, then my actual enjoyment needs to come second. Ten, I need to do more of it to get better at it.
So this is a little late but that's ok, I weighed myself on Friday morning before I headed off on my trip and I weighed 107.5kg. I weighed myself again today and I now weigh 107kg. I wasn't expecting that, I was honestly expecting no change or an increase because of the additional food and drink I had whilst camping. I often feel like I'm making excuses in these posts for why I didn't lose as much as I was hoping, but I'm still happy with the result and at least I didn't gain any weight. The truth is that I started to fall off the weight loss wagon, I was drinking more beer and eating snacks in the afternoon and after dinner, nothing outrageous but some cracker & nut mix and on Saturday night I had a whole bag of buttered popcorn whilst watching The Mountain Between Us with my wife. I've also struggled to drink as much water as I should. I'm going to blame my knee and being dizzy but it's time to start getting back on track and making sure that I'm doing the right things to keep losing weight. The dizziness appears to to be getting better so break time is over. I really enjoyed heading down the coast fishing with my two closest mates, one of them I hadn't seen in over 12 months. I'd never been on a chartered fishing boat before so that was an experience in itself. There were the three of us and three crew, the skipper stayed up the top of the boat most of the time and the owner spent most of his time fishing with us whilst the last guy did all the rigging, putting bait on and managed to fish as well. They had only just taken over the business and we were their first customers. It was pretty choppy out on the water and I struggled to stand up a lot of the time but I still had a great time. We all caught some good fish and no one got sea sick, so we're all pretty keen to give it another go some other time. We did camp but had dinner both nights at the local golf club where we also had a few drinks and caught up on the on the stuff that we'd each been up to and reminiced about our child hood. On Sunday morning I went around to my in-laws to see the wife and kids who'd gone down the coast too and after staying with them for about an hour I headed off north to go solo camping for the first time and to try and film something for YouTube. I'll go into more detail in tomorrows post but it was definitely a learning experience.
This post was prepared in advance just in case I didn't get home in time to write about the trip down the coast or if I did stay away for the extra night.
I was chatting to my wife the other night whilst watching a bit of TV. Fast Ed from BHG was cooking down the coast somewhere with cows in the paddock, rolling hills and the sea in the background. My wife was like "I want to live there", so I said, "well, if the filming of me going motorcycling pays off, then I can do that from anywhere and we don't have to stay where we are now". She asked how that could make money and I said by selling merchandise and putting ads in the videos. She'd seem me previously looking at Spreadshirt, so I said we could also start a t-shirt business and if we sold enough then we could do whatever we wanted. The more I think about it, the more I think that making my own t-shirts would not only be more profitable, but it would be more rewarding. I'd like to think that if I was looking at buying a t-shirt from someone online, that something that they designed and printed themselves at home would have more value to me than something printed out commercially where I knew that they were only getting a couple of dollars for it and I was over paying for a cheap t-shirt. I was again looking at Spreadshirt and created an account this time just to see what I could come up with. I didn't launch the shop as there is a discount that you can get for the first two weeks and I want that to be valid for if or when I actually have some subscribers who just might want to buy something. The cheapest black shirt with a white print is still AUD$19.49 + $11.99 shipping. It's such a rip off, you can get brand name clothes from discount chains for less than that. If I read it right, I'd get 8% of that sale (not including shipping) so $1.55, sure I didn't really do anything to earn that except put some designs up, but that's not really great profit and hardly worth it when you are trying to run a business. Just to pay for the hour or so I spent setting up the store I'd need to sell something like 20 t-shirts. I'm back to looking at making my own t-shirts and I think my wife is interested in making some of her own designs and trying to sell them too. I guess we could also look at tie-dying shirts too, they were all the rage when I was a kid so they must be coming around again soon.
If starting this blog, wanting to make YouTube videos and setting goals around both of those things has taught me anything so far, it's that I need to be well prepared. The more prepared I am the easier things seem and more I enjoy achieving my goals. I'm hopefully enjoying myself down the coast and didn't get sea sick on the boat today, as again, I've written this post in advance. Hopefully tomorrow I can give you a full write up on how the trip went and if I managed to get any decent footage on the 360° camera. If I did get any decent footage I imagine that I'll still be working through post production tomorrow so you can expect something to be up during the week sometime. Heading out with the camera having a flat battery, like I did last weekend, is not going to cut it when I start heading out for real. Also, not know what I'm going to say or do in advance will add significant time to the filming as well as the post-production and may end up making the videos feel poorly produced. The time I have to actually film is quite limited and the last thing I need to do is waste that time and feel like I need to rush. A while back I mentioned that I had been preparing a list of locations to visit and things to do in each location. I've expanded that list to include the proposed scene listing for each video so I have some idea of what I need to shoot and when. I've even started writing a basic script for the intro and outro of each video as I want to have some sort of consistency with that. I'll need to add to the list the things that I need to take with me on each trip, I was planning on writing down things that I'd forgotten on the trip I'm currently away on so hopefully I'm doing that. I also want to cut down on the things that I don't need to take so anything that I don't unpack or really need could possibly be removed from the list. Writing blogs in advance, even just getting them into a draft is really helping me with getting a new post out everyday. I often feel like I'm running out of ideas to talk about and then, all of a sudden, I have three or four posts drafted and ready to go. I like having the posts prepared in advance as it takes the pressure off of me and allows me to have a night or two off each week from writing. One of my goals is to be a better husband and father, so spending all my time at home in front of the PC isn't really going to be doing much for them.
As I'm away I also didn't do a weigh in, but I plan to do so tomorrow. It'll let me know if the trip was detrimental to my weight loss or not.
I then started looking at the map and wondered where else I could go that isn't as far away as Birdsville but still somewhere that would be an adventure to get to. I think I've decided on Bourke as the destination for my first multi-day trip. If I push myself I could probably do Bourke in one day but it would be better to do it in two, so a three night trip. Hopefully I could get kind of two thirds of the way to Bourke in the first day, that way I'd have a chance to look around when I got there on the second day and then head off in the morning of the third day and stay at somewhere about two thirds of the way back so the last day is a bit easier too. I think I'll set myself the goal of achieving this before the end of April 2019, it'll have to probably be in April or it may be too hot to travel out there, I may be able to go out in March but it's been pretty much like Summer for most of March the last couple of years. I'm not even sure what there is in Bourke, it's just one of those places that all Australians have heard of, maybe it's Opal mines or something like that but I think the Opals are in Coober Pedy. Don't know but all I know is that when someone is way out in the middle of nowhere, they often say that they are out the back of Bourke somewhere.