Being the guy who has to film the daily snow report is a shitty job. You have to drag your underpaid self out of bed at 5am, to head out into the cold, to talk about snow conditions, every day for a whole season. Once in a while we all like to talk about the snow, but usually on the odd occasion, like the first snowfall of the season or on a powder day, but imagine how tedious it gets if you had to find something to say about snow every single day of the season. How to you create a 3 minute video about the snow conditions if it hasn't snowed for a week in the knowledge that almost no one will even bother to watch it?
These are the problems faced by all snow reporters and most of them in their bleary eyed state will just fall into a routine of churning out a fairly generic report each day, but one lad called Chris Morecroft in the Australian resort of Mt Buller has tried something different at the end of the season, probably because the above routine has driven him completely mad.
He's started to try out different things and all of a sudden what would otherwise be yet another unwatched snow report about crappy snow conditions becomes something that people are interested in watching. I'd never heard of Mt Buller before watching this and now for some reason I really want to go snowboarding there on the shittiest snow day I can find.
It looks like that Chris first tried this sort of thing out at the end of the previous season with an impression of a French chef. Again the timing makes me suspect it was the result of his monotony-inspired descent into madness
Late this season, alongside his Braveheart impression he also tried this for size.
Next year, instead of waiting until the end of the season to try something different, this is all Chris Morecroft should do every single day. Suddenly something that was traditionally really dull becomes something people will tune in to watch and it might even become Mt Buller's most successful piece of marketing (it's already been picked up by the mainstream media in Australia). This could be the Every Third Thursday of snow reporting; after all, until Signal started doing that series did anyone watch any of the crappy snowboard manufacturing videos that everyone churns out? Just in case you think there aren't any other snowboard manufacturing videos, here are 2.5 million instantly forgettable ones.
Last night while I was idly leafing through the latest edition of Whitelines I was surprised to see a quote from this blog at the start of their lead article about Jake Blauvelt's new movie Naturally. The article they quoted was something I'd written about how most snowboard movies were instantly forgettable because they all followed the same format, and they were using this to show how by doing something different Blauvelt's movie stood out from the crowd. It's a similar idea for snow reports, manufacturing videos, magazines, blogs or any other part of this here industry; try something different and you have a real chance of creating something people will notice and care about. Chris Morecroft's example shows that you don't even have to start with something remotely of interest to anyone to produce something that is.
Next week I'll be testing my theory to destruction by writing an article about psychology. Till then, here are two other awesome snow reports:
Now that this blog has appeared in a snowboard magazine and we can tick that off the list, how long do you think it will be before we score a cover?
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