Right idea, wrong time

​Right idea, wrong time.

A friend and real Heavy rockstar once told me that great ideas sometimes just need the right oxygen. I often think about that.

In this case, Big Ride was a mountain biking adventure DVD and TV pilot way ahead of its time- filmed on the amazing trails of Afan in Wales.

DVD was a well established delivery format in the early 2000’s and I was making good money making fitness videos, corporates and even how to’s. The DVD format seemed the perfect way to present a mountain bike adventure and supplementary video files to give new riders the inspiration and education to take a big ride.

Good news, bad news.

The shoot was really challenging and the edit was a rites of passage; I sweated bullets, writing VO, loading between producers, graphic artists as well as producing the majority of the music and authoring theDVD. Eventually, it got done. We had 2,000 discs made to sell direct, but to get us to a series or TV deal we’d need mass distribution. At the time it was Chili video or go home if you wanted to sell via Halfords.
The deal was done. 

We made it! 
Except, we didn’t make it. 

Turns out a group of kids had made a thing called YouTube and the internet really became THE place to share video content.

Chili never came up trumps for us. Sales from our website were modest. There was a meeting with a TV company, but the pilot never took off.

Today, we have insanely good technology to capture mountain biking like full frame mirrorless cameras, drones, 360 cams, Action cameras and everyone has a smartphone.🧐

In the years that followed I worked independently on a smaller mountain bike series called Dirty Little Secrets. It gained over 1M views and I sold a lot of it to Future Publishings Bike Radar. Big Ride had become a flaming expensive calling card and it got me gigs and helped sell DLS.

It’s a shame Big Ride never fulfilled its true potential. Who knows, maybe it could come back.

Until then, indulge in the pilot episode cut of Big Ride - The Complete Mountain Bike Adventure.

Huge thanks to Justin Loretz my bestest bro who helped make Big Ride Happen. 

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