Instagram killed the video star

One Christmas morning, I must have been 16, I set off walking from my house towards to local woods and my closest bit of rock, a brand new crash pad on my back. With an almost glowing pair of new white climbing pants to replace the multi-coloured Troll monstrosities I thought climbers wore up until this point, I trotted up to Jackson Tor certain that today was the day!

5 minutes before I’d finished watching “Stick It”, a newly released film about the cutting edge bouldering scene in the UK, and inspired by the feats of my big screen heroes I couldn’t wait to get up there and finish off my own project.  Nothing could stand in my way!

Jackson Tor might not be the worst place to climb in the Peak, but its definitely far from the best. Whilst today its enjoying a little climbing renaissance, with chalk on the holds and clean landings, back then I was the only climber for miles around, and the more typical visitors to the quarry had either in-contenant 4 legged friends, or backpacks full of old deodorant cans, ready to explode in that evenings fire (I know because I used to be one of them)!  Still, it was gritstone and less than 3 min walk from home, and on Christmas morning I was sure to have the place to myself!

©Collection Pearson/Ciavaldini

The first thing I noticed about having a bouldering mat, opposed to a bit of raggedy carpet, is how comfortable it was to put my shoes on! That gave me confidence to go for one of my previous BIG solos as a warm up because let’s face it, with 1 square meter of foam beneath my feet what could go wrong!  Setting off up “The Sickle”, all I could think about was how awesome it was to be a real boulder and how psyched I was going to be to send my project later that day! 

15ft up the crack, the wind in my hair, feeling like a superstar; life couldn’t get much better than this! The soggy crack above however didn’t agree, and before you could say “Stick It”, I popped out of the crack and was flying through the air. I missed the pad by about 3 body-lengths, and went sliding arse first down the bank through brambles, mud, and other less pleasant brown stuff! White was perhaps a bad choice for climbing pants, and I knew even my mum would never be able to get those stains out!

The point of that story is that there was a time when climbing media made me dream. I’d wait for months and months for the newest Dosage movie to be released, then watch it on repeat until the Video tape started to go fuzzy. I knew all the problems, all the climbers, and my friends and I would even repeat the catch-phrases on our own early climbing trips in the hope that we could ‘be like Dave”. Those early movies shaped the climber I would become, and my life would not have been the same if they had never been made.

©Coll. Pearson/Ciavaldini

Fast forward 20 years, and we live in a world where everyone has a voice. Everyone can be whoever and whatever they want to be, and this applies to making films! There has never been so much climbing content out there just begging to be consumed, and in all honesty I don’t think there are enough hours in the day to watch all the stuff that is coming out.

Anyone can film something on their phone and upload it to the internet – you don’t even need a computer to edit these days, let alone an understanding of film processing and cinematic techniques. I’m saying this from personal experience because a lot of the time this is what we do.  I’m the first to hold my hands up and admit we know nothing about real film production, yet we still try to make films.

Back when I was younger and climbing films were first becoming digital, the guys I worked with were still real camera men. They had big, heavy, cameras, and all they did in life was to point them at people, in the week for real work and on weekends at idiots like me. They understood their craft, and when they shot a climbing sequence it was well done to the point of being art.

Whilst we often forgive shaky camera phone footage by calling it “raw”, or “authentic”, most of the time it just looks a bit shit! Without a doubt camera phones have captured some incredible moments of history that would have otherwise never been filmed, so we have to give them their due, but still, when every now and again I stumble on a climbing film that is really well made, it feels like I’m catching a breath.

Being a content consumer today is like drowning in an ocean of mediocracy. A lot of the stuff out there isn’t bad, it’s just not good, but the biggest problem we have is that the few “real gems” that do exist are so buried under all the other junk that you have to be lucky to even see them.

Whilst the following is only based on my own experience (which is in turn mainly based on frustration), I’m pretty sure the money, effort, and time you invest in advertising the film is far more important than the actual cost of producing it in the first place. To put it in simple terms, if you spend 10k on shooting and producing a your masterpiece, you better be prepared to put at least another 10k into advertising on FaceBook and Youtube if you really want people to see it! 

Paid advertising of our own content is a step that Caro and I have yet to take, which is one of the reasons our last few “big releases” saw relatively few views. You could also say that maybe they just weren’t very good, and I’m totally open to hearing that, yet if you look at the engagement and comments we received, it’s overwhelmingly positive, from the few people who actually got to see it!

We all know that our social media feeds are personalised, and that my Facebook or Instagram doesn’t look like yours, but I used to believe that even if I didn’t advertise our content, I could at least count on my real friends and fans to get to see it. Wrong!!! I’ve lost count of the number of times that close friends have asked me what we’ve been up to, and when I mention the name of our most recent project or film, something I feel like I’ve talked a lot about on our various platforms and places, they look at me with a blank expression. They simply didn’t know it existed. 

I’m not going to pretend to understand the inner workings of the social media algorithms, but it seems to me that if you go against the flow of what seems to be “working” then you might as well give up now. Unfortunately, going with the flow just compounds whatever criteria seems to be in flavour this month, leading to more and more extreme versions of the same thing.  At the moment the thing that works is Instagram Reels, the shorter and more dramatic the better. Over the last few weeks we got some advice to begin experimenting with this and we’ve been gob-smacked at just how insane the results have been. 

In 2021, the sum of all our video views, personally produced or produced by one of our various partners, like The North Face, was around 1 million.  This already seems like a huge number to me, but when you compare that to our Instagram Reels, in the first 2 months of 2022 alone we have almost 10 million.

Our most successful Reel so far, currently at over 7 million views, is a 4 second clip of Caro in South Africa. Whilst the clip is cool, and the double dyno she makes pretty impressive (especially if you know how bad Caro is at dynos!), in the 4 seconds you have to watch the clip you have just about enough time to realise she’s a girl, and that the rock is orange; the story of opening an amazing trad route in a far away land is left on the cutting room floor.  Yes, 7M is a LOT of views… but I’m pretty sure that if this Reel had never existed, the world would still be turning.

Whilst I find it incredibly frustrating to spend weeks or months working on an project I care about, knowing all along that in 5 minutes I could cut up some archive footage and get far higher views, I can also look at it like a way to “earn” the time to work on other projects. In the world we live in there is no way to argue against the fact that the “view count” is king. It might not be that way for ever, but it is for now. If by ticking some boxes and giving the people what they “want” to see we can keep on being professional climbers and creating the sort of content we really believe in, then it seems like an acceptable compromise.

When I said that climbing movies like Hard Grit, Stick It and the Dosage series shaped the climber I’d become, I wasn’t joking. Those films mean so much to me, and I’d love to think that our own climbing films could one day do the same to a few other dreamy-eyed youngsters in bright white pants.

Be it directly through the climbs we’ve achieved, our own personal journeys, or the way we try to bring our new family along for the ride, our stories need to have something more than just, for want of better words, the jizz shot!  It’s important for us to know “how the tap was broken”, and “why on earth the plumber doesn’t have any actual tools with him” than to watch a tiny crimp or an impressive dyno… We call ourselves Once Upon A Climb after all, and even if this is swimming against the current, can a 4 second clip, 6M views or not, can really inspire anyone.