Welcome to another edition of the OrvisNews.com Friday Fly-Fishing Film Festival, in which we scour the Web for the best fly-fishing footage available. This week’s collection offers a bunch of different locations, covering almost all the continents. But the real story here is the rise of the short video. Oftentimes, when I’m doing my searches to choose the videos for the F5, I wonder why so many videos seem longer than they need to be. To my way of thinking, you need a pretty compelling reason to go over five minutes, and anything over 10 minutes requires a narrative arc to keep the audience interested. This week, we have a bunch of videos between one and two minuts long that do a great job of capturing a moment or a feeling or a location without overdoing it. Remember, we surf so you don’t have to. But if you do stumble upon something great that you think is worthy of inclusion in a future FFF, please post it in the comments below. See you next week with a fresh set of films!
Fly from Silent James on Vimeo.
Short and sweet, just how I like ’em, this video clocks in at just over two minutes. However, the editing and the pacing are great, capturing the essence of Colorado’s Roaring Fork fishery.
SIFF12: NORTHEAST – IF4 Trailer from Peter Laurelli on Vimeo.
Peter Laurelli first came to my attention when the fishing manager of Orvis Manhattan sent me an email about this customer who made videos. Since then his year-end wrap-ups have become big hits. Check out past episodes on his vimeo channel.
Summer Storms from Nicholas Kneipp on Vimeo.
Y’all can let me know if you get sick of these Murray cod videos from Australia, but I just love watching these beasts hammering topwater flies and then bending those big rods right down to the cork. A couple of real whoppers on display here, and I love the way the angler doesn’t even flinch when a fish misses the fly. I would have set the hook into the bushes behind me.
vert pêche from 2hors.fr on Vimeo.
Here’s a gorgeous video from France, featuring great camera angles and beautiful scenery. The fish are hardly trophies, but they are colorful and look wild.
Ah, New Zealand! How cool is that first shot, at about 1:02, where you see the trout come off the bank to eat they dry fly? Man, I wanna go back there.
Saltwater Torpedoes (Trailer) from Fly Fishing Films on Vimeo.
We feature plenty of videos from Sweden, but here’s a Swedish angler who has traveled to Belize to chase tarpon. This is a trailer for a DVD released in 2004, but it still looks great.
Fly Fishing Under Red Sky from FLY FISHING ADVENTURES on Vimeo.
From Italy comes this dramatically lit and sountracked video. It’s just one of several shorties this week that don’t waste any time getting right to the fishing.
This looks like a really fun trip into wilderness outside Kiruna, the northernmost city in Sweden. These dudes don’t mess around when it’s time to cook dinner, either.
This is pretty much home-movie quality, but it does a great job of capturing the excitement of wading for bonefish. These guys suffered through conditions that were hardly optimal, but managed to succeed.
Europeans have been fishing for carp for a lot longer than we have, and this footage from Portugal features an angler whose fondness for the species is quite evident. The country music shows his affinity for his USA-based carp-angling brethren, as well.
Grey Reef on the North Platte is hardly the most attractive fishing venue, but when it’s bathed in low light and fog, it takes on a cool, dreamy quality. Once again, brevity is the filmmaker’s friend.
Austin Manthey seems like a pretty cool kid, and he knows his way around a trout river. He claims that fly fishing “took over his life” when he was eight.
Here’s some cool steelheading footage from Washington’s Methow River featuring two-handed rods. I love the way the angler who takes a tumble is more focused on maintaining tension on the fish than he is about his own safety.
The mountains of Italy clearly offer some great trout fishing in lovely freestone streams. That’s a sweet fario brown at the very end. The transition of the soundtrack from hard rock to country twang is a strange segue that suggests that the old country isn’t too tradition-bound.
Ardency: Chapter 1 – December Steelhead from james bridle on Vimeo.
This is a very cool, no-BS video from a group of Canadian guys chasing steelhead. There’s nothing fancy here: just hardcore pursuit of a great gamefish. The Bon Iver soundtrack does undercut the manliness a bit, keeping the video from being too testosterone-y, what with the knife throwing and all.
We finish up with an episode of Fishing Adventurer, which follows the adventures of Cyril Chauquet, on his quest to catch big predator fish in the most remote and exotic places of Earth. Here, he’s chasing sailfish in Kenya. Have a great weekend!
Is there a way I can buy a DVD recording of these shorts?