Do you follow these sailing video bloggers - andwhat do you think of them

+ 1 For follow the boat, great filming, FTB Sailing log 6and 9 but they are all worth while watching, really down to earth couple, Jamie Liza and Millie there ships cat, mostly set in Thailand and there numerous small islands, Jamie uses free music for his work, you are able to sign up, follow their blogs, comment, Instagram, they will always reply.
 
Binman said:
+ 1 For follow the boat, great filming, FTB Sailing log 6and 9 but they are all worth while watching, really down to earth couple, Jamie Liza and Millie there ships cat, mostly set in Thailand and there numerous small islands, Jamie uses free music for his work, you are able to sign up, follow their blogs, comment, Instagram, they will always reply.
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this is their highest hitting video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLOLWY9RDxE

and here is their taster

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JGHgN6qCCY

not come across these two before

this is their patreon page

https://www.patreon.com/followtheboat?ty=h

it is tough out there

D
 
dylanwinter said:
Making films on board is now fairly easy - a modest camera - £300 and a modest laptop £400 and you can be up and running. The thing that I admire about these people is that they spend many hours making the films and also planning on how to make the story stick together.
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Just wish they'd spend another £40 on a microphone and wind shield.

Editing is a skill which you can get quicker at, but a lot of people underestimate the time it takes, they expect to be producing quality in a couple of hours. Same with grading and audio. The best way is to set deadlines, 3.5 mins by 5pm, edited, graphics, graded, audio sweetened, subtitles and clearances filed.

Bandwidth is an issue because YouTube munge the file you send them. If you hunt on their website, they have a set of recommended settings which reduce what they do to your file.

I've got a mate sailing in exotic locations, to send a clip back via his satellite phone contract, it has to be less than 1 MB, so for 30 secs, you're looking at about 220 kbps. Uncompressed 720p50 is about 1500000 kbps. They look OK unless pointed at something moving randomly, like water.
 
Binman said:
+ 1 For follow the boat, great filming, FTB Sailing log 6and 9 but they are all worth while watching, really down to earth couple, Jamie Liza and Millie there ships cat, mostly set in Thailand and there numerous small islands, Jamie uses free music for his work, you are able to sign up, follow their blogs, comment, Instagram, they will always reply.
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I enjoyed the ones of those that I watched - but I shall never sail in warm clear water in a big boat - and I am immune to the alure of cats. I just imagine what the boat smells like and what happens to the litter tray in rough weather so they do not speak to me as a shallow water sailor.

just out of interest - do you ever bung any money at them via patreon or some other way?
 
No money change hands, I don't know if they would carry on without donations though? I find it down to earth filming,very interesting, with there maintenance of their boat. Obviously your not a cat lover, litter trays shouldn't smell if managed correctly, dogs a lot worse, I have had both.where would you train a dog to poo on a boat? I happen to like both. Much prefer watching them to watching young ladies fooling about. May be its my age, or something else.
 
Binman said:
No money change hands, I don't know if they would carry on without donations though? I find it down to earth filming,very interesting, with there maintenance of their boat. Obviously your not a cat lover, litter trays shouldn't smell if managed correctly, dogs a lot worse, I have had both.where would you train a dog to poo on a boat? I happen to like both. Much prefer watching them to watching young ladies fooling about. May be its my age, or something else.
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dogs on boats are just as bad as cats - Maggy comes occasionally but she was on board for ten days this spring - three months later I found a black hair in my coffee. She also needs to be got ashore twice a day and when it rains sharing a telephone box sized space with a wet dog is horrid.

I hear what you say about litter trays

but I am with milton jones

40 seconds in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=473KIeo_Xv0

as for follow the boat

looking at their patreon page

37 patrons - $165 per video

although between them patreon and visa will swallow 9 per cent of that

so they are getting $150 per video

which is 5 times what they would earn from adsense - if they are on it -but still pretty terrible recompense for their effort - and they do put a lot of effort into their films.

Sometimes this money for a free video seems mad but then when I look at my sailing book shelf - average the books out at a cost to me of £10 a pop and all the money I used to spend on magazines - suddenly you realise that maybe the new economy is not so bad. All outgoings are discretionary and by giving money you get a massive influence over the product.

But, it is becoming an increasingly crowded space for the blue water big yacht brigade

not many ugly old men sailing unexceptional boats and upsetting scotsmen with a poor grasp of their own history along the way though


It is good of them to answer emails from non tappers/payers

although I also answer all emails and queries - sometimes after a few chats people eventually hit the button


this discussion has reminded me to make sure that when I talk to the camera I need to keep it further away from me and have a nice background and to put pictures of good looking women/boats for the hook pictures for the vids

D

this explains their thinking on follow the boat

Help support followtheboat
We are Jamie and Liz and we produce videos for our YouTube channel. The story began in 2005 when we swapped the rat-race for an alternative lifestyle...living on a boat. So far we have sailed over 20,000 miles, across the seas from Turkey to Thailand.

Every two weeks we produce the next chapter of our followtheboat adventure on video. But it's not all palm trees and beaches...we let you in on the downright bad times of our story too.

What is Patreon?
Patreon is where you can become a patron of the arts! It's your chance to help the creators you cherish. You decide how much to pledge per video, and at the end of each month Patreon charges for any videos we have released. We promise we'll only upload two videos a month, so you won't pass out when you receive your bank statement.

You set a monthly maximum, and you can cancel any time. The boffins at Patreon do all the back-room stuff to ensure that your pledge is processed properly. Everything is in dollars because this is a US site, but they accept international currencies too.

We reward our Patrons
When you pledge, we want to give something back, so you get freebies like postcards, photos, calendars, followbacks on social media and even Esper T shirts.

Patreon asks creators to set milestone goals (you'll see ours on this page) which means more rewards for you guys. When we reach them we'll do something crazy like give everyone a limited edition T Shirt, or upload a video of out-takes and bloopers, even invite you on Esper for a week. Put simply, we spend a lot of time working on new ways to say a BIG THANK YOU to our kind and generous Patrons.

If you can’t afford to send money, don't worry, every comment, subscription, like and view makes us smile. And you will still be able to watch the story unfold on our YouTube channel, because followtheboat content will always remain free!
 
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I have spoken to Jamie and Liz many times and they are down to earth genuinly good people. I also really enjoy their videos which are well done.
Follow the boat should be getting far more recognition that it does.
Jamie also regularly contributes to this forum and offers his opinion.
I think some of the sites mentioned are more about making money than sailing.
At least follow the boat is about sailing and their lives.
Dylans blog is a recorded history of the UK from the water. I think not only is it important now but will be in the future long after he has sailed into his last sunset (sorry Dylan). To me Dylan is an eccentric but the best kind and a man that makes me proud to be British.. well done Dylan. Your videos will stand the test of time where as I doubt Bikini girls will.
Just my opinion of course which means nothing
 
st599 said:
Just wish they'd spend another £40 on a microphone and wind shield.
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Most of my footage is created by pulling my camera out of my pocket while I have the tiller in the other hand, so rigging up an extra microphone would be quite tricky. I will try sticking a bit of something fuzzy over the microphone at some point to see if that helps. At least I'm not using a GoPro, which makes everything sound like it's underwater, even though it isn't!

st599 said:
Editing is a skill which you can get quicker at, but a lot of people underestimate the time it takes, they expect to be producing quality in a couple of hours. Same with grading and audio.
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+1
 
Dylan, forgot to mention, this sailing video culture, it was your very well made vids that got me interested, and then I drifted onto follow the boat, So am a fan of you both. What is the boat, in FTB. Ever thought of doing club talks?
 
Buck Turgidson said:
Not keen on most of these to be honest. There is a lot of gushing when a bikini clad girl ties a knot and then asks for money so she can do it again.
I do like SV Seeker though. Lot's of welding and grinding but no sailing yet. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCj_XaV1ss-qdD-lPUtTEcXw
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That is my favorite also. I logve the way he gets stuck into everything. I am currently building a workshop so that I can get started on a project and I get a lot of inspiration from SV Seeker.
 
Aardee said:
The only ones I follow are KTL and Drake Paragon - Both interesting, well made, and more about the sailing than the sailor :)
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I enjoy Dylan's contributions here and his blog, but I just can't watch the KTL videos because they make my head hurt. Perhaps if I was a member of the MTV generation I could cope with a cut every two or three seconds, but I'm not and I can't.
 
Hi all,

Jamie here from followtheboat. Interesting thread and encouraged to read positive comments about our videos. I thought I'd respond to a few points raised...

Perhaps the most important issue I need to address, one that some people find quite controversial and one that we get upset about, is that our cat does not smell. She has been trained to use the heads so does not need a litter tray. She's cleaner than we are after a couple of days at sea. If anyone doubts our feline's ability to perfectly balance her furry bum across the bog we can post up a GoPro FPV clip from within the bowl to prove it. Smelly indeed, what an outrage!

Seriously though, about the video blogging/Patreon thing:

We were producing videos anyway
As some of you know we've been blogging and writing articles for about ten years. Previously it was mainly with the written word and photography but we're now spending more time with the video story, which was a natural progression for us. We spent over a year in the boatyard doing a complete refit and recorded over 50 episodes before we'd even heard of Patreon.

Don't you just spend all your time editing?
As full-time liveaboards most of our time is not spent sailing. It's spent at anchorages maintaining the boat and pursuing personal interests. Ours happen to be blogging, videoing and editing our experiences, be they boat maintenance or travel. I used to knock out the weekly refit videos in a day (I had to as I only had Sundays off from the yard). The current video episodes can take anything from 2 to 4 days, including sourcing of music (all free, creative commons), uploading, tagging and stuff. Uploading is the most expensive part of the process and so our Patreon funds go towards that. Each episode is (normally) a single location, so that makes story-boarding the episodes a lot easier and therefore saves time editing.

Why watch us?
I'd say most of our viewers have some kind of interest in sailing. Delos, who we're in email contact with, has a slightly different audience. Plus they benefit from young girls in bikinis! Our videos are more 'day to day life on a boat as a liveaboard'. This includes travel, of course, but there's emphasis on maintenance and all the sh!t that goes wrong with the boat. Some people learn from our stupid mistakes, others gloat as we sweat it out in the tropics cocking things up, and some just like to see yachts in beautiful anchorages surrounded by golden sand and palm trees. The other thing is we're English, whilst most sailors using Patreon are American. I'd say we're pretty English in our production too, though we have been accused of being posh (by Americans, of course). I actually regurgitated my tea through my nose when I read that comment. I'm from Essex and the old dear comes from sahf Lahdahn, innit.

People wanted to thank us
Throughout the time we've been blogging we frequently get emails/questions/thanks and that hasn't changed since uploading our videos. Youtube allows a direct communication with people interested in what we are doing and earlier this year a follower of our youtube channel emailed us to ask us how he could bung us $10 for our efforts. At the same time another viewer recommended we try out the Patreon thing. The consensus among some of our viewers was that we deserved a 'tip' or a pat on the back for taking the time out to put the videos together. It was their idea, not ours, but we figured we were making the videos anyway, so why not? Funnily enough a guy in the States has just send us a proper filleting knife after watching our episode where I hack away at a bream with a blunt knife. This kind of generosity never ceases to amaze us, but it's a nice relationship: we make entertaining/educational videos and the viewer may tip us however they want, if they want. If they don't, it's not a problem because...

It's still free
Perhaps most importantly is that all our videos are free. You can view them all on our youtube channel. The Patreon thing is in additional service for anyone who wants to support artists out there producing content.

We're pretty new to the Patreon thing. Not many people have heard of our youtube channel but it's been growing steadily, from 300 subscribers in January to 3,600-odd now. This growth is partly a reflection on the way in which media is being consumed, i.e. via the internet. With Netflix and the like, people want to watch what they want to watch, when they want, rather than being dictated to by a rigid, scheduled TV channel, and they don't mind paying for it. We fall somewhere in the middle of all this: we're producing regular content and you can view our youtube channel like a TV series as each episode reveals a new chapter in our continuing adventure. The added benefit of being able to communicate directly with the content providers adds to the experience. Whether you 'pay' for this is entirely up to you. Viva l'internet!

At the risk of being accused of self promotion, Liz and I have just uploaded our new trailer today, and we've changed all our Patreon goals to benefit the supporters, not us. For your viewing pleasure:


You can watch the entire boat refit series and our current video blog, with new episodes every other week, via a single page here.
 
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deepest apologies

I fear I am more sensitive to the odour of a cat than most

it is a bit the way some parts of my house smell okay to me but other people can smell the Labrador

so it is not the litter tray as such - just the hum

that aside I think you guys do a great job of the films

they allow me so experience sailing in warm clear water

something I have yet to achieve

and they make me realise that big boat = big bills

well done the both of you

your presentation is really natural - you invite people onto your boat as friends

brilliant and engaging stuff I reckon

D
 
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