We did it! The Lapporten Project by @northernlines_slackline officially got a highline world record at 2130m long (1.3 miles) but it isn't just the length, it was in a really remote location making the rigging quite complex. A full feature film by Pinewood Productions will be aired on Swedish TV and submitted to film festivals. This was the first slackline project to be sponsored through crowdfunding. We made soft shackles with the dyneema tag line as a gift to them and you can see more about that in this VIDEO
Intro and Ending music by Martin Gravdal
Some clips provided and edited by PineWood Productions
Some clips provided and edited by JoEight
Maps by Henry Adams (a highliner)
Behind the Scenes
These types of projects take a year from inception to published video. It's the fun part of the channel that I get to join in on such complex and expensive projects. Now it's pretty hard to get a large highline project sponsored, even if it is going to be a world record and when you do get support it becomes stressful to try to make sure it is actually successful. One can plan all they want but you are at the mercy of luck and the weather gods, and northern Sweden isn't known for fair weather. SPIDER SLACKLINES gave them a killer deal on the webbing and Volks Wagon lent us free vans to make the very long drive north and covered gas and there were other sponsors who helped which you can see in the description of the video on Youtube. But it still takes real money to run a project like this and so I tried to get 100 people to donate $50 to make this the first crowdfunded project and it worked. It helped cover almost all the expenses of this project and we all paid for our own expenses to fly and drive to Stockholm where we started the journey. It's pretty neat when a community works together for a goal. As a thank you, we made soft shackles from the dyneema tag line and mailed them to (almost) all the crowdfund sponsors. That proved to be more work than we realized and CRM systems and shipping is best left to a store. We were fortunate to have even more help and LINEGRIP INC managed all the shipping. Everything was hard about that project than originally thought, including the edit. It was such a good story and so successful that it deserved more than just a 8 hour edit. But if you put in that much work, add music. Then add maps. Then scrounge for better footage for this one part and reshoot this other part and so on and so forth. I estimate it was a total of 60 hours on premiere making this my most detailed video to date and I think for the budget of $0 and mostly cell phone footage, it came out super good enough. I'm now inspired to do nicer "films" a few times a year to see if I can expand my story telling and editing skills.
After Posting Thoughts
The audience responded positively and it seems most people who don't slackline got the gist of even if they can't go rig a line after watching it. I thought, being slackline content, that it might get 10,000 views or if I'm lucky 30,000 views but after 28 days, I crested over 100k views with 30% of people who made it to the 10 minute mark made it all the way to the end. Blows my mind. Sure makes me want to put out more quality videos. Thank you for the positive feedback.
We have another VIDEO showing the California record that was 861m long or half a mile in Yosemite. That required 5 days just to get the line across!
