 Hello my friends, I hope you've all had a great summer getting out there I'm home happy and healthy one week ago today. I completed my amazing adventure on the great divide Yes, I've unpacked everything Washed my stinky clothes thinking hosed down my bike Stocked up on beans And now I'm going through all the footage and I'm really excited to share these stories You're gonna see the grace and beauty of this country through its landscapes and the wonderful people I met along the way Look who's up and ready. Good morning, man. Good morning. People have asked me what's harder Riding my bike all day every day or editing the footage Well, I gained over 100,000 feet of elevation in the 26 days of riding the divide But editing is by far more time consuming This footage will easily take a few months to complete You know, I take my time with editing. It's where the story is built I put things in I take them out. I put them in again Then I go for a run to clear my head and I come back and I change it all up It's a crazy process, but I love it and the goal is to create something that puts you Right there with me. I want you to feel the excitement the ups and downs and the freezing cold hailstorm I want to give you a quick rundown of my creative process There's a lot of elements that go into making just one video And for a trip like this, there will be about 20 videos total First of all, I'm dealing with footage from three cameras my drone my sony and my gopro The drone gives a spectacular bird's eye view of the terrain These little machines have really opened up the door for capturing cinematic footage That just 10 years ago would have been only possible with a full on helicopter They're also fun to fly when I'm not crashing into trees I try to use the drone about twice a day depending on my battery situation A battery only lasts 15 to 25 minutes depending on the drone It's a full-time job keeping all these cameras charged and that's why I travel with many extra batteries The gopro is the camera that I use most I keep it right on my handlebars for easy access And sometimes I attach it to my helmet It gets all the riding shots some landscapes and I constantly pull it out throughout the day and talk to it But in reality, I'm talking to you. It's all right made at the top of car narrow pass 10166 feet. It's a funny feeling constantly chatting to a camera But I like this style because you get the raw in the moment emotion So I'm just riding along and I see out of the corner of my eye something brown Dart off the road And my body just froze for a second and my heart started beating Super fast and it felt like an electric shock through my body and it's amazing what A millisecond of fear Will do to the human body It was just a deer But still it scared me. I was like, oh god Please don't be a bear these sound bites help tell the story of what I'm going through as a rider The random thoughts that pop into my head and this helps bring you the viewer Into the experience. So back there when I said, oh, it doesn't feel like I've been climbing much today Well, the climbing gods heard that and gave it to me. They slapped me upside the face This camera is great, but it's limited. It has incredible image stabilization But it's only for wide shots If I used this to show you far away mountaintops, you wouldn't see anything In comes the sony rx 100 mark 7 This is the beauty cam the picture quality on this camera is way better than a gopro And it can also zoom which allows me to highlight things that are far away I use this for pretty much all the shots when I'm off the bike I love capturing flowers insects rainbows or whatever I think is cool and interesting I also set this camera on the ground with a little tripod and do ride buys I do this many times throughout the day and even though it slows down my riding I like these shots because it provides a different angle than the gopro This camera has an external mic as well and I use it for all my interviews I love bike riding beauty shots But I truly feel that the heart and soul of my content comes from sharing stories with the locals Everything here is free And the only thing that we ask when people stay with us is that they pay it forward We'd like to think that we have four acres of love right here in kindness And we just hope that any of that love and kindness we just spread out into the world. So that's what that's why we do this Okay Like I said before the editing process is where it all comes together But it doesn't come together quickly I spend countless hours Going through footage from the three cameras and blending them together to make something that's Hopefully engaging and a little bit magical I don't know if I've ever seen anything like this The sun just came up over the mountains and on the opposite side of the sky There are two rainbows It's the sunrise rainbow. Now that is a miracle. Wow Wake up everybody the initial stage of the editing process is slow and overwhelming Staring at footage all day is hard on my brain and sometimes I feel like my head is going to explode After I get a bunch of clips into a timeline I start tightening things up and trimming clips down and eliminating shots that don't progress the story Oh wait music. I gotta talk about music The right song is super important and I spend hours at the beginning of a project Sifting through an online library called music bed Each video usually has about five to seven different songs that I weave in and out of to build emotion Okay My favorite styles are acoustic folksy songs And ambient electronic stuff As things start coming together, I continually go through the timeline to fine-tune each clip This is my favorite part where all the hard work pays off and I'm finally seeing the finish line. Oh, yeah, baby I'm almost done At the very end I add in text for names locations And distances and make sure to convert everything to kilometers and meters for my viewers outside the usa You're welcome Swedish brother Carl Now it's time to upload and you might think that this is the easy part But it takes quite a bit of time and it's very important You got to create a visually pleasing thumbnail come up with a catchy title And then build up a library of keywords that helps with search engine optimization As a viewer you never see these magic words But the idea is that they help drive traffic to the video I use a program called tube buddy for this It helps tell me which keywords are effective in google searches This is the nerdy back end to youtube and it's confusing ever changing and I learn more Each day so that's my process And this is what I'll be consumed with for the next few months as I roll out videos from the great divide Like I said, I'm really excited to share all this with you And I thank you from the bottom of my heart for watching my videos It really means the world to me without you. It would just be my mom watching my videos I also want to thank the team at priority bicycles They played a huge role in making this adventure a reality As many of you know, I was riding a prototype bicycle on the divide a bike that we developed together The 600x I'd always wanted a bikepacking bike with the gates and pinion drive train And we made the dream come true Stay tuned for a full review of this awesome bike down the road And a release date in case you want to get one Still raining Still cold We're still biking forward making progress now for the patreon ask I put my heart and soul into this channel and it takes a lot of time and resources This is my full-time job. If you have the ability, please join my patreon I can't tell you how much it helps in keeping this channel moving forward. The link is below However, don't feel bad if you can't I totally get it My channel will always be free and open to everyone who wants to enjoy it Okay, now it's time for a tiny taste of what I saw out there every day Here's some beautiful drone footage and some sappy music to get you excited for the upcoming series You