🏆 Lift-Off Season Award Nominee: Best Short Documentary
🏆 Manchester Lift-Off 2024 Winner: Best Short Documentary
SA #15: https://liftoff.network/sa
🎬 Story:
“What if joy could be built from scrap metal and silliness?”
In a world that prefers conformity, two inventive bike builders push boundaries skyward with their tall bikes, turning silliness into art and strangers into friends.
🎬 Creatives:
Produced, Directed and Shot by Joel Porter & Alex Moore
Written & Edited Joel Porter
Illustration – Lydia Wonham
Animation – Joel Porter & Lydia Wonham
Sound Recordist – Tom Nott
Sound Mastering – Ben Porter
Post Production Assistant – Lydia Wonham
Runners – Bee Wonham & Josh Moore
Ride Contributors – Scott Mansell, David James, Ash Secrett, Ben Pope, Jacob Held, Zac Held, Jim Handel, Gosia Black, Bee Wonham, Vicky Cleeton, Jonathan Wonham
Vox Pops – Richard Child, Kyle Lockerby, Rachel Rodrigues, Kike Molares, Andy Natarajan, Lewis Allan
A SWAMP films production.
Featuring Jon Thompson & Petor Georgallou
👉 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt36411015/
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[Music] [Applause] [Music] My name’s John. I build bespoke steel bicycles and bicycle frames. [Music] I’m Peter. I run Bespoke, the handmade bike show. I’m also a photographer and a writer. Come on. Seriously, what’s this about? Why? But it’s very tall. The typical reaction is how do you get off it? How do you actually get off it? How do you get off? Always. How do you get off? Always. Surely you should ask how do you get on first or or like how did you come to be there? you know, so I I always avoid the question of how many bikes I’ve got just in case my wife is uh in the uh vicinity. This was tool bike number one. Have a removable rack. So that’s the conrod out of a Triumph motorbike. This was actually the first frame I ever made. Been tooured on, bike packed on, raced on, commuted on. I obviously need a certain bike for a certain activity. So, if I’m going to the shops, then it’s one thing. If I’m going bike packing, it’s another thing. If I’m going bike packing somewhere different, it’s maybe another thing. My brother and I used to ride around the garden when we were 3, 4 years old, as soon as we could. Pretty much been riding bikes ever since. We must have be 12, 13 when we first started screwing about with bikes and building stuff. On our paper rounds, we would pick up things that people were throwing away and build hack bikes, Franklin bikes, whatever we could find. Typically riding off road, jumping to things, you know, generally destroying them. Why bikes? For me, I think the primary thing is mental health. I have a day job. It’s very different to building bikes. It takes you a few minutes to kind of get out of the corporate [ __ ] that you’re in during the day. And it doesn’t take long on a tour bike until you’re actually having fun. It’s a really nice release of just being able to do whatever you want to do. A way to relax, a way to kind of decompress. Like kind of what’s the point? We’re not here to not have fun. Coffee. I’ll get like 10 coffees. You want to come and sit with me? No, that’s fine. You don’t have to. I deal with the not ordinary stuff to such a degree that there is no ordinary. I’m past ordinary. I’m post ordinary. Well, then which one do I have first? Okay, I can just compare. Wish I had a door to show. Oh, this room does have a door. There we go. This is a bike room. We never call it a bike room. We just call it Charlie’s room cuz Charlie used to live here. Oh, this bed is so disgustingly dirty. Full of bicycles. That’s some good weird stuff. Oh, this is a bike that I built basically from a children’s drawing. I really like riding it. It’s so just like gentle. This one’s kind of the same. That one I made from scratch to be like a nice bike. Then this is two [ __ ] bikes welded together. There’s a Cleland, which is like the oldest mountain bike even possible. I don’t know why there’s no fur. There just is. Genuinely have no idea how it got here. So, there was another row on top and then just all hanging from there and from there. And then there was like another row over there, and you can’t really see it, but it actually goes a really long way that way. And they’re all in there, too. I’m trying to not be a hoarder, but I really have like hoarder tendencies. So, it’s Yeah, I’m getting better. I used to really want to ride my bike as a kid, and my parents wouldn’t let me cuz they were like, “Oh, it’s much too dangerous. You’re going to get run over by a car.” I think my parents really encouraged me to stay inside and play computer games a lot as a kid. [Music] I definitely remember leaving school and and being like, “Oh, well, just go ride my bike now then.” Spend 30 or 40 or 50 hours a week riding my bike. And when I wasn’t riding my bike, I’d spend that time thinking about like how I could make my bike better. I just thought in terms of bicycles and even if I wasn’t thinking about bicycles, I’d be thinking about bicycles. When I started frame building, I felt like all of the work that was being put out was really similar. It’s all really super high quality, artisan, and bespoke. But for me, that I wasn’t seeing anyone building stuff that’s just like fun. Fun for fun’s sake. Not fun for performance, not fun to show off how well you can make something or how much money you’ve spent on a thing. That’s probably why the first bike that I bought at the Bicycle Academy was a tall bike. wanted something that your friends kids can appreciate. Something that was quite silly and just more fun than a normal bike. Kids love them. So, I think that’s a powerful thing. If you can get creativity into young people, then that’s a good thing for the future. That was brilliant. Your feet don’t get wet when you ride through puddles. You can carry longer objects and they’re good for jousting as well. Huh? A lot of people don’t understand them. People engage with it in such a strange way. Yeah. What is that? It’s just a tall bike. On a sort of cartoon level, it’s like the smallest deviation from a normal bicycle cuz you just get a normal bicycle and do that. I like the creative process of working out how to make something. You know, the the shape and size of a normal bite has been worked out. I understand normal. We’ve got normal. I want different. You know, what is different? It starts with a doodle almost always. And then there’s a challenge in can you make that work? They’re made in a number of different ways or a number of different designs. It can be stacking one frame on top of another. It can be adding tubes to kind of push angles, geometries, shapes, sizes. I live in the world of niches which is a great place. The essence of tool biking to me is creativity. It just leads to you that kind of sense of fun and adventure that you can do with something that you’ve dreamt up. With handmade bicycles there is completely blank canvas here, here and there. I trained as a sculptor and I saw what I was doing as sculpture and I worked on stuff as if it was an artwork for the most part. I thought I could trick people into buying sculptures if they’re bicycles. But then I actually just got tricked into making bicycles. When I was really getting into cycling, probably 2004, 2005, like peak fixy, the secret source to an extent was crime. You could just be completely lawless is great. So a tall bike adds to that. It makes the crime more crimey cuz you you can’t put your foot down so you do more crime. One time a guy just shouted at me that is highly highly illegal. I was just like I don’t think it is but it feels like it should be because nothing this fun can be legal. Hello. Hello. Why do we have fun? Why did da da happen in between two world wars? This is brilliant. As long as you’ve got like enough to eat and drink. Fun’s basically the most important thing. Can change your perspective on the world for the better. It’s like a breeding ground for optimism. Going around on these things, you can’t help but meet people. Almost looks like it belongs to a circus. No. This what 6T feels like. I think they are bloody awesome. I’d love to ride one. Yeah, I’d love to have a shot. They look fine. I’d ride one. I would. I’d ride one. Not good. It wouldn’t end well, but I’d try. That connection that you can get with somebody just having fun. That’s kind of the point. Life’s boring enough as it is. I think you need just to push the boundaries a little bit. Otherwise, everything is just mundane. It’s all the same thing every day. Otherwise, you know, I really like this. This is nice. Everybody knows what a bike is and that’s fairly pigeon hole. It’s quite a conservative kind of thing. Whereas the this is obviously a bike, but it is different. So I think people kind of get that are you’re a weirdo or like is there a point? Never seen anything like this before in my life. And are you in a in like a gown? I think people make assumptions about tall bike riders. I would imagine that they’re wrong most of the time. It would be easy to see them as slightly anarchctic. You’ve got a big group of people all doing weird [ __ ] Like what are they? Are they all on drugs? They must be because they’re riding those things. When you see it and it’s different, you know, people can react to that as a it’s some sort of threat. It’s new. It’s I don’t understand it. I don’t like it. But, you know, statement about society is how you react to things that are different. I used to have a frame building company called Dear Susan, but now I run this which is called Bespoke. This is like the handmade bike show. I mean, why bikes for me, I guess, is if you look at the people who do bikes, designers, builders. It’s such a diverse crew from people who come from an engineering background to people who come from fine art background to people who worked in the city who would rather reap their own face than move their way gently up the ladder of Audi’s. Like, how did these people decide to do this thing? Maybe I’m trying to push back against things being the same for the sake of things being the same, not because they have any value in being the same. With the show, we’re working really hard to make frame building space more inclusive cuz it is just a load of middle class middle-aged white guys. They do all like the same bikes. They do all wear raffer shorts. It is all the same same same. This year with the show we introduced the inclusivity scholarship and the wording of that’s just if you don’t see people like you or work like yours represented in the frame building industry you can apply in terms of like discourse and dialogue that discussion is so much more interesting with more points of view and more alternative points of view. Edge variety is the key to everything. [Music] Some adults are perplexed and kind of look at you really strangely, but actually you’ll find that a lot of them will just pick up and just want to have a go and see what actually it is. And a lot of them just just smile and have a laugh with it and think actually I can see the point of it. Oh, there’s absolutely no way that I can get on that bike. Oh my god. Yes. Yes. I’m doing it. It’s always good sport that you get somebody who’s up for a laugh, but then they get struck with that, but I don’t think I can do that. Getting over the kind of the first hurdle of actually giving it a go and then when they have, I think, you know, we’ve seen a few today that are kind of whooping and hollering because actually it’s a crack. It’s beyond riding a normal bike could crack. There’s something else going on cuz it is a bit exciting that you’re six wheel off the ground. All three saw of danger. Oh my god, it was once I was on it. It was so much fun. Just what I need is I guess being able to achieve that thing that you didn’t think you could achieve. I want someone to make an off the peg tall cargo bike. More than anything, I want that to happen. The kind of person who would be like, I know, I’ll ride on top while my kid can go underneath. I think I could probably be friends with a lot of those weirdos. Yes, they’re good people. It’s the end, puppy. It’s the end. We’re going on the road again. Come on. I did see a crazy kind of side sport of tool bikes, which was tool bikes jousting. There tool bike jousting. We had a bass of drain pipes with loads of cuddly toys gaffitate to the end. It was me and this guy Dave and we’re just riding at each other as fast as we could. We thought our fun would be enhanced by setting the cuddly toys on fire. And I got him, thank God. But then I looked back and he was still just on fire. When you melt a load of plastic cuddly toys, it’s like nap palm. So his whole chest was covered in like molten plastic that was on fire and he was desperately like rolling around on the grass trying to put out the flames on his chest. But then he’d roll and then he’d roll back over the flames and then his back was on fire as well cuz it’s like sticky. So he’s all covered now in scars everywhere from where I set him on fire when we were tall back jousting. Um, he’s I’ve seen him since he was surprisingly cool about it. But in fairness, if he could have got me, he would. So, uh, yeah. Nearly killing a guy is the same as not killing a guy. I do that every day.
1 Comment
I want one!