While the rest of this year’s Banff Mountain Film Festival tour has had to be postponed, the good news is that in the meantime they are releasing a series of films online for viewing at home (https://www.banff-uk.com/watch). Following successful virtual socials to watch the previous weeks’ films together, we’ll be repeating this for the third set of films (which aren’t yet released but we expect them to be in time for Monday!)
Please email the organiser by noon on the day if you wish to take part, and you’ll be sent the links to the video meeting and to the films. Please join the meeting from 7pm onwards to chat and be ready to watch the first film at 7:30pm sharp, with your preferred drinks and/or snacks to hand! Total runtime is about 1h30m, and we’ll have a break in the middle so probably finish watching around 9:30pm, but of course you can stay and chat as long as you like afterwards.
The films generally cover a mix of outdoor activities (hiking, climbing, skiing, mountain biking and more) in a highly adventurous context, with some fantastic story-telling and cinematography.
We’ll host this on Jitsi Meet, which you can run either in your web browser on a computer (Chrome or its derivatives appear to work best), or as an iOS or Android app on a smartphone or tablet. Some of the films are hosted on Youtube, which we can share within the same environment; others are on Vimeo, which you’ll need to play in a separate tab or window at the appropriate time and then come back to the chat (you’ll also need to do this if using the app).
A few pointers to get you started:
- Once connected, please click the menu icon (three dots in the bottom-right corner), select “me” at the top of the menu and give yourself a name (this is especially helpful if we can’t see your video for any reason). If you’ve used it before, then it may already remember your name.
- If the connection quality seems poor, try going to “Manage video quality” from the same menu, and reducing to standard or low definition; you could also try turning off your own camera, or as a last resort low bandwidth mode, which is audio only. Moving to a location in your house with a better wifi signal (or using a wired connection on a computer) may also improve things.
- You can switch between seeing everyone at once, or just the current speaker with thumbnails of everyone else, via the “tile mode” button (bottom right) or menu item on the smartphone app.
- There’s also a text chat facility, if you’re having problems with sound – click the speech bubble in the bottom left corner.
Please contact the organiser separately if you’re having problems getting it to work.