For me it doesn't seem that long ago when one of our young forum members produced a little video with his mum's video camera at a Thredbo national round that caught the attention of a quite a few of us. While not a technical spectacle, it did a great job of capturing the excitement and emotions of the time which not even most expensive camera equipment in the world  can achieve by itself. Fast forward a couple years, young Sam Davies has now produced his second professional film that aims to raise his own bar a few notches and mix it with the big boys of the Mountain Bike film industry.


TIA (This Is Australia) gives us a look at what some of our best riders have to offer, what they're up to and what they think of some of the other Australian riders. Featured riders include Nathan Rennie, Jared Graves, Chris Kovarik, Jared Rando, Amiel Cavalier, Ben Cory, Sam Hill, Mitch Delfs, Rhys Willemise, Joel Bain, Shaun O'Conner and more. Each has their own little section that shows off some riding, and a short sit down interview. A couple riders we get to see a bit about their home life, like Jared Graves in his training bubble (shed), and Rhys Willemise and Sam Hill on their motos.  Unlike Davies' previous film Compression, TIA doesn't follow the Australian race scene. It's more a documentary style film geared to show off the featured riders.


Footage and composition wise Davies has done a great job, he's done the hard yards and learnt a lot more about being a videographer and it shows. Some of the riding sections are awesome. He's even somehow managed to make the harsh Australian light not so bad with some good post production colour correction. A little bit contrasty in places but I can't get too picky as it’s a Mountain Bike film, not a multi-million dollar block buster. And after all, what most of us mountain bikers want to see is just some cool riding with some nice angles. TIA delivers.


Off the bike, there are quite a few of minutes dedicated to rider and important people interviews. While it's good to find out more about the scene, I feel it hurts the videos overall replay ability a little. Some of the scenes should have been cut shorter as they seemed to go on and on. There's also one or two in house jokes (Sam Hill subtitles) that probably 80% of the mountain bike general population won't get.



Overall TIA is a great film and definitely worth buying. Aside from a couple minor gripes (and they are minor), This Is Australia is just as worthy of a spot in your DVD collection as any other Mountain Bike video out there at the moment. TIA will be premiering in Canberra on the Saturday night of the Canberra World Cup, goto the TIA website for more details.

Very big thanks to Sam for sending one of the very first copies!

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