A great deal of my time is spent looking on the web for videos of unicycling skills to help me learn. I think it would be very helpful to have a skills gallery where short vid’s of skills can be found. I would post the ones I have, but I don’t know whom they belong to and I don’t want to post anything that is copyrighted.
A good deal of the vids I have and I refer to are from Jeff Lutkus and the Korean Unicyclist.
Daniel
You could simply post a link. I’m sure Jeff wouldn’t have a problem with people visiting his site to see his videos. He put them up to make them available to people. Additionally you could e-mail him if you are concerned. He’s a good guy and as long as you’re polite I expect he would respond as soon as he’s able.
If you really want, I know there is a video that was put out a while ago showing all the skills. Done by semcycle I’m told. I don’t know where to get it. Jeff showed me his copy once.
Keep rolling
there isnt much skill in mine but do what ever you want with them.no copyright is good copyright. http://www.unicyclist.com/gallery/-random-orderz?&page=2
Daniel,
Were you thinking of something along the lines of a place where you could go and look in the category of say reverse suicide mounts and see a list of photos and videos of different people doing the skill? I think that’d be great!
Andrew
I was thinking along the lines of a gallery that you could go to that would have mainly vids of particular skills. I know that when I was learning to kickup mount, I was doing it all wrong unitil I looked at a vid of it done correctly. I think it would be great if we could have all the skills in one place. I don’t know how much space Gilby has and I don’t know if he’ll mind if there are duplicates of some vids, ie. one copy in the gallery of whoever’s video it is and one in the sills gallery.
If we do decide to go ahead and make a skills gallery, I don’t know how to do it, so could someone else make it? Thanks.
Daniel
great idea.
i may consider taking a video or two of the limited subset of skills i can do, if you set it up.
as for the copyright thing, (although i despise the whole concept of copyright)
if you ask the people in question they’ll mosty be more than happy to be featured.
if you realy can’t find someone whos video your using, leave a not with the vid stating that you’d like their aprooval so you can credit them or you’ll take it down asap.
even if someone did sue you, you could take it down as soon as asked and leave yourself in the clear.
being polite is normaly enough.
Probably the easiest way for you to come up with a gallery of skills with easy “look-up” would be to create the base site or page, and manually find all the links of pictures, videos, and text descriptions people have posted all over the place.
For example, I post my pictures on Ofoto (admittedly not the easiest to look at). My videos go to the Unicyclist.com galleries (free space), and my text descriptions usually end up on newsgroup threads that get lost if nobody catalogs them.
It would be an awesome resource.
Once established, you will attract people to submit more of their stuff directly to you, so you don’t have to go looking for it. But I imagine it will always be a mix.
For such a project I will gladly share photos, video clips, and text descriptions.
look at
its got to be the best website i’ve seen in ages,
go to the moves section and look at some stuff,
this is the best way i seen to demonstrate skills,
looping .gif animations embeded into the page,
granted, the guy who runs the site is a php wizzard, but you’ll soon get the idea, i’m sure it could be done on a much less gradniose scale with a simple html editor like mozzila composer or M$ frontpage
I think I will go ahead and make the gallery… It can’t be that hard. I was wondering how you think would be the best way to organize it. I wanted to make nested albums to break up the skills. Should I break them up in categories, ie mounts, hops, drops, etc. Or should I do it by skill levels. If I make it be skill levels, mounts would probably be in a separate folder anyway.
I need yout feedback
Daniel
not sure about the organization, but I could start getting vids of skills. What would anyone want? I could get about anything…
contactjuggling.org has some nice skill examples. bmxtrix is another site with some nice how-to section.
We really need a similar site for unicycling skills. unicycling.org describes some of the skills in text format, but there is no video.
People who don’t have a good local unicycle club or who don’t go to the conventions often don’t know what types of skills other people are doing or know how to do those skills. A web page with skill demonstration videos would be invaluable to them.
A skill how-to web page would take a lot of work to setup and maintain. It would be nice to see it happen, but given the work necessary to do it I can understand why it may not happen.
The USA has a skill level video that demonstrates the skills necessary to pass the 10 skill levels.
<http://www.unicycling.org/usa/merchandise/>
I have not seen the video. I don’t think very many people know that there is a skill level video. The people who know that the video exists are already USA members and probably already go to the conventions. That is a small minority of the unicyclist population.
We are preparing video movie english version of wilduni.com
Thanks daino149 for comments on Korean unicyclist vids.
We have some video on wilduni.com and preparing more
on wilduni.com which have only Korean langauge website.
We are preparing english free board that can deal with this
matters. we hope it can be done within next month so that
english user can post, discuss and share the movies.
Until then, you can see some phtos on “What’s cool?” gallery
on WildUni.com.
Cheers,
Now I know how behind I am with my own project. I shot lots of video at the last National and UNICON events and I have converted it to mpeg files. What I still have to do is to divide that into small mpegs of 3-7 sec. or so.
I am going to organize a website (iunicycle.com) so that you can easily find videos based on the USA/IUF skill number.
Of course you will be able to search/browse on different criteria. USA skills are divided into riding, stationary and mounting skills. Each skill has a difficulty rating, starting with riding forward 10M being a 1.0. I’m wondering if I should add fields for things like 1ft, bwd, seat out, etc., and I wonder if partial skills should be some how supported (like some of the skill level skills).
However, this only covers certain skills, I’ll need to add sections that cover new or unrated skills, muni skills and muni courses and trials problems.
The website is going to be orgainzed around these reference points. When you find a skill you are interested in, you will be able to view photos, video, discussion, or comments (or add your own). You will be able maintain a web log of your practice sessions, keyed to the skill. You can keep your log entries private, or publish them selectively. You will be able to record your progress (skill achievements) for each skill separately from the web log. Since you will then have a list of what skills you can do (to different levels like freestyle, or standard skill), you can easily create a standard skill routine and calculate the points in the routine.
Muni trails should be searchable by location and difficulty. The datamodel should support detailed descriptions and maps like John Childs produced for UNICON here in Washington.
I would like to add features that would encourage unicyclists to review their skills, plan a practice session, and record their ideas on what they learned during the session.
I also am working on a datamodel to hold information about unicycles. You can add you unicycles, either by a simple description/photo, or with a detailed part-by-part breakdown of how you built it. You can publish this info or keep it private.
I am hoping that iunicycle.com will become more of a reference and record of unicycling skills, what they look like and how you might learn them. I have completed most of the datamodel for the site, but not much of the programming, unfortunately, I am enjoying unicycling much more than programming right now!
want some code?
If anyone’s interested, and has enough time to do a bit of code hacking, I can give you the entire code-base of contactjuggling.org, including teh structure of the database. I’m interested in making the code a little more open, and feel that it could work as a generic “skills site” base.
If you’re interested, please email me at kverens@contactjuggling.org
Kae
I did have a similar idea to this a bit back, my idea was to get lots of videos together, index them and then bung them on a CD as well as a website. A CD would be handy for anyone without fast internet or for use away from internet connections. Maybe the website could host an automatically updated ISO image of all the stuff on it, so someone with a fast connection could download the current version and burn it.
I think it’s most important to get the newer skills rather than the IUF ones. This is because whilst there’s nothing wrong with the current skills, I think something where you could see new tricks other people are coming up with would have real potential to speed up development of tricks/skills. Trials / street things like grinds, footplants etc, new freestyle tricks / combinations, 360 degree suicide mounts, that sort of thing.
Also some film of short combinations would be cool as it’s good to see what people are doing with transitions between skills
As for a list of muni trails, it’s a nice idea, but when I tried it, no-one actually seemed to want to contribute to the site. It’s also hard to work out difficulty levels.
Joe
How to organize everything depends on what exactly you’ve got, and how fancy you want to get.
Once you’ve got a collection of links, assuming you’re not necessarily bringing everything in, you can arrange them in multiple ways. Just as Contactjuggling.org starts you off with a choice of how to list things, you could break freestyle skills down by skill level, or by type of skill.
If I were doing it, I think I’d concentrate on breaking it down by skill type. Start with riding forward, branch to one foot, seat out, and wheel walk, for instance. Each of those would branch into all the variations on those.
But that wouldn’t cover everything, even just in the realm of freestyle. You’d probably have a separate section for mounting, and separate sections for giraffes, ultimate wheels, etc.
MUni and Trials skills could branch out of “regular” unicycling, just like they did historically, but each should have its own direct entrance as well.
Good luck, I hope you’re able to make it all work!
Re: want some code?
i assume you’ll be at the 1st british contact juggling convention in thornhill
http://www.bcjc2003.contactjuggling.org/
its just down the road from here and i know andy from glasgow juggling club so i’ll be there, i’l have a unicycle too as well as more acrilics than i can hold at once.
see you there hopefully.
Re: Skills Gallery
On Mon, 27 Jan 2003 20:59:22 -0600, daino149
<daino149.hy46z@timelimit.unicyclist.com> wrote:
>I think I will go ahead and make the gallery… It can’t be that hard.
>I was wondering how you think would be the best way to organize it. I
>wanted to make nested albums to break up the skills. Should I break
>them up in categories, ie mounts, hops, drops, etc. Or should I do it
>by skill levels. If I make it be skill levels, mounts would probably be
>in a separate folder anyway.
>
>I need yout feedback
It seems as if the discussion is about putting all those videos and
pictures on one server. However, much of it is already online,
distributed over a multitude of websites and servers. Wouldn’t it save
effort and server space if the skills gallery was organised like
daino149 and others described, with pages of text descriptions and
links and everything, but the actual vids and pics were left in their
original locations? That way, I think copyright would not be an issue
either. The only two drawbacks I see are (i) reliability (you are
dependent on the other sites keeping the material online) and (ii)
less user-friendly navigation: you have to back out with your browser
<back> button.
As long as the forum<->newsgroup link is only 50% reliable
I may post on both platforms. Sorry for any inconvenience.
No corrections planned for a future stats page.
Re: Re: Skills Gallery
The “back button” problem could possibly be avoided by using frames or a new window for each link. Possibly a bit of a pain, but it may make it nicer.
I agree that the main problem is that the maintainer would have to check every link periodically to ensure it’s still active. A lot of link collections on the internet are pretty much useless because half of them don’t lead anywhere any more. It’s surprising how long links float around… I keep finding requests for pages I’ve deleted months ago popping up in my site’s error log.
Phil
On my own server, I give the option of uploading an image or linking to an external one (in my “Moves” section). Copyright is not really a problem though, as long as you believe the person giving the URL is the owner of the image - I never upload images done by other people unless they specifically ask me to do so.
On the problem of videos and other resources disappearing off the web - that has happened on my own server as well, and I always try to get a copy of the video for myself “just in case”, then when it disappears - try to contact the original author and ask his/her permission to post the video on your own server. If people know you will do this, quite a lot of them will actually ask you to do so before they remove the video from their own site.
It should not be up to the maintainer to check every link. In a large site, that can be a mammoth task. Maybe a better way would be to either write a script which periodically checks that the links are correct, or add the ability to report deaqd links, so the average punter can do it immediately, instead of waiting for the maintainer’s next round of checks.
As for requests for pages that are deleted - write a custom 404 page that either reports the page missing, or redirects ("304"s) the browser to the new location. If it’s a genuine 404 - the script should email the maintainer reporting the broken link. This will help with the above paragraph’s problems as well.
I’ll probably be at BCJC, Ewan-that-is-Evil. I’ll be also carrying more acrylics than I can, er, carry.
Kae