FFR: Drake/Cloudveil Fly Fishing Video Awards

In between collective guffaws and projected sighs, popular music bent copyright laws and the eardrums of most of the crowd (sub-30, by the way) packed into a hot miniature theatre in Denver’s Oxford hotel last night. It’s the closest I’ve been to a college party in the past 25 years, and the most surprising thing was that nothing really appears to have changed.
“The Drake” magazine and Cloudveil were hosting a one-and-a-half-hour screening of ten films (I think) in ten-minute segments (I think), for a select subset (it seemed) of the Fly Fishing Retailer show attendees, the general age of which probably trends more toward 50. I don’t yet have perfect details on the names of the various producers represented — hope to get those from Tom Bie of “The Drake” today — but I can tell you that Frank Smethurst and his pals won the competition for best trailer with their segment on surf fishing for big roosterfish on what I assume was the Baja peninsula. It was funny, frantic, and well-timed. One of the other prizes went to the Angling Exploration Group’s trailer of their upcoming New Zealand film, part II of the “Trout Bum Diaries.” (See our review of Part I here.) Ryan, Mikey, Brian and Chris have really begun to refine their filmmaking, and it showed last night.
More details later if I can find anyone who attended awake before noon today.