When Jake MacManus decided to film one of his hikes up the Dublin Mountains, little did he think it would spur an export business.
Through his company, Trek Ireland (trekireland.com), the Dubliner now sells forward-motion videos of various trails around Ireland, bringing people on a virtual tour of the Irish countryside.
The videos are mainly aimed at people who exercise on treadmills, allowing them to feel like they are walking or jogging through various places in Ireland.
“The main obstacle to treadmill exercise is boredom,” MacManus says. “I try to make it more interesting. My trails are also interactive. If people come to a fork in the path, they can choose whether to go left or right. I will have filmed both routes.”
As well as helping improve the whole exercise experience, MacManus also provides an educational element to his videos. Before he prepares every video, he meets with a local guide to collect stories and learn the history of the trail.
“I try to go past something of archaeological or historical importance, such as a round tower, tomb or abbey,” he says. “An icon will pop up on the viewer’s screen for 10 seconds. If the viewer clicks it, they can learn more about the site and its history.”
An eye for it
In his day job, MacManus is an IT consultant for the South East Dublin Department of Anaesthesia and a video consultant for the Royal Victoria Eye & Ear Hospital. He says he came up with the idea while, what else, hiking.
“I wanted to show people in Dublin how to get on a walk. I felt many people didn’t go on walks up the Dublin Mountains as they didn’t know where the walk started. I wanted to make a video showing where the walk started.”
To test the market, he first put a forward motion video of Glendalough for sale on Amazon.
“In the first video I kept forward momentum the entire time. I got a lot of feedback from customers, who said they wanted me to stop and look at things along the way, as you would in real life.”
“I went to the enterprise boards looking for money. I didn’t get any, but in retrospect I ultimately didn’t need it. I might not have spent it as wisely as a bank loan.”
MacManus did receive support from the enterprise boards to attend the Nacta Ireland Show and Celtic Marketplace trade shows in the US, where he promoted his videos to US distributors and businesses.
He uses a high-definition steadicam, which has a stabilising system to ensure there aren’t too many shakes. He says each video takes about to month to film because he visits the trail five or six times.
“I can’t film the entire trail in one go,” he says, “as often I encounter other people on the path in front of me, or a group of Spanish students, or loud noise such as a chainsaw, a car horn or a plane flying overhead. I’m battling loads of elements to get the perfect video.”
“People want deserted trails. They don’t want to see lots of people or hear a sudden loud noise.”
All the sights
MacManus has produced five DVDs showcasing walks and jogs around Glendalough, Howth Head, the Cliffs of Moher, the Burren and the Sugar Loaf Mountain. Videos of Killarney and Connemara will be out in the spring, and then Dingle and the Aran Islands are next on his list.
“My market is mainly Americans and Irish people in America,” he says. “Often people want to visit Ireland but they don’t have the money. I bring a bit of Ireland to them.”
He has sold almost 3,000 DVDs, mostly in the US, and mainly to customers in California, Florida, Colorado, New York, Ohio and Texas. He has also sold DVDs in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Finland.
Although the videos are filmed in Ireland, they are printed in New York and shipped from New Jersey. “When people order something online, they want it the next day. Thus I keep all the DVDs in warehouse in New Jersey.”
Each DVD retails at $22.50 (€19) and contains three trails, one long one of about 40 minutes and two shorter ones.
As well as selling online, the DVDs are also on sale at a number of Irish stores in states such as Pennsylvania, Illinois, Virginia, Wisconsin and Arizona. Though the whole practice of selling DVDs, he says, may soon change in favour of streaming and downloads.
As for the future, MacManus’s aim is to produce footage of walks in every county in Ireland.
“My customers have started saying what trails they’d like and what they want to see. A lot of them want to see small Irish villages.”
