The Global Paddling Community

Video Review of Liquid Skills, the latest boating video from Heliconia alias Ken Whiting (Behind all pictures in this review are video fragments in mpg format. The one on the left shows an artificial areal kickflip, sized 960 KB).

Audience

Liquid Skills aims at today's beginning boaters, who learn to paddle in a modern flat-hulled playboat right from the start. It is interesting that it comes to the market one year after Ken Whiting's first popular video 'Play Daze', which aimed at intermediate and professional paddlers. This means that neither of both videos deals with the very latest moves, such as the Matrix etc. This may be in the pipeline for a new video next year.

Liquid Skills is perfect for its target audience though. It seems the world finally recognizes that modern boats are not too aggresive for beginners, but actually make learning easier (remember the PLAYAK survey of February 2000?).

(mpg, 484 KB)

Production

The video production is quite professional, with some really nice 'camera-taped-to-boat' shots. Such techniques are normally more confusing than helpful, but in Liquid Skills it's quite functional. The music is a bit neutral (or even cheesy, sounds like Manu Chao to me, even if the cover doesn't say so), but again, functional. A small minus point can be given for light-conditions. Some shots are really too bright, others a bit too dark.

Subjects

Liquid Skill follows a well thought-through structure. All relevant subjects are discussed in the right order: boats, paddles, body use, basic technique, rolls, eddie turns, ferrying, surfing, back surfing, flat spins, squirts, blasts, cleans, safety, all in a logical order. As an example of how things are built up, all parts of a wave are defined in detail:

(mpg, 3.4 MB).

Next, let's have a look at the covered subjects in a bit more detail.

The meat

As already said, the video is very logically structured and invites to be watched more than once.

It defines many details in a short time frame. This also means that it's quite tiring to absorb it all in one run, so indeed it invites for watching it more than once. On the positive side, it's fun to watch the video a couple of times. You won't get bored with it too fast...

It provides some interesting new ways to look at old things, explaining simple moves in an analytic way. This starts with explaining that learning in a modern flat-hulled boat is actually easier. Also, Ken tries to finally overcome the old prejudices against back-deck rolls. He even explains how to do a back-deck roll without getting your head wet. No way you're going to lose any teeth once you master that trick :-)

(mpg, 686 KB)

The video also presents good simple drills, e.g. putting your boat on edge and paddling on the 'wrong' side of the boat only. This should help you get the feeling for carving. As for learning in general, Ken explains that in to learn cartwheels, it's probably easiest to dive into a big truckeater without any fear, but you learn a lot more by practicing the same moves on small river features.

One thing that will certainly lead to controversy is Ken's definition of a 'Duffek' stroke. The Duffek was originally used by slalom paddlers as an non-braking angle correction stroke, close to the paddler's knees. Ken puts his 'Duffek' behind the hips and almost a 2 ft away from the boat. To be honest, it looks pretty redundant and silly (that's a matter of taste of course) and some people will argue that there are safer and more effective ways to change your angle. The best examples are when this Duffek-mutant is used for eddy turns and gliding draw strokes.

Another small minus point is that the spoken explanations don't always match with what you see the paddlers do on the screen.

Conclusion

All in all, Liquid Skills is a video we can recommend. We don't normally do star ratings, but if we did, we would give it 4 out of 5 stars.

Liquid Skills is available in NTSC format as well as PAL for Europeans. You should be able to get one in any good paddling shop. If you don't like getting away from your computer you can order it at whitewatervideo.com as well.

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Review by [mail address protected from spambots with javascript] for PLAYAK.COM, August 28 2001

All pictures and video clips in this article are courtesy of Heliconia (Ken whiting)