Fortylove.tv: Two Friends, Forty Takes, One Adventure

Fortylove.tv is the latest project by Adrianna Tan, a photojournalist, writer and blogger from Singapore, and May Yee, a communication strategist from Kuala Lumpur. With digital postcards from cities in Europe and the Middle East, they reveal secrets you won’t find in any guidebooks.

I recently got in touch with Adrianna (currently in Dubai) and May (based in London) to learn more about their, in their own words, “part travelogue, part video-cast, part excuse to hang out with interesting people/travel even more.”

First of all, can you tell us a bit about Fortylove?

Fortylove.tv is a mobile travel show from across Europe and the Middle East. Two friends from Singapore/Malaysia live in two very exciting world cities on different continents – London and Dubai. Two very different worlds, but both have an abundance of secrets and stories to tell. It’s good old traditional wanderlust… on steroids, fuelled by web2.0. It’s our excuse to travel more, meet new people and do strange things, so that we can produce: forty short episodes shot, pieced together and edited by us. Two a week, every week for twenty weeks. View it on the website, on youtube, in your newsreader, iTunes, or on your iPod. We love travel shows; we think we should be able to take them everywhere. And we think everybody can make their own.

How did you get the idea? Were you inspired by anything in particular?

We’ve always been avid travellers, and we have the tendency to leap off into the unknown… sometimes quite literally. But we’re uninspired by the regular tourist trail, and the uninspiring guidebooks that tell you to go to the Eiffel Tower while you’re in Paris or to check out the Burj while you’re in Dubai. These sights are great, fine, but there’s more to a city. We thought to ourselves: if we only had only three minutes to show someone a city we knew, what would we tell someone to do/see/eat, and what are the offbeat things we love that we want them to know about?

That’s where it all came from.

As to how this all started: around September last year we knew that we were going to move to London and Dubai, on short term assignments for about six to nine months.

By that time we’d already started shooting rough videos of stuff that intrigued us on our travels, and amassed a lot of cool footage of stuff like May in a backlane in downtown Amsterdam, and Adri among the hordes at the million-strong Rath Yatra festival in India. We just stitched up some of this footage together, for a hoot, and sent them to our friends. They seemed to like it. So when we were up one night at 2 am talking about our travel plans for the year ahead, something clicked. We knew we were having a great opportunity to live in such exciting places, and that we were going to have to use London and Dubai as a base to the regions around us; that even the cities we were going to live in were cities that are very widely known and tourist-friendly, but not everybody got to see the ‘real’ London or Dubai that we knew. In the sense that they attract plenty of business and casual tourists, but beyond the Big Ben and beyond the Burj… in the gritty alleys of Shoreditch or Satwa, laid the stuff we loved: the true heart of the city. We wanted to dive deep into these parts.

We also knew we had to do something about this while we were on the road, and it just came naturally: we love the internet, social media, travelling, writing, talking our heads off. Something clicked, and we jumped out of bed, grabbed a pen and paper and did wireframe sketches of what our site would look like, and what you see on http://fortylove.tv today is pretty much that

So far you’ve been filming malls in Dubai, tube stations in London, a camel souk in Al Ain, martini making outside the Buckingham Palace, and the preparation for the Rickshaw Challenge in Chennai. What’s next?

Traditional beer-making and the secrets of Belgian abbey beer, if the monks will let May in. The underground world of Syrian lingerie if Adri can just crack the code. The 600-700 year old skyscrapers of the “Manhattan of the Ancient World” – 15 storey tall buildings in Shibam Hadramout, build hundreds of years ago to protect themselves from Bedouin invasions, and people still live in them. A Sudanese beat poet’s stunning poetry in English and a little Arabic, on themes of exile, loss and displacement, that’s surprisingly relevant to her own ‘exile’, as well as to the thousands of migrant workers in gleaming Dubai. There’s a lot more and we’re looking forward to sharing everything we see. For now, May needs her passport back from the UK Home Office and Adri needs to get out of Yemen alive (because that might otherwise be quite a dent in our ‘forty episodes’ concept if we had to stop at, say, sixteen, due to one of us dying).

How are you shooting the videos?

Equipment: We use a small Sanyo Xacti each, a low-end consumer camera. It’s about capturing the moment as it happens – the noise, the crowds, the imperfection, the spirit of it all, and we found that the smaller your camera, the more we’ve been able to immerse ourselves in the heart of the moment… people aren’t intimidated by it, and usually don’t even know what we’re doing.

Procedure: We came up with a list of cities we knew we were probably going to go to within the period, and actively started seeking out cool things about them by talking to people who lived there, reading, and making friends with people who knew these cities inside out. We usually just ’stumble’ upon the story ideas, then reach out to the people who can help us with it. Usually just show up and shoot with our little cameras, then go home and edit them into short episodes that tell you the story in 5 minutes or less (sometimes a little more).

I must compliment you for the irresistibly cool look of the site. Who’s behind the web design?

A brilliant Pittsburgh-based designer, Nathan Swartz (clicknathan.com). Adri had spoken to him a year before, on another travel-related podcast project that she eventually shelved. We always thought he would ‘get’ the spirit of Fortylove.tv from the start, becaues he designed our site while he was on the road – literally. He was living in a campervan with his family across the United States, and so there were some similarities. Nathan designed the site from scratch, implemented it in Wordpress, and did a great job.

After 20 weeks are over, what will happen to fortylove? Any chances you will post more videos from various trips around the world?

From the start we’d always imagined that fortylove would live beyond London and Dubai. If we get the right kind of support we would love to do this in two different cities again. Say, Bombay and Buenos Aires next year. Shanghai and Rome. Whatever. It doesn’t even have to be us; if we find two people crazy enough to do this we’d love for them to pick it up for another Fortylove.tv run. We do understand the logistics and the costs involved — so securing travel and tech sponsors in the future would be ideal.

We may also feature cool travel videos that others might make. Or continue posting videos there sporadically, as we’re never going to stop travelling. We’ll see! We’re also launching a bunch of other cool travel-related web projects after this. We’re off to India in July to race an autorickshaw 2000km across the country. That’s going to be another mobile travel project of its own — watch out for that

Last, if you could travel anywhere in the world and shoot new videos, where would you go?

May: a big city in North America; it’s the only continent I haven’t been to. I’d start with New York, or San Francisco, New Orleans maybe. Or on the other side of the Pacific – Japan. Tokyo.

Adri: Bhutan. Not sure about the internet connection though.

Editor’s Note: Below you can watch the episodes from week 2 and 3.  Make sure to head over to Fortylove.tv to check out the other videos, and join the fortylove.tv crew on Twitter and Facebook.

Week 2: Mind the Ghost

London: Mind Your Ghost from fortylovetv on Vimeo.

Hey Adri,

Living in this city has taught me a few practical things. Bring an umbrella wherever you go. Buy beer in eights for a better deal. Don’t freak out when you hear strange noises at night. Continue reading.

Week 3: Know your Camel

Know Your Camel from fortylovetv on Vimeo.

Dear May,

When I first moved here they told me if I ever knocked down a camel while driving, I could expect to pay more blood money than if I killed a human being.

That’s how seriously they take their camels around these parts. Continue reading.

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