I expected that high quality LFTR videos would start popping up on YouTube, given the enthusiastic response to "LFTR in 16 Minutes" and the obvious importance of the subject. Videos did appear, but the capture quality was no better than the Google Tech Talks. Again, nothing a casual viewer would sit through. And "LFTR in 16 Minutes" could only appeal to a narrow audience, given its video quality and jump cuts.
 
It wasn't until April 2011 that there was an opportunity to shoot my own footage: Since "LFTR in 16 Minutes" I'd been volunteering for TEDxYYC, TEDxCalgary and other Calgary forums, asking them all to please host a Kirk Sorensen lecture on the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. TEDxYYC 2011 agreed, and was generous enough to fly Kirk in for three days.
 
 
Hoping to iterate on "LFTR in 16 Minutes" (which consisted of multiple lectures) and "An Inconvenient Truth" (great example of lecture footage presented in a narrative framework), asked Mount Royal University to host a LFTR talk.
 
 
Calgary's hackerspace, PROTOSPACE was also willing to host a Kirk Sorensen talk on Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors.
 
 
Lectures and interviews took place over Kirk's three day visit to Calgary. Often while driving. Chelsea Pratchett helped videotape during the entire three day period.
 
The three Calgary talks offered a fantastic variety in subject matter: TEDxYYC was high-level and aimed at a general audience. MRU was for students studying the intersection of politics and nuclear power (with Kirk taking great questions). PROTOSPACE was an extremely technical crowd, continuing the conversation beyond Kirk's 2.5 hour presentation.
 
Kirk's TEDxYYC video was our best shot at quickly getting the LFTR in front of a large audience. Despite having 10,000 views (now 30,000), TED Talks did not include Kirk's TEDxYYC talk on their TED.com collection of featured talks. This was a bit of a dissapointment, since an (excellent) 2010 TEDxYYC persentation by Ben Cameron was featured after receiving 3,000 views. Being featured on TED.com gave Ben's presentation a boost from 3,000 views to 150,000 view. Such a multiplier would have been nice.
 
TEDxYYC generously allowed Kirk's Thorium video to be released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. All 3 Calgary videos are released under this license.
 
 
 
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