2024-01-12 18:51:36
BarcelonaWhen the temperatures drop and the days of spending more time at home arrive, often under the covers, there is a Netflix content that resurfaces: crackling fireplaces. Basically hour-long videos of burning logs and hypnotic fire. Nothing else (sometimes a slight instrumental melody, but it is so faint that it can go unnoticed). Obviously, these fireplaces only have an aesthetic function; no matter how much virtual reality there is, the videos still don’t convey warmth. There are three pieces of content available on the platform featuring cozy fireplaces, and some of them have managed to sneak into the most viewed list in recent weeks (with a notable peak during the Christmas days). During the last days of 2023, one of these crackling fires reached the number one ranking on the platform.
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The three titles that can be found in the Netflix catalog are: Fireplace for your house, Fireplace in your home i Fireplace in your home: the crackling of birch wood. All three were released in 2011 and can now be viewed in 4K. Curiously, among the recommendations that Netflix makes to the user when he searches for the popular TV channel, there are videos for guided meditations or for sleeping.
The creator of these curious contents is the director George Ford, who with his production company Pet Media Plus has specialized in contents such as videos to teach birds to speak and other proposals related to nature. Ford, who lives in the state of Washington, an area of the United States that is particularly mountainous and lush in terms of nature, got the idea to film a fireplace thanks to his children, who very often asked him to light a fire “I thought it would be much easier to put a television inside the fireplace than to keep lighting fires,” he explained to The Independent years ago.
Ford claims that it took two years to film the videos and that he needed to light 200 fires. “Everyone thought I was crazy,” he confesses. The director assures that his job is not as easy as lighting a fire and standing the camera in front. He was looking for an aesthetic position and that, moreover, everything seemed natural. “I had to make the trunks turn on themselves. I had to make everything look natural and it was very difficult,” he says. The effort was worth it because, despite initial reluctance when Ford was trying to sell the project to Netflix, the fireplaces have become a classic on the platform. After the success of his fires, Ford has shot other projects like Aquarium for your home: Saltwater reef i Mountain stream: A mountain stream background for your home (the latter can be found on YouTube).
The antecedents
Ford’s fireplaces are not the first on American television. The director’s work is, in fact, inspired by the show The Yule log, which between 1966 and 1989 aired on New York’s WPIX television on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning. Recorded at the residence of the mayor of New York, Gracie Mansion, it was three o’clock loop of 17 seconds of the house fireplace with carols in the background. It was broadcast straight away, there was no commercial break. By the end of 1969 it became apparent that the footage shot on 16mm was beginning to deteriorate and it was necessary to re-record the fire. The network asked the mayor of New York for permission to re-film his fireplace, but he refused. So the chain had to find an alternative: the current version of The yule log, which lasts six minutes and thirty seconds, was recorded in a house in California during a hot August day. After a few years of hiatus, WPIX brought the show back in 2001 and it is still on the air.
Aside from Ford, many others have tried to imitate the original burning trunk. There are versions made by the DC comics firm (it’s a ten-hour video of a fireplace with Christmas stockings hanging and a Hanukkah candle next to it) and by the Hallmark Channel, which specializes in Christmas movies.
Burning fireplaces evoke a fascination that is an important part of the charm of what is known as slow television, a type of programming named after Norwegian public television that shows seemingly mundane and boring things. In 2019, the Aragón TV broadcast of the train route from Zaragoza to Canfranc went viral, a broadcast that simply showed the view of the train driver. Other well-known examples, especially for Barcelona viewers, are the fish tank or the printing press that printed on all machines at BTV.
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