A film for you on this winter solstice
Chris Peterson | Hungry Horse News | UPDATED 5 hours, 21 minutes AGO
My wife got a text from a friend a few weeks ago.
“Tell your husband nice tongue,” she said.
“Huh?” I said.
“She said she saw you on teevee. Nice tongue,” my wife said.
It was my documentary. Montana PBS had aired it, never even told me. Prime time no less. Two nights in a row.
In the film, which is actually a wildlife film, I appear briefly and stick out my tongue at the camera. I can’t help myself.
The name of the film is “Winter Song” after the song of the American dipper, which sings all through the winter, particularly just before dark.
I started shooting the film way back in the early winter on 2020, a few weeks after I got over Covid. The film, all 26 minutes and 46 seconds of it, took more than 200 days to shoot, primarily from December 2020 to December 2021. Though I went back for three more years on and off to fill in some gaps and get some footage of birds I really wanted.
The length of the film was dictated by PBS. That’s how long a 30-minute time slot is. A longtime PBS producer, Gus Chambers, gave me valuable advice on early cuts of the film.
You learn a lot shooting a documentary. All those years of photography experience certainly helped, but video is a different animal.
There’s a line in the film where I remark, “You spend hours on end staring into holes.”
Which is to say holes in the ice, waiting for something to pop its head out. Sometimes it was a beaver. A couple of times a river otter.
But most of the time, nothing.
If I got 15 seconds or so of usable footage a day I was pretty happy. If you watch the film, you might think I saw a lot of river otters, but I did not. Over the 200 days, I saw otters maybe 10. But otters have a tendency to mess around for several minutes close to the camera, so when they did, you got several minutes of footage.
Almost anything that could go wrong, did. I spent thousands on gear and it still wasn’t even close to enough (you quickly learn why even modest Hollywood films costs millions). Batteries went dead at the worst moments. Memory cards filled up. Tripods broke and we post holed through deep snow for several months that year, because it was impossible to ski with all that gear and I didn’t have any money left for snowshoes.
Still, I think my little wildlife film turned out pretty well and the folks who saw it on PBS seemed to agree.
Special thanks goes to Chambers, Bill Dakin, Toby Scott, the Boy (who carried more than half the gear) and Mark Brinkman, who did the music.
Now that it’s been shown on PBS, it will now appear on the Hungry Horse News You Tube channel. I’m releasing it on Dec. 21, the winter solstice, which seems appropriate
Just search for the Hungry Horse News on You Tube, and the film will be there.
And now, a correction: Last week’s column said the neighbor’s dogs were pugs. They are bulldogs.