“The River” Rolling Along

It’s been a lot of hard work but “The River” is done! It’s even finished a couple days before the deadline.

I had originally planned on documenting the entire process here. But, once it things started to go together, I didn’t want to spoil the impact of seeing it by giving you a lot of behind the scenes info.

So, once the film is up for viewing, I’ll post a link and then I can go into some of the details on how this film came together.

I think it’s one of the best films I’ve entered in the challenge to date.

Once you have an opportunity to see it, please post a comment and let me know what you think.

The River

A strange thing happened to me this round of the UWOL challenge, I actually was able to change my mind about the subject of my film.

Normally whenever the theme is announced for a new challenge, an initial thought will pop into my head and no matter how hard I try to think of something else, my brain locks onto that first idea I had and that’s all she wrote.

Maybe at first, the idea sounded really good but upon further reflection, I realized it might be more difficult to pull off in the three week time frame that I had originally thought.

When I first heard the theme was “Habitat” for UWOL #11, my first thought was a film on vanishing forests here in Iowa.

Every year in the Cedar Rapids area, they have what the call Parade of Homes. The public is given an opportunity to tour homes built by local contractors. Homes range in price from $150k to over a million dollars.

One of the million dollar plus homes was in the middle of a great forested area. As my wife and I were being driven up the lane in a golf cart because it was tucked back so far off the road, I was saddened by the fact that such a beautiful area was being bulldozed to make way for more million dollar homes.

Oh, there were still plenty of trees and a great pond, but the natural beauty and wildness had forever vanished with the building of this development.

So, that was what my film was going to be about.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was part of a bigger story. Something that couldn’t be told in the normal span of time we have for the challenge.

Normally my brain would be so focused on this story that I wouldn’t be able to shift gears and find another story that needed to be told.

But this time was different. This time for whatever reason, a new idea popped into my head. That idea has become the focus of my UWOL #11 film, “The River.”

Stay tuned as “The River” starts to take shape.

Clip of the Week

Wapsipinicon Mill

The six story brick mill on stone foundation measuring 62′X 102′ replaced an earlier 1851 mill after its 1867-1870 period of construction Samuel Sherwood built this best flour mill west of the Mississippi River. The main structure is of heavy timber frame, mortise and tenon joints with square nails and wooden pegs of oak for strength. Wooden shingles covered the roof, 107′ above mill base. The complete price tag of the mill and it’s water rights came to $100,000, a tidy sum for the 1870′s.

The mill is situated on the west bank of the Wapsipinicon River at the dam. The mill produced it own electricity from 1915 on; power for the Gedney Hotel via an under-river cable; and later, the mill lit the whole town for a while. Rollers replaced the millstones; the original water wheel was replaced by turbines, then the steam boiler & a gas engine of one cylinder power came into use; finally, electricity powered the corn sheller and attrition mill and mixer of more recent times.

The horse drawn stone puller used to pull the massive granite boulders from the Buchanan Co. prairie. These boulders were transported to the mill site, dressed and sized for the foundation material of the mill with the help of Alex Hathaway and Samuel Sherwood. The walls of stone above this level are of Farley Limestone.

The west side of the mill has deep grooves along the wall of the wagon hubs that scraped the bricks as the farmers got as close to the mill wall as possible, to ensure that no grain, corn or meal fell to the ground to be wasted. The old millstones were last used in 1942 by Jesse Zimmerly and Fred Potts, to fill an order for the Burris and Soener Cafe, in town, for a ton of buckwheat flour for pancake fixins’.

The mill was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 by the Oliver Greenleys. The following year the mill was turned over by the Greenleys to the Buchanan County Historical Society. The lower “floating floor” needed work after many floods, as did the roof, some outside walls and brick facing in many places. this was done about 1993 in part of a major $300,000 restoration effort. Resoration is on-going, as the mill is a museum of displays and exhibits depicting 1870′s grain milling in the Midwest.

Click HERE to view the clip.

The UWOL Film Challenge

October 1st marked the start of the eleventh UWOL Film Challenge. The Underwater, Over Land Film Challenge or UWOL as it’s most commonly known, is and international film challenge catering to ouotdoor, nature and wildlife filmmakers.

Six times a year, filmmakers who sign up to accept the challenge are given a theme the day the challenge begins. Once the theme has been announced, filmmakers have three weeks to complete a three minute film based on that particular theme.

Past themes have included The Living Skies, Water, The Wild, Wildlife, Recreation and Adventure.

The hallmark of UWOL is the constructive critisism filmmakers get from their peers through feedback threads hosted on DVi. Even though it is a competition, entrants and non-entrants alike give positive and constructive feedback on what worked, what didn’t and why. As a result, the filmmakers expand and improve their abilities and the whole challenge improves as a result.

The theme for UWOL 11 is “Habitat ”

Follow along as I develop the idea, shoot and edit my film.