Finding Inspiration at the Wild & Scenic Film Festival
This past week the 19th Annual Wild and Scenic Film Festival took place virtually. If you’ve never heard of the festival, it happens each year in Grass Valley & Nevada City during the M.L.K. weekend, and then goes on tour across the U.S.
Since moving to Grass Valley, the Wild & Scenic Festival has been a highlight of each year and I always look forward to attending a few sessions. In addition to attending the festival, my wife and I each bring our classes to the youth sessions during the week. This year the festival is entirely online and our students were able to view the films asynchronously. While I missed the experience of walking into the Del Oro Theatre as a class and enjoying the films together, like many things in the COVID era, we appreciated the efforts put in by SYRCL to provide some analog to our yearly attendance.
As artists and students, one of my favorite parts of taking my students to the Wild and Scenic are the conversations that unfold on the drive back to school, or in this year’s case, the conversations on zoom as we waited for the class to gather the next day. Sharing our favorite films and what techniques we enjoyed, I’m always fascinated by what aspects of the films resonated most with my students.
Footage from the film Disappearing Penguins by Noctiluca
A film featuring animals is always going to receive high marks, and this year was no different. One of the films, Disappearing Penguins was one of the classes favorite. Filmed on Elephant Island off the Antarctic Peninsula, this film won me over with a clear narrative about a group of scientists counting chinstrap penguins in their nesting grounds. As a math and science teacher I have found that students love any opportunity to participate in data collection and sampling activities, and this film showed students how similar the activities we do on campus are to research projects happening around the globe. Of course I also loved that they used aerial imagery from drones to monitor densely packed colonies which would be tricky to hand count from the ground.
Drone footage in the film Disappearing Penguins by Noctiluca
As a drone hobbyist, I was very excited to see another application for drone aerial imagery, using the same workflow I have been using to collect imagery of forests here in the Sierra Nevada. As we debriefed this film and the others as a class, we discussed which films inspired us, or made us feel or want to act. For me personally Disappearing Penguins inspired me to think more about the potential applications for monitoring wildlife using drones. The beaver activity in the Upper Truckee watershed I have been photographing would be a great project to explore more as the seasons progress, but I’m also wondering if other keystone species like Chinook salmon on the Yuba can be monitored using RGB imagery of their redds (egg laying sites).
A great summary of using RGB and multispectral imagery can be found on fishbio.com: and a recent journal article referenced here. To quote the fishbio summary, “The researchers concluded that RGB imaging is best for rapid data collection because less processing time is needed for these images. This may make it particularly well-suited for daily or weekly redd surveys over the course of a spawning season.”
Now that our winter rains are coming in I likely missed my chance to photo the redds on the Yuba River this year, but I’m inspired to drive out their soon to see what kind of imagery I can collect using the RGB camera on my phantom pro.
Stay tuned!
