Page 4 - BRN April 2021

By June we were into multiple takes of narration and reediting. This initial work was sent out to a few “candid critics” for comment, asking “what now?”
In July, Harley and I met with Travis Perry and Megan Pitman, two researchers with the Furman (University) Cougar Project. They offered some photographs from their camera traps - photos showing Bobcat and
Gray Fox predation of cottontails. That was a real start in the editing effort to break up the sequences. They also offered to talk with Mike Abernathy about our project.
In early August, Mike Abernathy, joined the effort, bringing a different visual perspective to the project. Mike is an experienced glider and motor glider pilot who wrote, produced, and piloted the camera- ship in the award winning movie CloudStreet: Soaring the American West. In 2016, he won an Emmy for his photography in that project. (CloudStreet was nominated for an Emmy in four categories.)
In our case, the aircraft he piloted was a bit smaller (photo previous page). Each morning we were on site early so that we could get at least an hour of recording done before 8 a.m. After the sun crested the hills it created significant contrast problems in the wide-angle shots.
COVID-19 did not
make this any easier.
Meetings with masks and
social distancing occurred
periodically, emails were
exchanged, video drafts
were posted on Vimeo for comment, and every one remained in good spirits.
During the remainder of August we went through a lot of editing and reediting, recording and re-recording narration. I use the video sharing platform Vimeo to support the Black Range website and my personal website, A Birding Life. Although not all of my work is on Vimeo, I do have more than 2,200 videos on that site - mostly species accounts, but also some long forms. And, it provides many tools which are typically used for collaborating on long-form videos. Upload a video (which takes
hours and hours given our internet “speed” in Hillsboro) and everyone on the team can view and comment on it - using time-code (so comments can even be made about a specific frame, or in time-code-speak, 1/30th of a second).
At this stage of a project, candid, substantive comments are required and useful. Being able to provide such comments is not something that everyone can do, but when a team has the competence and the skill to do that, it is incredibly valuable.
We were lucky enough to be working with pros so the project came together in a reasonable amount of time. At the very end of August I was able to upload the final edit to Vimeo and announce the project to the world.
Harley indicated that he liked the final product, and from a producer’s perspective that is really all that counts, and apparently many others were appreciative of the effort.
Perhaps most importantly, the film has opened up a new dialogue with regional and international
practitioners about how science, and the process of science, can be made accessible to the “lay” public. In an era of much anti- scientific bias, being able to talk about science in a manner that everyone can relate to is more important than ever.
Mike Abernathy piloting a drone during the recording for “Trailing With Toasty”.
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