Keith Partridge on location. Photo supplied.
Filmmaker Allie Bombach came to Banff with a trailer about trailers. Her film, 23 Feet, is about people who live in trailers, school buses, and station wagons, adventurous people living on the road in the name of freedom. Bombach drove to Banff in early November from Portland, Oregon, in a converted school bus with some footage of the film. First, though, she needed a plan. 23 Feet needed to find its place in a world where it seems just about anybody can become an adventure filmmaker.
In Banff, Bombach joined 27 others for the 2010 Banff Adventure Filmmakers’ Workshop, held in conjunction with the Centre’s Banff Mountain Festival last November. Under the guidance of renowned adventure filmmakers Keith Partridge and Michael Brown, the group studied the factors that make an adventure film successful, and came to some clear conclusions.
Each participant arrived with a film ready to develop — some with more experience and more footage in the can than others — and focused on mapping out a path from conception, through production, to getting the film to audiences. They discovered that making an adventure film isn’t that hard. The challenge is in making a great film.
Workshop sessions ranged from pitching and editing to narration and funding. Guest speakers covered topics like story-telling and audio postproduction, and participants learned about everything from the right equipment for foul-weather filming to the state of the current market for adventure films.
Partridge says the faculty’s goal was to refine each filmmaker’s idea and to hone unique individual vision, giving them tools for transitioning into professional careers. These days, that means breaking out of the crowded Vimeo and YouTube crowd — and that demands creativity.
“Over the past few years filmmaking has been democratized through technological change,” Partridge says. “On one level, filmmaking is open to all. On another, an enormous ‘can of paint’ has exploded all over the creative masses.”
It wasn’t long ago that creating an adventure film required a team of highly trained specialists, a van or helicopter loaded with very expensive equipment, and months of sacrifice, often-horrendous weather, potential injury, and unpredictable expedition logistics. Those days are mostly gone now.
Now, high-definition cameras fit in the palm of the hand, and laptops have enough power to quickly edit hours of footage on budget-friendly professional-quality software, and because of it, more and more adventurers are filming as they go. They’re plugging into solar power and dialling up satellite modems, posting dispatches to multiple platforms in near-real time.
But the core skills required to make excellent adventure films haven’t changed, Partridge says. And the key is still great storytelling. “The power to communicate through sophisticated imagery and sound can place all that creativity in a minefield of jargon,” he says. Filmmakers need to fight to not become slaves to the “unfathomable menus and fiddly buttons with strange consequences.”
Partridge advises filmmakers to focus on bigger concepts. “It’s all just a case of seeing the ‘big picture’ in your mind before daubing away at the canvas,” he says.
The Banff Centre workshop is timed to coincide with the Banff Mountain Festival to allow participants to not only attend festival screenings, but also to harness the cross-platform talents of the Centre’s Film & Media team, including video editing experts and audio postproduction engineers.
“What you get at Banff is world-class faculty, access to our top-notch production team, and, thanks to the festival, the opportunity to rub shoulders with adventure filmmakers at the top of their game,” says Film & Media executive director Kerry Stauffer. “Similar to our Women in the Director’s Chair program, this workshop offers a full immersion into the filmmaking process.”
Bombach says she found her stride in Banff, in “inspiration so thick you could cut it with a knife.” She gained the confidence to let her creative instincts take her in the right direction for her film. “This made me a lot more comfortable with my style of filming,” she adds.
Now she’s back in Portland, putting the final touches on 23 Feet. The workshop, she says, launched her “on the path of thinking that anything is possible.”
Scholarship support for the Banff Adventure Filmmaker Program is provided by The North Face, Redwood Creek Wines, Big Rock Brewery, Icebreaker Merino Clothing, and Mammut.
