A few quick updates as we speed through summer like a rocket. It’s almost August. That’s a lot to swallow. Our most recent documentary in the RealLab family, KEEPER OF THE MOUNTAINS was Kickstarted by dear friends and fans of Miss Hawley. Shooting begins in Colorado this week under the watchful eye of Director Allison Otto. A few of our interviews include climber Jake Norton (who wrote this great post about Miss Hawley and our doc) and Polar Explorer Eric Larsen (which you have to write with capitol letters like it’s all his name). In addition we have the wonderful opportunity to spend time with Miss Hawley’s family and review her personal letter collections. Going hand in hand with archives, we’ll be visiting the American Alpine Club Library and meeting the wonderful Beth Heller.

A side project for release in late November, is a travel E-book collecting personal stories of adventure from a group of 18 people who you haven’t met yet– but soon will. We’re calling it Travels of the Lesser Knowns. Travel can be defined by a broad spectrum full of individual meaning. You may want to call it seeking. The goal of our authors is to submit a journey that has more to do with a personal journey. This is why you’ll find stories written by professional sailors having to do with an ill-fated car trip; and a winner of Parks Canada’s Greatest Summer Job who decides to walk across Winnipeg until he tires. Our digital document promises to be full of glorious color and personal photos– a nice benefit of publishing digitally. RealLab’s mission is through all digital media to convey personal stories.

We look forward to wowing you with these projects about people who love travel.

Until then,

Carole

Previously, I mentioned getting to work with the wonderful Allison Otto on a new project. We went live today with our Kickstarter campaign and you can read all about the good stuff that has us trekking to the Himalaya there. But, since it’s 2:18 am in Chicago and yours truly is fighting a late spring cold and several editing deadlines, I’ll wish you well, beg you to check us out and consider a contribution. I fully intend to pour Miss Hawley a glass of whiskey in the foothills of the Himalaya this summer, she’s positively wonderful. Our first leg is to meet with Hawley’s family members and dissect their wonderful archives of letters and photos out in Colorado next month. We’re stoked.

I feel it’s appropriate to sign off with –Namaste–

Carole

Full disclosure: Rebecca appears in our doc Soul Winners but we pushed those boundaries because we had to have her infinite and amazing film scholarship on board. Rebecca Hall is a familiar face in the film community (and we actually mean film) here in Chicago.

Hall is a freelance projectionist and celluloid missionary. She studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, with a focus on American evangelical Christianity, mass media, and linguistic analysis. At the U of C, she volunteered at Doc Films as a projectionist and co-programmed a retrospective of the films of Andy Warhol and a series of 1970s evangelical Christian films. Currently, she serves as president of the Northwest Chicago Film Society, an educational nonprofit she co-founded in January 2011.

Basically we couldn’t stop interviewing the gal, so over breakfast at Beef and Brandy we successfully conned her into finishing out production of Soul Winners as our Associate Producer. She will be responsible for archival research and film transfers to include in the final film, which means wrestling a lot of 16mm prints from the hands of collectors for the best possible transfers we can afford.

We are so excited to have Hall on board.

-Carole

I wanted to tell you about the other projects coming to the helm as we push onward with our cornerstone project Soul Winners. In November I had the opportunity to study at the Banff Centre in Canada complete with a student ID that said ARTIST in big bold letters. What a thrill to be in the heart of the Canadian Rockies with other filmmakers dialoguing and eventually as we fanned back out all around the world– collaborating.

There’s a duality of equal love in my life as a creative person. I’m fascinated by religion and I am fascinated by nature. In January I set to work with my new creative partner Matt Lauterbach, a local editor for Kindling Group, Kartemquin and the Chicago History Museum to piece together the beginnings of a nature documentary. While I can’t yet tell you the details we decided we were fascinated by wolves and a particular story that is beginning to surface all over again. Combined with his love of historical research and my fascination with the Rocky Mountain region of North America we have quietly been meeting over crepes and Orangina piecing together our next moves, hitting the library and traveling with camera in hand throughout the duration of our unseasonably, bitter cold Midwestern spring.

I am really excited to be collaborating with Matt and we certainly balance each other out with our skill areas, it’s been a magnificent time idea running to say the least and I hope to have you updated soon on our next move. So think wolves– because we are.

In early May I traveled to the Rockies again for a pre-screening of the delightful doc 23 Feet with my Banff Centre roommate Allie Bombach at the helm. Excited to see her Airstream (traveling home/editing bay) touch down in Boulder, Colorado I linked up with a third classmate from Banff, Lonely Planet and freelance Outside Television Producer Allison Otto. Over tacos we talked about who was fascinating us lately around the mountain buzz and both agreed we wished we could carry on Everest historian Elizabeth Hawley’s self-made job. Fascinated with her work, we wondered if anyone was pursuing a documentary on her life in the aftermath of a media buzz. After several exchanges with mountain culture historian and author Bernadette McDonald, we decided to pursue the documentary. On Thursday morning while I was on a 16 hour shift for Northwestern University’s Advanced Media Production Studio (NUAMPS) I received the gleeful phone call from Allison that Hawley had indeed accepted our proposal to travel to Kathmandu and document her. Tentatively our working title is Keeper of the Mountains. So stay tuned for more news about this fantastic documentary.

I hear the word thrilled a lot in this business. But I am thrilled. We are thrilled.

Our goal is to go into production with a crew of all women traveling to Kathmandu so we have begun the process of courting our favorite women who shoot with big rigs. As you can imagine, we have a lot of interest! And we’re glad for that.

Finally I have been editing a fantastic festival short entitled Boys of Winter you can read about it on our Projects Cooking page. I’m excited to release this fun and often deep tale into the mountain film circuit. It’s been a blast working with these six young men this year. They all bring a lot to the table and are some of the wittiest suburban adventurers I know. There’s a lot sacred in the film, and by sacred– I mean bacon.

Cheers and bacon,

Carole Snow

PS: Boulder– happiest place in America.

It has been a long, busy stretch at RealLab. In February Ford Seeuws joined our crew for a quick jaunt to Alabama to capture the Olive Brothers. You might recall their film Rock It’s Your Decision. The brothers, pictured above grew up with the family photography business. Their father captured images of the Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama including Kennedy and the pair became master photographers. Dean Olive on the left pastors at several area churches and through out our set-up time captured our images on his new iPhone. David Olive at the right continues to run the family studio which shares space with a coffee bean roaster and is quite the delicious smelling studio. (I know I am biased, I love coffee and cameras.)

Their experimental production company Olive’s Film Productions Inc. closed their doors in the late 1980s after the film distribution market was changed by VHS and home recording systems. Eventually their films were transferred from 16mm reels traveling church-to-church to VHS tapes. The business became unsustainable and the pair departed the film business.

Rock It’s Your Decision still shows up in midnight and curated screenings today among the 16mm community. It was a part of Doc Film’s Cinevangelism Series in 2010 and was screened with a selection of curated shorts for AV Geeks’ Temptations of a Christian Teenager. The original script penned by a student at Liberty University in the 1980s is pictured above.

-Carole

As a former graphic artist for several newspapers in Ye Old Age of Print I am very sensitive about fonts. New to me; typography in films for lower thirds, title pages and your marketing campaigns. Can you tell I’m a newbie? I am not even sure what you call all of it collectively. Being a veteran of 137 Films there’s a definite calling card and style with every film put out in keeping with the wonderful theme of science. Their Executive Director; Clayton Brown is also a veteran designer from the print world and has done a great job in building a strong brand for his movies and merch.

With our production Soul Winners it has been really fun to experiment with fonts and art from the movie as we push forward in our branding strategy for the picture. Really– nothing upsets me more than when you have a gorgeous doc and you dump a generic lower third into the piece. So I swore to my own self I would not be a guilty party. (Although Helvetica is so enticing and easy.)

After a visit to Half Price books to unload 10 years worth of bad paperbacks; this book caught my eye– The Land of the Smokies: Great Mountain Memories. While the book feels focused on the 1950s, (America’s real good time) whenever I visit this region of Tennessee I feel like the only thing that has budged and moved forward in time are the gas stations and Applebee’s. But as I think stylistically about fonts and details– I can’t help but be drawn to the above signage. Maybe it’s that undeniable combination of bears and pancakes. (Click the photo and it leads you to photographer Brent Moore with a great Flickr account.)

Alphabet Dreams;
Carole

———
Related: I think Typeface pretty much wins it on building a brand around your doc.

This is art, and this is life. No apology necessary.

Ford Seeuws is a freelance videographer, editor and aspiring screenwriter from Panama City, Florida. He likes Citizen Kane, Firefly, and Arrested Development and hates long walks on the beach. You can find him on the web at: http://fordseeuws.wordpress.com/

Erin Kitzinger is a writer, director, producer and editor.  (And is doing us a massive solid by working on an indie documentary for below her pay grade– so we love her.) She graduated in 2008 from the University of Central Florida’s School of Film & Digital Media, as one of the first six students accepted into the Entrepreneurial Digital Cinema MFA program, where she was also a film instructor. Her feature film, Hope for a Thorn, which she wrote, directed, and edited, received the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the 2010 Gasparilla Film Festival and the Best Director Award at the 2009 LA Femme Film Festival. She has directed several other short narrative and documentary films, which have played the Sarasota Film Festival, Gen Art Ignite!, and the Women as Global Leaders Conference in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, among others.  As an editor, Erin has edited franchise videos, promotional videos, educational children’s webisodes, and spots for clients such as Quiznos Sub Shop, Barnie’s Coffee & Tea, and Stetson University, as well as narrative and documentary work. Most recently, she completed three documentary programs for the Big Ten Network.

Unrelated but a quiet passion of mine is mountain film. I often joke that after spending so much time in the Blue Ridge on this project perhaps we’re on to something. But the true mountain film– the people in the lifestyle, “living the dream”  was showcased at the Banff Center this week.

Here’s a few of my favorite people and films:

Eliza Kubarska: Do you know those “Most Interesting Man in the World” commercials for Dos Equis? Well, Eliza may be his match. An accomplished climber and all out filmmaker (meaning, she’s not afraid to showcase the true grit of expedition), I was continuously amazed by her all week long. Add to that… she can dance. Her next project will focus on the children of mountaineers, we saw a sneak peek during Banff and I am beyond excited for the project.

Allie Bombach: she lives in an Airstream and is a wicked shot. Her project, 23 Feet will unveil in 2011 and I couldn’t think of a more timely indie with simplicity being on the minds of many Americans.

23 Feet Trailer from Allie Bombach on Vimeo.

Lifecycles: I have a part-time job at REI where when I’m not dedicating my wallet and 15 hour days to producing indies, I spend a lot of time around people who love being outside as much as I do. One thing I’ve never gotten the hang of is riding a bike, loving a bike– being ONE LESS CAR. I’m terrified of bikes. However, “this is not a bike movie, it’s a movie about a bike.” (However, my co-director Kurt Morris just shreds asphalt in Boston riding mercilessly to his librarian day job. He is more amazing than you know.)

Life Cycles OFFICIAL Trailer from Life Cycles on Vimeo.

Kerim Jaspersen: My across the hall German classmate. Kerim an engineer by trade happens to be a paraglider– in fact his dog goes paragliding with him. You can see his selected Banff short, Rush Hour Dream here. Interestingly, his work is shot on a small Sony DHC-HX1, proof that you should just pick up whatever you have and create.

The Banff Film Festival has a traveling World Tour where you can catch many selections from the week long Mountain Film in Canada. The Chicago leg is in March at the Field Museum. My buddy Matt Lauterbach (who is amazing and has done everything from curate exhibitions about Lincoln to editing for the PBS series The Calling) and I went a couple years ago to Field and were blown away by this base jumping flick Journey to the Center.

What has been really interesting to follow is the relationship of filmmaker to athlete and the challenges of being the limber and steady DP who can get the shot, of the unroped guy on Half Dome. Or in other scenarios, the athlete becomes camera man. I spent the week studying under DP/Director Michael Brown (Return to Everest IMAX, Stormchasers, NOVA: Extreme Ice Survey)  and DP/Director Keith Partridge (Top Gear, Touching the Void, Human Planet)  at Banff, and despite their day jobs of renting helicopters and multiple Everest summits– there was one point that they continued to drive home– story is everything and it doesn’t matter how big a gun you’re toting, or how many pilots you have on the roster.

So yeah– I walk a strange line between my love for IMAX films and exploitation films. I can’t think of any more conflicting genres. But returning to the point of story– Michael Brown said it best, “That’s one thing you see, people who draw attention to their filmmaking and that’s unfortunate.”

–Carole

Tim Ormond shares family photos with Director Carole Snow in Nashville.

On our first meeting, after one year of phone calls and e-mails, Mr. Ormond told me, “I don’t know why but I trust you,” and let me leave to Chicago with a heavy stack of personal photos for use in Soul Winners. The stack had everything from 40 year-old film ad mock-ups to photos of the family jet-setting to film openings in the Deep South. Head shots of June Carr Ormond and Ron Ormond Vaudevillian days, glued to evangelical film summaries. Right now we’re doing our best to retouch digital copies and place the actual photos into archival albums.

Ron, June and Tim Ormond head to opening of Girl From Tobacco Row

June Ormond paints on actor/cinematographer Eddie King's "stained glass demon" face for The Burning Hell.

This trip to Nashville was marked by a shift in crew. Our beloved DP Sean Clark has relocated to New York City working towards his goals in narrative film, but still on board for our NYC and LA shoots– and we welcomed in co-worker and good friend Mark Skala who pulled a 14 hour day as camera man, troubleshooting shifting sunlight and funny hand-held angles.

Cameraman Mark Skala on location in Nashville.

Next leg in the journey takes us to NYC, until then.

Happy Fall.

-Carole