Tip: Alone in the wilderness

[HuBBa]

Just saw this and i must say it was inspirational. One man lives one year in the Alaska wilderness with nothing but the animals and a 8mm filmcamera. The image quality is suprisingly good for being 8 mm film and there is a lot of bushcraft and wilderness.

well worth it imho.

Here you can read about it (and buy it if you feel so inclined http://www.dickproenneke.com/

(and no im not affiliated with that site in any way, i googled for it. =)

 

[Hoodoo]

I can vouch for the video and the book. The book recently has been showing up in bookstores. The book has more details.

One of the frustrating things about both the video and the book is that it only covers one year. Richard Proenneke lived there for over 30 years. You really want to know more.

This is a story very similar to Cache Lake and Richard Proenneke is much like John J Rowland in that both show great humility in the telling of their wonderful stories.

 

[HuBBa]

I must say that as a video producer myself, what impresses me is the high quality of the footage. It feels like he had a camera crew, but he was alone with two cameras and a tripod. That makes this if anything even more impressive.

I thoroughly enjoyed it and will probably get the book aswell.

And i agree that it would have been nice to see more than one year. Though there is another film made with him 30 years later. Have to see if i can get hold of that one

 

[BlueTrain]

There were a few Walt Disney motion pictures produced in the 1950's that were produced in essentially the same fashion. That is, one man, one camera, lots of time in the field. I haven't seen any of them for ages but the one about the desert (The Living Desert, it might have been) was probably my favorite. They compare favorably with more recent nature shows.

Generally speaking, the nature shows and documentaries produced in the 1950's were not a good as ones done today. They were rather shallower, and the documentaries especially lacked detail. When I saw "Victory at Sea" a year or two ago, I was struck by how little there was to the series. The music was good but there was too much footage of sailors lounging on deck. Some recent productions suffer from the same thing but maybe there is only so much material to work with.

Another difference is that recent productions sometimes take themselves rather too seriously. The old Walt Disney movies had a lot of humor, even if it was a little contrived at times. There is one current TV series, the name of which escapes me, that is great in that respect. The shows produced by David Attenborough are probably the best these days.

 

[innocent bystander]

Wasn't it disney who filmed the one where the were shoving lemmings over a precipice? Thus starting a myth ....