Adventure As Experience For Us As Storytellers

Experience is a curious thing. On the one hand it can enhance and amplify a person and their endeavors. On the other it can hold back and keep a person from fully realizing their goals, depending on how that person interprets the experience. At Keller Media Works we believe that every experience has value to us as people, and to what we bring to the table as visual story tellers. It helps us through the process of creation and enhances interaction with the world, and with our clients. Even if the experience seems, upon review, to have been negative, or damaging in some way.  It is with these thoughts in mind we will be bringing you stories of some of our experiences and adventures that we have had in pursuit of the stories we tell, and with hope these tales of our experiences will help illustrate how we navigate the process of helping you tell your stories in the most impactful ways possible. After all, to tell good stories, you have to have lived some!

As a sort of intro to this concept, we’ll start with a really simple story, but one that still resonates with us, with me, to this day. I was on a very casual production working out in the wilds of Grafton Notch, Maine. I was working with water, as we do, in that time of year in Maine when it’s not warm, but it’s not frigid. When there are still drapes of snow on the land and the edges of the rivers have thin crystalline layers of ice that have accreted on the rocks and hang out over the water as it rushes towards various rapids and falls. The sun wasn’t out and the air smelled like it was going to snow. There is a very particular smell in the woods when it’s about to snow which adds to that unique north woods feeling in the season between winter and mud season. Not life threatening, but not altogether comfortable either.

I was working with one unique feature on this particular stretch of water, a series of cascades that ended with a grand waterfall. I can spend hours doing this kind of work as the face of it is always changing, and that to me, is fascinating. In these environments, to me, it’s never just a nice image of water, but how to create the image in a way that speaks to the experience of the water. It’s about how to bring the viewer into the environment, instead of just having them view it in a frame, so that the viewer can feel like they are there too. I know that is a lofty goal, but one I am in continual pursuit of. Because of the perceived depth of the river and the speed at which the water was traveling I was relegated to filming from the eastern side. The light was flat so there weren’t any shadows from the surrounding forest. However I did notice from one vantage point that there could be a potentially impactful view from the opposite side of the river. The light, such as it was, fell upon this feature in a unique and beautiful way.

There was no way to access the other side, and from the looks of the snow remnants and duff on the opposite bank, it was generally inaccessible. I stood on the bank for a while looking up and down the river. I could finish up and call it good, who would ever know that there was another potential shot that could really speak to the experience, the uniqueness of this place? Or, I could take a calculated risk and try to carefully- both for myself and the protection of the surroundings-  make my way to the opposite side. The end viewer may never know the difference, but I would, and maybe would kick myself for the rest of the edit that I hadn’t taken the chance to get the shot, to make the story just that much better.

Foolhardy! I wasn’t prepared to make the crossing in a conventional sense. But I just knew the shot(s) from the other side would make the piece. So I stripped off my snow pants, rolled up my second layer, took my shoes in my hand, camera in my pack, looked for the safest way to cross, that would also cause the least disturbance to the environment, and gingerly stepped into the river. The water was cold and invigorating. It flowed with a speed that pushed harder against me than anticipated but I compensated quickly and within a few minutes, stepping from a long rock outcropping to series of other rocks I made it across without getting much deeper than my knees. I put my shoes on and headed back to the vantage point where I believed there would be the shot I was looking for. Here I was rewarded with a handful of frames that spoke to this place unlike any other shot I had taken that day, and made the final piece truly beyond what it would have been otherwise.

Once I was done and back in the relative safety of my vehicle with the heat blasting on my feet, I realized that that is what makes a great final story- the willingness to take the risk, to do what you need to do to get the shot, as long as no one or nothing is getting hurt or damaged. What is it going to take to really tell a story deeply? Sometimes you don’t know until you get in the field, and other times if you can, you plan for it. But it is the experience of knowing how to take the calculated risk, to do what it takes to safely (personally and environmentally) get the shot, that really distinguishes an experienced production company. Whether it is in the out of doors, a factory or a studio setting. And while this was just a small production and a small moment, it was a real watershed moment for me. (see what I did there?) It’s been many years since that moment on that in between day in Grafton Notch, but it still sticks with me even today. Do what you can to get the shot.