Are you a conservation connoisseur?

Potential scientific solutions to global problems are often not shared in a format that can be easily accessed by a wide audience. Films, however, are a powerful communication tool with a global reach.

Please help the Society for Conservation Biology by donating through our ChipIN crowdfunding campaign. Follow this link and click on the ChipIn button to the right to help support a workshop and a public conservation film screening that will be at the North America Congress for Conservation Biology meeting and will take place July 17th, 2012 in Oakland California, Website: http://www.scbnacongress.org/

The SCB is hosting a workshop featuring an incredible line up of conservation scientists, journalists and documentary filmmakers with backgrounds in small and large media outlets such as ABC, BBC, CNN, Green 21, National Geographic Society, the New York Times and PBS. This group of diverse and distinguished panelists will explore with congress scientists how to effectively portray conservation issues through film. Workshop participants will also spend time in smaller groups learning the basics of filmmaking and how the industry works.

In the evening, we open our doors to the general public and will showcase clips of films that tell stories of conservation and the state of our environment in the 21st century. These films have been produced by collaborations between filmmakers and scientists and they will join us to talk about the process of filmmaking and shed light on how to tell gripping stories that inspire global conservation.

Conservation Media’s photo, entitled Sage-grouse in Gas Country is one of thirty jury-selected photos for the 2012 Environmental Photography Exhibit at the American Mountaineering Museum February 24th.

Conservation Media is pleased to announce that our film Peak to Peak is an Official Selection at the 2011 American Conservation Film Festival!

Our film will screen at 7:15p on Saturday, November 5th in the Byrd Auditorium at the National Conservation Training Center in Sepherdstown, WV.

Peak to Peak is the second film we’ve had chosen for this festival, with Disturbance being our first submission and an Official Selection in 2009.  Peak to Peak has been well received where ever it has screened, and there is still the possibility it could receive the Audience Choice Award.  Better yet, tell us what YOU think of our film.

Conservation Media is pleased to announce that we have picked up two, count ‘em, two Merit Awards from the 34th Annual International Wildlife Film Festival in Missoula, AND two Finalist Designations! There may be more Official Selections to come!

Our film Crossroads, embedded below, picked up a Merit Award for Conservation Message and a Merit Award for Made in Montana film, the home of the long-running, prestigious film festival.

More to come!

Conservation Media is happy to announce that our film Crossroads is a Finalist in the Public Service Announcement category at the 34th International Wildlife Film Festival in Missoula, Montana this May.

If you haven’t seen the film, you can see it below:

On December 13th, 2010, the US Fish & Wildlife Service published a long-awaited report on the potential listing of the wolverine (Gulo gulo) under the Endangered Species Act.

Rare by nature, the 30lb (14kg) wolverine has achieved mythical status for its ability to kill moose hindered by deep snow and to drive wolves and grizzly bears from their kills. Scavenging and hunting, wolverines roam the high country where they depend on deep snowpack for denning. In fact, persistence of snowpack into late April is the greatest predictor of their occurrence, something that is measurably shifting due to climate change.

The USFWS report finds that protection under the Endangered Species Act is indeed warranted for the wolverine, but so great is the backlog of imperiled species, and so poor is the funding that protection for the wolverine must be deferred until the USFWS can deal properly with other priority species.

Although the report simultaneously acknowledges the imperiled status of the species and denies it protection, the report is at least significant in that it acknowledges that climate change impacts to habitat and connectivity are serious and reason to give rare and declining species like the wolverine federal protection.

Here is a recent HDR (High Dynamic Range) time lapse from our edit bay. To date, digital cameras still have problems simultaneously resolving details in bright and dark areas, and one solution for photography is to bracket the exposure of a composition and then merge the images with various software. It is not currently feasible to do this with video, but since time lapses are video created from stills, we can create HDR video.

To the left you can see examples of the three bracketed exposures, rendered into their own time lapses. To the right is the digitally merged version. The result is a time lapse with details in the dark areas (sagebrush) and details in the highlights (snow,clouds).

We could have made the entire piece lighter overall, but we chose simply to subtly bring out the details in the sagebrush and cottonwoods, while capping the IRE peaks.

This process is very time consuming, but the results are well worth it.

We’ll post more here later, so check back.

We are pleased to announce that Open Space, our production for Sonoran Institute, has picked up another Official Selection at the CINE International Film Festival in Missoula. We will be at the opening reception on October 19th at 6 p.m. Filmmakers at the Roxy drinking beer and talking conservation! What could be better?

We are pleased to announce that our short films have picked up two more Official Selections, and in the same festival no less! Open Space and Crossroads both made the cut at the Colorado Environmental Film Festival this year. We plan on attending, so we’ll see you there!

We used our Canon 7D on a jib arm while producing Crossroads. We packed it out to a sage grouse lek and grabbed some sunset lit jibs to use with our sunrise grouse content, also captured with the 7D. If the 7D has one thing going for it, it is that it’s built like a tank; it took nearly 30lbs to counter-balance it on a 10′ arm.

Below is a video excerpt to show you how that jib shot worked into the short grouse film.

The workflow for the 7D is a bit convoluted right now, but we like the image quality, ONLY if we can successfully work around the aliasing and the rolling shutter problems.