How It All Began
While on one of our regular freshwater stewardship field-rounds, with one of the island’s school groups, we talked about the idea of making the island’s freshwater story more accessible, and to a larger audience. Why shouldn’t everyone get the chance to see the story of our island’s watersheds, their natural systems and to learn more about their roles in our freshwater-on-an -island? At the time Covid was making community get-togethers a challenge, yet the messages were so important.
Making an educational film was an opportunity not to be missed, it all made sense, if we could find funding! And the idea of a "SSI Watershed Stewardship" film series, in collaboration with our island stewardship groups, was born. As a result of a generous donation from Nancy Braithwaite we were able to start down an island’s freshwater and watersheds stewardship film-making road, a first film short would be a calling card for what we can do!
After sitting down with some of our island youths (FreshWater Catalogue volunteers), and our film’s creative director and videographer, we built an “Our SSI Water storyboard” short film, which is the image you see in this post.
Our brain storming with the youth group captured some of a Our SSI water key elements:
1] We Are An island (and rainwater is our only freshwater supply) 2] Balance - island water may be (is) a delicate balance
3] Rainwater (precipitation IS limited and seasonal) natural systems thrive/survive, help to maintain balance
4] Weather pattern changes (do) may be happening?
5] What can (should) we all do?
We thought about some simple animations for the film - a set of scales of justice depicting the elements that control balance, but ran out of funds for this one. Nevertheless the result, our first(!) Freshwater Salt Spring film short is great!
To-date our Freshwater Salt Spring film short has had approaching 1,000 hits (and counting), and a great selection of testimonials. With additional film-making funds we can can develop some of the threads introduced in our first film short into a full-blown documentary film, sharing more of the science and what our island stewardship groups are doing! Building on success!
