ShoreZone collaboration brings filmmaking to Arctic students

August 17th 1:11 pm | Hannah Heimbuch    

When you ask 18-year-old Tracy Burns of Kaktovik what she wants to do with her adult life, she doesn't beat around the bush.

"I'm going to be a film maker," said Burns who graduated from high school in May. "This is the thing I want to do."

This month, she was one of several young people from the village who attended a filmmaking workshop with Maeva Gauthier, marine ecologist and outreach coordinator for Coastal and Ocean Resources Inc., and representatives from the Media Action Project of Kodiak.

Gauthier's company is one of the primary entities working on ShoreZone, a coastal habitat mapping project that aims to document all, or most, of Alaska's shores with high quality images and habitat information.

ShoreZone representatives brought their efforts to Kotzebue this summer, endeavoring to add Kotzebue Sound to its mapping conquests.

That intensive project inspired Gauthier to take this side trip into film making workshops, held this year in Kaktovik and Point Lay. She sought out young people who wanted to document local sights and issues and incorporate those into conversations with their elders.

"I thought it would be great to have a cultural angle to the ShoreZone project and get the community involved," Gauthier said. "The goals were to really give an opportunity for kids or for students to learn how to make a movie and also get them involved and connect them with the elders in the community. It's a great way to share knowledge and document traditional knowledge."

Much like the professional mappers do to retrieve their imagery, student filmmakers hauled themselves into helicopters, armed with cameras.

Students made short videos on a variety of subjects.

Burns, accompanied by her 22-year-old sister Brittany, made a roughly four-minute film about erosion in Kaktovik.

"I had two interviews with elders, and I asked them (about) the changes that they've seen," Burns said. "Where (are) the main parts of the island that are eroding? I went to the bluffs where it's actually eroding and I filmed as many different angles as I could. I went on the beach where you can see where the tundra is falling in."

Opportunities to illustrate the film's subject matter were ample.

"It was actually melting right in front of our eyes. I filmed the permafrost, fencing collapsed into water. We had a high tide. It was kind of flooding our runway, so I filmed that."

As the Arctic often draws crowds of curious creative types, Burns has found a number of opportunities to learn about the film making process over the years in Kaktovik.

"I grew up around people making documentaries," Burns said. "With their big cameras and all their equipment."

Several times, she was able to tag along with documentary projects, assisting and learning techniques she could later apply to her own projects in her school's drama class — or this most recent opportunity.

"There's a film school in Anchorage and I hope to enroll in it next year," Burns said. In the meantime, Gauthier is hoping that Burns will submit her film to the Anchorage Film Festival.

Curious viewers can also catch the film and the others created through the Kaktovik and Point Lay workshops on the Media Action Project website. They will be posted in the near future.

The Arctic Slope Community Foundation and the North Slope Borough supported the workshops. A number of other partner organization contributed to the project's organization as well, Gauthier said, and they already have interest in possibilities for next year.

"I got some interest from the Northwest Arctic Borough in Kotzebue," Gauthier said. "If the communities there are interested in something similar, we could work towards that."

Hannah Heimbuch can be reached at hheimbuch@reportalaska.com.

 

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