People who produce adventure films featured in the Banff Mountain Film Festival shouldn't be stereotyped as hard-core, muscle-powered adrenaline junkies with a death wish.
"I'd never been ice climbing before I went to Alaska to help shoot Blue Obsession," said Jordan Halland of Coeur d'Alene.
Halland, 31, is the first Inland Northwest filmmaker to help produce one of about 50 films selected from more than 300 entries for screening at the fabled Alberta festival.
He introduced the 8-minute movie to a full house at the Bing Crosby Theater this past weekend. Blue Obsession was among 21 top films featured in the Banff Festival's World Tour.
"We do have one common denominator," he said. "The independent filmmakers competing at Banff aren't driving Mercedes or weekending in Europe."
Blue Obsession is the brainchild of Alaska ice climber Alan Gordon, who had been chipping away for months with a Canon D5 digital SLR video camera to capture his fascination with the beautiful and ever-changing icefalls of the Juneau Icefields.
This year, he made the commitment to a video focused on climbing around the Mendenhall Glacier, one of the most viewed glaciers in the world, yet rarely explored because of the danger of being around constantly moving chunks of ice the size of tall buildings.
Gordon heard about Halland's film-producing skills through a mutual friend."My friend asked if this ice climber could send me some footage to review," Halland recalled.
"Honestly, a lot of people say they have an idea for a movie, but their footage doesn't back up their desire. But I took one look at Alan's stuff and was blown away. The clips were beautifully shot inside glaciers that looked like a foreign planet."
Halland was onboard in a heartbeat, even though he knew the crunch was on. He flew to Alaska only about a month before Banff film entries were due.
"Alan knew how to make ice climbing look amazing, but he was looking for somebody to help make a story out of what he'd already shot," Halland said.
"I helped take his footage and passion for glaciers and bring it to Blue Obsession."
Gordon sometimes had trouble getting friends to help him with the climbing and filming because the glaciers are notoriously unstable.
"We were working around crevasses that were 150 feet deep," Halland said. "If you fell in one, you were dead.
"He taught me some basic ice climbing stuff for moving around the glaciers, but basically he would set me up in one spot and I'd shoot while he climbed.
"Alan had invented an ingenious pulley system to hang a camera between two spots and get amazing aerial shots from where we couldn't go."
Making the cut for the Banff Mountain Film Festival is like making the Olympics for an independent filmmaker, he said.
"Some people call Banff the Sundance of mountain filmmaking," he said. "For the alpinist, mountain culture enthusiast, skier, snowboarder, mountain biker - this is The Show. It's an unbelievable honor."
