A Bow Valley grizzly bear took her place front and centre on the big screen in Toronto earlier this month as the NFB interactive documentary, Bear 71, created by Jeremy Mendes and Canmore filmmaker Leanne Allison, won a Digi Award.
The interactive multi-user experience documentary was awarded top prize in the Best Web Series: Non-fiction category. The event, which took place at Toronto’s The Carlu, is the nation’s premier annual showcase celebrating Canada’s top companies, products and people of the digital media industry.
Produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), Bear 71 was created by a team of designers and digital technicians developed from Allison’s idea. Narrated from the point of view of an omniscient momma bear, the documentary shares the story of how Bear 71 tries her best to navigate the all-too-real and unfortunately life-threatening human-created maze of the Rockies landscape surrounding the busy towns of Canmore and Banff.
The result of a large collaborative process, the 20-minute film incorporates a digital landscape map with still and video images captured by sensor-triggered cameras installed on backcountry trails throughout the Rockies. Navigating by keyboard or mouse, the viewer passes over lakes, forest, rivers, the railroad and highway encountering wolves, bears, cougars, deer, lynx, ravens and wolverines. Pullout segments share individual animals’ stories – the name researchers gave it, the distances it travelled, how it crossed over or under the highway, how many young it raised. One option allows the viewer to become part of the picture, literally, via their own desktop camera.
Unlike traditional film projects however, Bear 71 can only be viewed on a computer screen with Internet access. Having Bear 71 come out on top in front of a predominantly urban audience in a decidedly technological format is nonetheless a great development in the story, Allison said.
“I think this is the Seventh Digi award the NFB has received so they are definitely out in front with this new medium,” Allison said. “And yes, you don’t get much more urban than the Digi awards in Toronto, so the fact that a story about a grizzly bear in Banff is getting attention from that audience is great.”
While this is the first digital project Allison has ever co-created, she’s no stranger to awards. Her first film, Being Caribou, which captured the adventure she and husband Karsten Heuer experienced travelling on foot for five months with the migrating Porcupine caribou herd across 1,500 kilometres of Yukon and Alaska wilderness in effort to raise awareness of how drilling for oil in the herd’s calving grounds would threaten their survival, earned her a Gemini Award for Best Nature, Science and Environmental Documentary. It also garnered several festival awards, including Best Environmental Film at both the Telluride, U.S. and Kendal, U.K., mountain film festivals.
Her subsequent film, Finding Farley, shared the adventures of her, Heuer, their then two-year-old son, Zev, and family dog travelling across Canada mostly by rail, sailboat and canoe to visit iconic Canadian writer Farley Mowat at his Cape Breton home. Visiting the settings of Mowat’s books along the way, the film earned her several top awards, including Grand Prize and People’s Choice at the 2009 Banff Mountain Film Festival.
Sharing the poignant and sobering story of Bear 71 on the giant screen of the Banff Centre’s Eric Harvie Theatre during this year’s BMFF in November remains a highlight, Allison admitted.
“For me, personally, the presentation of Bear 71 at the Banff Mountain Film Festival was the most rewarding experience so far in the journey of this project getting out in the world,” Allison said.
“The emotion in the Eric Harvie Theatre at the end of the presentation was palpable. One can only assume people are feeling this one-on-one at their computers also, since that is how projects are judged at the Digi awards.”
To experience Bear 71, visit http://bear71.nfb.ca/#/bear71
