Late as always

Struggling with my thoughts has delayed a post to the blog. Chasing Ice was the film that got the most reaction from me as I see it was with others. Reading Tiara’s post thought provoking as it was, I still cannot get behind the film as a whole. I agree that integrating a human aspect to this global dilemma was essential for this film to provoke public awareness. However, the film became the public awareness of James Balog the artist, than the awareness of what he was trying to document. The filmmaker along with James Balog both use technology to their benefit with some amazing results. Balog and his engineering skillz capture the visually unseen narrative of global warming. Filmmaker Jeff Orlowski does an incredible job with sound. The sound we are actually hearing is not the sound being made in those beautiful shots instead he used with other techniques contact microphones. I know it sounds fairly clear what contact microphones are but if not here is Wikipedia’s definition, “A contact microphone, otherwise known as a pickup or a piezo, is a form of microphone designed to sense audio vibrations through solid objects. Unlike normal air microphones, contact mics act as transducers which pick up vibrations and convert them into a voltage which can then be made audible.” So cool… Orlowski picked what sounds he felt best suited each glacier crumbling moment. Back to my issue with the film, with all the amazing technological tools being used we instead get practically an entire film of Balog, his leg, crying family members, and Balog’s own tears. What about global warming? The pretty pictures have so much to say, but too bad for them the artist had more. At one point in the Q&A Balog stated that he was trying to, “reveal the truth through images,” I think he was able to do that, but his ego as an artist became the focus of the film not the actual truth he was risking life and limb for. I am not sure if it was Orlowski’s choice to make Balog’s personal story the primary focus rather than global warming, all I can say is this film was good if you wanted to know about James Balog the artist and his life’s accomplishments.