The Production Blog

July 2007
Notification that the National Science Foundation has approved our grant application for the documentary comes too late to capture the summer research season. The crowd of scientists that had been working all summer were just heading home when we got the go-ahead, so we decided to aim for a Fall shoot. There will be fewer researchers, but we’re confident that something interesting will be going on, even in the rain.

October 2007
Our confidence was rewarded. Our first shoot in October focused on the Elder Creek watershed, a major tributary of the Eel River, where the Keck HydroWatch team is developing a ‘wireless watershed’ that will allow them to follow water through the watershed from their offices at UC Berkeley. This process involves installing a wide range of sensors and wireless communications equipment in diverse locales, from the canopies of giant Douglas firs to wells drilled into solid bedrock.

Researchers have dubbed the watershed Rivendell and named many of the key trees that are to be equipped with sensors. Treebeard, for example, is a particularly gnarly old-growth tree at the heart of the system. In order to protect the steep hillsides in the watershed, Reserve Manager Peter Steel has installed a network of ladders that link fallen trees so the researchers can work without disturbing the fragile soils.

All of these sensors require a lot of power, and because this portion of the reserve is off the grid, the team is installing solar panels on tall Douglas firs, along with sensors and wireless antennas for relaying data back to Berkeley. The first step in this process is to rig the trees with ropes, and this is the focus of our first shoot.

Professional arborist Wendell Beedle is rigging the tree with help from reserve manager Peter Steel and Keck technical expert Collin Bode. Wendell has climbed many of the tallest trees in the world. His job is to do the first ascent of the ancient trees where he will attach ropes that other team members can use to haul themselves and all of the equipment into the trees. In some cases, this will include up to 200 pounds of gear including solar panels, communications equipment, and storage batteries.

Rigging the trees is a time-consuming and exhausting project. The first step is shooting a piece of fishing line over a branch high in the tree. This is then used to pull a series of larger ropes over the branch. Once a climbing rope is securely over the branch, the rigger must struggle up through the often-dense foliage, clearing a path that later climbers will follow. When he reaches the top of the tree, he secures a rope around its trunk that will support the ropes of other climbers.

Also on this trip, we’re able to get an interview with Berkeley professor Todd Dawson and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist Rohit Salve. Dawson is a plant physiologist who will be in charge of designing and installing the sensors in the forest canopy. Salve is a geomorphologists who is monitoring wells dug deep into the ground throughout the watershed.

February 2008
KQED Quest (http://www.kqed.org/quest/), a TV, radio, web, and education series produced by KQED, a San Francisco PBS station, has decided to feature one of our research projects in their series. Quest explores science, environment and nature stories in Northern California. They will use the footage we’ve shot at Angelo on the Keck project. In exchange, they will shoot interviews on campus with two of the project's principal investigators, Inez Fung and Todd Dawson, and provide our project with that footage. This is an excellent way to make use of the footage we’ve shot, get additional interview footage we might not have been able to afford, and get additional public exposure for the Natural Reserve System.

March 2008
The winter weather at the reserve is not just questionable, it’s almost predictable – it’s going to rain. The only question is how hard and for how long. This shoot was set up to capture the process of installing solar panels in the treetops. Heavy rains threaten to cancel the climbs, but during a short weather break, Peter Steel and Collin Bode decide to install at least one set of panels. Once they’re in the trees, the rain and hail become more intense, but they are able to secure the solar panels and get back down safely. In addition to documenting this process, we’re also able to get a large amount of beautiful winter scenic footage with heavy rainfall on different stretches of the river. This will be invaluable for establishing the seasons at the reserve and as a lead-in for the Keck Hydrowatch story as they work to track water through the landscape.

June 2008

Our third shoot at the Angelo Reserve ran June 24-26. For that entire time, the air was smoky from nearby fires. There are hundreds of fires burning throughout northern California, and some researchers are considering pulling out their students due to the poor air quality.

For our crew, the lousy air quality meant we wouldn’t be getting any wide overviews of the reserve, so instead we focused on interviews and detail shots. The first morning, we hiked up above Blake’s Meadow to get shots of a goshawk nest that Ben Steel (Peter’s high school-aged son) had discovered while monitoring a climate change experiment. The nest contained three chicks, and Peter had set up a small observation blind.

Unfortunately, a video crew is a cumbersome creature. It takes time and patience to move from one location to another, so you have to get used to missing things. Researchers often greeted us with, “Too bad, a bear was just here,” or “Did you catch that bald eagle that flew up the river?” Darn, we missed both of those, and the adult goshawks flew away when we arrived, but we did get good shots of the chicks and some beautiful wildflowers on a small island in the river.

The next day was taken up mostly by interviews. We talked to:

Reserve Manager Peter Steel about the history of the Angelo Reserve and his role in keeping it running. Peter has an amazing range of skills. He can handle everything from installing solar panels in the tops of 60-meter Douglas-fir trees, to keeping up all the buildings scattered around the reserve, to maintaining the roads, to coordinating the activities of all the research projects and making sure everybody has everything they need.

Mary Power, Angelo’s faculty reserve manager and long-time visionary. Mary is a world-renowned, food-web ecologist and has been conducting research at the site since before it became a UC reserve. Many of the scientists working there today are her former graduate students who have gone on to successful careers.

To capture the research of Emily Lim (one of Todd Dawson’s graduate students), we enlisted Peter Steel to carry our “canopy cam” up a tall Doug-fir. He produced great footage of Emily fighting her way up through the understory to take samples. As she pushes her way through the understory, you see what hard work it is just moving around in the canopy, much less conducting research. Peter also captured footage of Emily working on the cable bridges that link a series of trees from the riverbank up the side of a steep hill.

We then interviewed Emily in a fern grotto near the science center. Her research focuses on how sword ferns and other understory plants get water. The leaves of these plants have very open pores to capture moisture from the air. Unfortunately, this also means that they lose a lot of moisture through their leaves, so they depend on fog for watering. If global warming changes the fog regime, that shift could have serious consequences for the composition of plants in the understory.

Our final interview was with graduate student Mike Lim who is working in Elder Creek where he studies the lifestyle of caddis fly larvae. Caddis flies are armored insects that go through many aquatic stages in their lifetimes. In their early stages, they are cloaked in mossy filaments; but, with each succeeding stage, they add more armor: first pine needles, later small rocks. Mike believes that the needles and rocks allow the larvae to graze in areas with the swift water. He’s testing this hypothesis by altering the coverings and observing how the larvae fare in an agitation-tank set up near the creek.

July 2008
The pressure was on as we approached our final shoot at the Angelo Reserve, July 21-24. This would be our longest shoot (four straight days!), and we still needed a number of key interviews. We were also hoping that the skies had cleared of smoke, so we could get overview footage of the watershed.

The moment we arrived, we began scouting for a location to interview Jacques Finlay, a researcher from the University of Minnesota working with the National Center for Earth Surface Dynamics (NCED). Jacques was leaving that evening, but he graciously took the time to talk to us about the stream-monitoring activities he and his team were doing. Following the interview, we tagged along with an NCED team on Fox Creek doing an inventory of the fish, insects, and invertebrates. There was no trail, so “tagging along” involved carrying the video gear along cliffs, through brush, and over fallen trees to reach the site. The effort paid off with some great footage of researchers capturing and measuring young steelhead trout.

After the shoot, we headed back to the Angelo homestead. For the last two shoots, reserve manager Peter Steel has allowed us to use his grandparent’s home as a base of operations. It’s wonderful: centrally located to all sections of the reserve, there’s a great kitchen for preparing food, and we have room for storing gear, transferring files, and carrying out all the prep work required to keep a shoot going. Peter maintains the house much as his grandparents left it. Heath Angelo’s prized hats and memorabilia still hang on the walls, and the entire house is lit by gaslight.

The next day, an interviewee hadn’t arrived, so we switched to Plan B, documenting another NCED survey crew. We got excellent interviews with two of the group leaders, Wendy Palin and Camille McNeely, about their work. We also had another chance to talk with Mary Power, as well as a local high school student who is working with Mary throughout the summer. That evening we worked late into the night at the science center, getting footage of the research crews processing their samples.

The next day we focused on Bill Dietrich. A geomorphologist, Bill is a principal investigator for both the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM) and NCED, and one of the main players in the Keck HydroWatch Project. We began at the science center, but after a few questions, Bill suggested we move to the waterfall on Elder Creek where, he said, there was some interesting geology. On the hike up the creek, we passed through an undisturbed native grassland featuring five-foot-tall bunchgrasses under towering oaks. Bill gave us some great sound bites on the locale, describing it as “a window into what California was like 200 years ago.”

At the waterfall, Bill explained how NCALM’s laser maps helped him figure out the area’s complex geology, because it allowed him to peel away the tree canopy and look at the bare ground. From this he was able to determine that the waterfall was actually migrating upstream over time.

Our final location with Bill was at the bottom of the Elder Creek watershed, where the Keck HydroWatch is focusing its attention. We had to hurry, because the sun was getting low and we were deep in the canyon, but Bill provided a great overview of his focus for this project. He’s intrigued by a concept he calls “rock moisture,” in which the large, older trees are thought to pull water up from the deep rocks and then use it to sustain not only themselves, but also the surrounding vegetation through the long, dry summers. If his take on the situation is correct, his theory is likely to have a major impact on how mature forests are managed in the future.

That day became a long one as we worked extra hours to get an overview of the watershed in the late afternoon sun. We piled into my car and headed for the Wright Memorial Overlook. I’d taken a two-hour hike to this point on one of my scouting trips, but this time, Peter Steel had gotten permission from the neighbors to drive up another route that would leave us with just a 20-minute hike. The route involved a locked gate and a neglected, former logging road. Peter laughed as I timidly edged around washed-out stretches of “road,” gunned the engine up steep hills, and gritted my teeth as low-hanging branches scraped the car’s roof. Naturally, since we’d gotten a late start, we were racing to reach our location before the sun got too low to light up the watershed.

Fortunately, we won the race and got some excellent footage of the different watersheds in the reserve, along with pans of the high surrounding mountains. Back in the car at last, we faced one final challenge — turning the car around. Won’t go into details here, but Peter once again had a great laugh.

The final day began with a shoot in the middle of the Eel River. The rocks were slick and treacherous, but Dave waded right in and set up his camera, so Rob and I followed. Our plan was to interview Jill Welter and two of her undergraduate students (Maria Moenkedick and Anika Bratt) from the College of St. Catherine in Minnesota. But as we were setting up, Mary Power arrived, and we decided to interview her first. She’d given a lot of thought to her message about the river food-web, and she delivered it beautifully. She even demonstrated her points by holding up large algal mats as she explained how their roles change through the year. Next we interviewed Jill and her students, as well as Paula Furey, a postdoctoral researcher in Mary’s lab who is an expert in algae.

After a quick break, we were off to interview Blake Suttle, one of Mary Power’s former graduate students, who has been conducting a long-term, climate-change study in the meadow near the Wilderness Lodge. The study has resulted in a number of significant discoveries and impressive publications, but the shoot teetered on the edge of control. The crew was exhausted, Blake was suffering from intense allergies, and the wind and sun were uncooperative. It was one of those shoots where everyone just had to grit their teeth and muscle through it. Fortunately, Blake is a natural on camera and was incredibly cooperative. Although the meadow was bone-dry and brown, we still got some good shots of him surveying his plots. He even stopped to tell interesting natural history stories about the flora and fauna.

Exhausted, we finally made our way back to the Angelo homestead to pack our bags. While the rest of the crew packed and cleaned up the house and gear, Rob transferred the last files from the camera chips to the hard drives. With everything safely duplicated, we headed home. Each day had been intense, shooting from early in the morning to late at night, but our efforts had been extremely productive. Now it’s on to logging, scripting, and editing the footage.

The whole crew deserves a lot of credit for their hard work, but one person deserves special recognition — Lobsang Wangdu, NRS staff and production assistant extraordinaire. Lobsang took the lead in feeding the crew for the last two trips. For this shoot, he did all of the shopping (I was out of town until the evening before the shoot began), and once at the Angelo, he prepared all the meals. This had three great results: the food was vastly improved, the crew was much happier, and I was free to focus on getting the footage we needed for the program. Thanks, Lobsang!