Josh Fowler and I opened our documentary Heart of Stone with a chance encounter in Steele, Alabama.
Southeastern Climbers Coalition activist Brad McLeod walked a cliffline with a local landowner and a realtor, talked some turkey, and shook hands at the base of the access trail. The ball was rolling on access to a climbing that had been shut down since the early 80s, when, as the story goes, one too many climbers traipsed through another landowners tomato farm at the top.
In the few months since then, McLeod and the SCC sealed the deal on 25 acres of land, including 1400 linear feet of sandstone cliffs, an access trail, and even a trailer house at the base. Like all SCC purchases, this land will be multi-use, open to all, and preserved for future generations.
To really follow through, of course, the SCC needs to raise the money to pay off the note. That's where Chaco Sandals and Rock/Creek Outfitters come in. A long-time supporter of greenspace initiatives, Chaco is teaming up with Rock/Creek (SNEWS and Backpacker Magazine's 2009 Online Retailer of the Year) to raise $5000 toward the purchase, by donating a portion of ALL sandal sales for a period of time through Rock/Creek.
Go here to learn more.
Josh and I were tapped to create a promo for this partnership. You can see it in HD below:
Chaco and Rock/Creek - Summer of Steele from Andrew Kornylak on Vimeo.
Much more cliffline (some say the best) is still privately-owned at Steele, but this plot gives the climbing community a foothold in the region, and a strong position from which to negotiate with other landowners for access. We're neighbors now. Good neighbors. So don't screw it up!
Before the first airing, I was hired to shoot a few 360-degree panoramic photographs of the interior of a prison: the cells, the yard, the common areas, etc. I spent the day with Executive Producer Greg Henry of Part2Pictures at Hays State Prison, near Rome, Georgia.
Click here to see the resulting virtual tour of a prison cell and the yard.
Technically, shooting a 360-degree panoramic for this type of virtual tour is straightforward. Almost any camera and lens combination will work, but the wider the field of view of each shot, the fewer shots you will need to cover the entire 360-degree field of view. The critical part, if you want to do it well, is using a tripod that will allow you to rotate your camera about the lens rather than the camera base. This eliminates parallax errors when you are stitching the images together (Tricky to do handheld - try it.) Ideally you will use a tripod that can do this rotation horizontally (hula hooping) as well as vertically (jumping rope). Then you can get the sky and the ground while the camera is still attached to the tripod. Crank those images through some special software and voila: QTVR, or in this case, a Flash VR.
I couldnt get my hands on a true 360 "spherical" pano head in time for this shoot, only one that gave me proper offset horizontal "cylindrical" swivel. No problem: With a full frame camera and 8mm fisheye lens, you can get nearly full 360-degree coverage in 3 shots. Yes, I know, for you pano experts out there, there were some nadir and zenith issues. Don't sweat me. We nailed it.
I took the photos on a Nikon D3 with a Sigma 8mm lens, and a Manfrotto 303PLUS tripod head. The folks at Channels did the stitching. Temporary accomodations provided by the State of Georgia.
Heart of Stone - HD from Andrew Kornylak on Vimeo.
activism to preserve and protect climbing areas in the Southeast US.
"...a masterpiece that will help climbers and access for years to come." - Dawson Wheeler, co-owner of Rock/Creek Outfitters
"The best climbing film I have seen yet!" - Kurt Smith
"...a great example of positive, constructive film-making and a clear indicator of where web-based climbing movies will be heading: high quality and large format." - Peter Beal, from Mountains and Water Blog
Our day with Brad McLeod of the Southeast Climbers Coalition was a great example of serendipity. Josh and I had hit the road with Brad one day to visit about a half-dozen closed crags around Alabama, just to get some far shots and chat with him about the project. While we set up a shot of the crags outside Steele, Alabama, Brad mentioned that a couple days ago he had chanced on a For Sale sign in a nearby yard. He had the realtor's number in his phone. I suggested we call her up, knowing full well that the landowners in these parts have been stonewalling against climbing here for years. Well, a miracle happened that day - the realtor came out with a friendly landowner who offered to show us some of the cliffs above his property. We rolled footage on the whole encounter - a classic look at how the Southern sausage is made. That is the scene that opens the film.
Heart of Stone also features some unusual techniques. Most of the footage came from a Sony XDCAM EX1 HS camera, with some b-roll with a Canon HV1. The film also contains stills and stillmotion clips, which are 4K "ultra-HD" moving pictures which I shot entirely on a Nikon D3 still camera. See more stillmotion examples at my Vimeo site. Suprisingly the stillmotion blended well with the HD video footage and stills. I edited everything using Final Cut Pro.
