Elfshot: Gros Morne Trip and Filming

Monday, March 28, 2011

Gros Morne Trip and Filming

Moose pausing for a drink

I spent Friday and Saturday in Gros Morne National Park. It was a quick trip and the weather was mostly white out snow squalls, but its still such an amazing place that I was able to fit in visits with old friends, spot a thirsty moose along the side of the road, fill myself up on Northern Peninsula morel mushrooms, garden grown salsa and local berries, have a caribou sausage breakfast (with a bakeapple cheesecake desert!), hike through drifting snow at Western Brook Pond and get a little bit of flintknapping in as well.

Fitting the new blade to the old handle

The flintknapping was the purpose for the trip. Ron O'Connell from VidCraft came up from Corner Brook to film the session so that Parks Canada would have footage of stone working for the upgraded displays at L'Anse aux Meadows. I knapped a Dorset Palaeoeskimo knife blade and fit it into an antler handle that I'd prepared earlier. The handle is based on an artifact from Port au Choix, which we talked about during the filming, so Parks may find uses for the footage at other sites in the Province.

filming in the theatre

We filmed in the theatre at the Parks Canada Visitor Centre at Rocky Harbour. While Ron was filming me work, a few Parks Canada staff watched and assisted. Mike Burzynski took a couple hundred photos of the session and thanks to Ron's studio set up and Mike's keen photographer's eye - the photos turned out amazing. So by the end of the 3 hour session we had the whole process documented on both hi-def video and still photography. Mike gave me a CD of the images and said I could use them on my blog. I've only included a couple here today, because they are so good and so thorough, that I want to present them as a separate photo essay at a later date to show all the stages of knapping a Droset Palaeoeskimo knife.

Fused glass cod at the Deer Lake Airport

I love the west coast, and Gros Morne, in particular. The last time I was on the left side of the province was last spring for the Craft Council AGM. The stone that I used in the Dorset knife demonstration was some of the chert that I collected on the Port au Port Peninsula on the way home from that trip. During the AGM weekend we visited craft producers in the area, including Urve Manuel's stained glass studio, where we saw a large piece that she was working on for the Deer Lake Airport. Since I flew in this time, I was lucky enough to see the completed work installed.