newsminer.com

Lacie Stiewing

Paula Daabach

Barrow isn’t as well-known in the filmmaking world as New York City or Los Angeles, but for 10 days in May, assistant professor Maya Salganek and University of Alaska Fairbanks students ran a film school in the northern village to make a documentary about sea ice research.

Salganek, assistant professor of digital media at UAF, said she took a small group of undergraduate and postgraduate students to Barrow to a field school led by the Alaska Geophysical Institute’s Hajo Eicken.

Salganek’s students taped Eicken’s 23 students as they went through 10 subjects including Inupiaq ice knowledge, ice strength and satellite remote sensing. The field school was led by researchers from the U.S., Canada, New Zealand and Japan, Eicken said in an e-mail.

The 50 hours of footage captured by Salganek and her students will be turned into supplemental DVD to accompany a textbook about sea ice. It will also be available in a public archive at UAF.

“After discussing and planning this with Maya for almost a year, it’s great to see this high-quality documentary footage be used for a textbook as well as for public access and education,” Eiken said.

The final product will also include some of the 20 hours of previous footage Salganek shot when she accompanied Eicken on a research mission earlier in the year.

This was the first year for the film school, a course officially titled “Visual Anthropology and Science Documentary Research,” and Salganek said she would like to repeat the course again, but there are no plans to do so at this time.

Interest in sea ice is increasing as more research is focusing on climate change. Eicken said sea ice helps regulate the Earth’s climate and many animals and industries rely on it as a platform, transportation pathway and source of food.

“Sea ice performs a number of important services, not just for the local communities, but also for the Earth as a whole,” Eiken said.

Filming in Barrow proved to have unique challenges. Salganek said students had to battle wind and the glare from sunlight hitting white snow to capture quality footage. And while concentrating on filming, students had to worry about cold weather affecting their equipment and battery life.

Tyson Hansen, an undergraduate broadcast journalism major, said the environmental factors forced him to be extremely prepared for any problems that could appear during the day.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” he said. “It was much more intense than I expected.”

But other things balanced Barrow’s challenges. Hansen said one of his favorite moments in Barrow was a demonstration of how to trap and tag ring seals for tracking purposes, because it reminded him that sea ice wasn’t only an empty, expansive space.

“It added life to sea life,” Hansen said.

Eicken said this was the second time he has conducted a field school in Barrow and although his students had some extra company, both groups worked undistracted.

“They did a great job in staying inconspicuous,” Eicken said.

Salganek recalled a lighthearted moment when the two groups decided to switch roles and the researchers filmed some footage while the film students measured ice thickness.

Both Hansen and Salganek said they enjoyed working with the research students and the film school provided a chance for two groups of people who wouldn’t normally cross paths to learn from each other.

“It was a fantastic opportunity for hands-on work and I’m sure the students benefited,” Salganek said.