Projects > A Fishy Tale
Chris Abram says :
"A Fishy Tale came about from my filming of The Lune Valley-Our Heritage. Whilst walking along the river Lune near Hornby one day I filmed some fishermen standing in the middle of the river trying to catch salmon. This led to a discussion about the fish and how they came to be in the river. Later, at top secret destinations, I filmed the trapping of male and female salmon, the extraction of eggs, the fertilisation and eventually the placement of thousands of eggs in breeding troughs. All this is done by volunteers on a shoe-string budget. Filming the trapping of the salmon was quite challenging because I was twelve feet underground, in very low light conditions and standing in very cold river water up to my knees with large, angry salmon biting my wellies! I used a combination of the natural light, what little there was, plus a 50w on board camera light. As you can imagine, colour balance was variable but I tried too film in "zoned" cones of light where either daylight was prominent, or vice versa. The colour balance was then touched up during editing.
"During my trip to film in Colorado I passed a "State Fish Breeding Station" but thought nothing of it. Until two days, and five hundred miles later, when I wondered if I would be allowed to film there and perhaps add it to the Lune Valley-Our Heritage piece. This I would then give to the fishermen for them to use as a fund raising aid. When I went back to the fish breeding station I found it to be a huge site with enormous concrete pens holding hundreds of thousands of fish, with automatic fish feeding systems and even its' own Visitor Centre. Something the Lune valley fishermen could only dream about. The head of the station, Adam Mendoza, was only too happy to give me an interview, in this remote landscape he hardly saw another human being apart from his small number of staff, and so I wired him up with a Sennheiser radio mic and got him to do pieces to camera as he gave me a conducted tour of the site. No rehearsals, gusty wind and conflicting lighting conditions were all problems that had to be dealt with "on the run". I filmed the Lune valley section using my big Sony 250 camera and dvcam tape and the Colorado piece on my Sony PD 170 mini dv camera.
"This film, contrasting the penury conditions of the Lune valley fishermen with the no expense spared Colorado operation, was then shown for the first time at the Lune valley fisherman's AGM."