Faerie Houses for PBS

Greetings Everyone!

   As you may recall, Mountain Lakes PBS did a short documentary segment on my work in 2011 for their Mountain Lake Journal program. You can view the show here. They came and visited during the winter and I made a large Ice Castle sculpture just for them. Here is a shot of Derek filming a close-up of the Ice Castle. 

 
Here is the Ice Castle at twilight:

The Producer and Head Cameraman is Derek Muirden and a nicer person you'll never find.  He is a consummate gentleman with a wry sense of humor and an artist's eye for composition and beauty. Working with him was a real joy.  And the great news is that we got to work together again a few weeks ago!

    Derek wanted to expand the previously produced segment into a full half-hour program and he really wanted to focus on summer time and Faerie houses this time, as well as touch in on the Environmental art. We shot tons of footage on two very beautiful days.  The first day he had me scrambling to set up a bunch of Faerie houses in various spots in my garden. Fortunately I had several houses on hand to use.

There were also a few flowers left in bloom so we had fun visualizing where various houses could go and then making little tableau set-ups for him to shoot. 

 Since I'm a shy person this was a bit of a push beyond my comfort zone as he also wanted to shoot footage of me making things and actually working. So we set up some shots of that as well. I demonstrated gluing some pine-cone scales onto a roof I was working on. We also set up a segment where I collected and pinned together the leafy roof for this house and he took footage of the process. 

My work is very slow to observe, generally... so it was a huge challenge for me to pin these leaves in place and get them right and do it faster than I normally do because he wanted to show how the process works. It was a stretch as I say, but perhaps it will be interesting for people to see how I do these fresh leaf roofs... but first we have to wait and see if the footage even makes it into the final cut!
     After the roof was created, I set up the house in my favourite little mossy nook and we waited for that just-right combination of sun, wind and overhead leaves to open up the tree canopy with dappled splashes of sunlight.

After the first day of shooting was over, I set up my camera again and took some twilight images of one of the houses which happened to be outfitted with some micro LED lights... I just love how these little houses glow when that magic hour descends upon the garden.
 

Next post I'll conclude the story of filming for the PBS show with Derek Muirden.