Award-Winning Film, ‘Paddle to Seattle’ Edited by Local Film Instructor
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Ben Gottfried, a Digital Film & Video Production Instructor at The Art Institutes International Minnesota, recently assisted two adventure filmmakers, J.J. Kelley and Josh Thomas, to organize and edit their footage from a three-month, 1,300 mile trek on handmade wooden kayaks down the Inside Passage from Alaska to Seattle, Washington into a film. The adventurers shot over 65 hours of footage and Gottfried edited the piece into an 85-minute film titled, “Paddle to Seattle: Journey Through the Inside Passage.”
Paddle to Seattle is now starting to tour the film festival circuit and garner some attention. It competed with over 70 films and took the coveted Audience Favorite award at the Port Townsend Film Festival in September and is slated to run at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival in November 2009 and at the Minneapolis Underground Film Festival on December 6, 2009.
In the film, Kelley and Thomas captured what one reviewer called "a stunning display of the awe-inspiring landscape that is the Pacific Northwest." But Paddle to Seattle is also as much buddy comedy as it is outdoor/adventure film, a testament to how humor can work to offset the isolation, boredom and frustration that can accompany a trip of this magnitude.
Paddler Magazine's review of the film includes, “What they did have was the discipline to collect 65 hours of film and the vision to turn those shots of spitting oysters, of a bloated seal carcass, of maggots devouring an apple core into 85 minutes of the best feature film about paddling produced in the last decade.”
Regarding the process, Gottfried says, "The best part of editing something like this is that they often left it up to me to scour countless hours of material to find and shape a story, which can be thrilling when it starts to come together. The worst part about editing this type of thing is that I have to scour countless hours of material to find the story. Still, in the end, it's well worth it when you can see a theater full of people react how you envisioned they would back when you were sitting alone at your computer at three in the morning cutting that scene together."