Announcement!

Homework inspired me to take a look at podcasts more seriously.

Topics I'll cover range from writing tips, what I know about photography, life as a writer/artist/filmmaker, projects I have in the works, making of those projects, and whatever else people write in that are FAQs to writing.

If anyone wants to submit topics and questions email me at l.annahlstrom@hotmail.com

Hopefully homework will start becoming merciful and I can start distributing the podcasts this winter.

Results of mental pingpong

As I said earlier on my Tumblr account, the French Embassy requested for my school’s current students and grads to make content for the UN Climate Change Project exhibit. (Not completely sure how that came about but I am still squealing slash pinching myself.) Deadline for the final project is August 25th. (Summary due July 25th and a pre-production/first draft is due August 13th.) So that means a documentary in six weeks.

As I mentioned on and off during posts on Tumblr and other social media sites, I live on a piece of reforested land right smack dab in view of Canada. Wind and root rot damage made it so bad up here a person from the state’s reforestation project said that my family’s property is the worst piece of land that he had ever seen. (Heavily logged by Boise, wind tore down the remaining trees, and was so over run by weeds you were literally walking through a jungle.) This got the property a grant to reforest twenty acres (the acres we bought from the state in the devastation that it was) that led to a mission to grow a forest. Over the last four/five years I’ve documented bits and pieces of the process. Showing a barren landscape coming alive again. Dozens of before and after pictures in addition to knowledge on habitat building for species of concern. Plus the year my family got started on this project I took an Environmental Science course to better understand the dynamics behind everything that I was having to do at home regarding the project.

For years now I've wanted to do some form of documentary about the project that's regrowing a forest and this looks like a great chance. DNR actually got interested when my mom mentioned it because the state program we used isn't widely known and a little PR would be good for them. It isn't the long documentary I wanted to do originally with this story, but it’s a start.

Consider it my prelude to what I’ll be doing in the future when drone cameras are 100% legal. (C’mon, aerial shots - what viewer doesn’t get impressed by that? Motto of all creative people is “up the game.” I just like to take the tricky game ladder up.)

All I need now is to find out where I misplaced my tripod...