Birdsong
Duration: 2:47, Format: Quicktime
Broadband connection recommended
It was a green wall used as a green screen to transmit a green message.
A student in the new Environment, Sustainability and Society program, Lars Boggild was racking his brain for an idea for a creative assignment when he came upon one of the freshly-painted walls in the Life Sciences Centre. Then the words started flowing.
“Knowing that they had just repainted the LSC, I decided to go in one night and film against one of the green walls to achieve a green screen effect, which to my amazement, actually worked,” says Mr. Boggild. He replaced the green background with breathtaking images of nature (a forest glade, a field of flowers, the v-shaped path of Canadian geese across the sky) in the finished video.
Not only did he submit the video to his professors, he also entered it in an Environment Canada contest to mark 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity. Now back home in Vancouver, B.C., he just heard that he won the contest and is being flown to Ottawa for the grand re-opening of the Canadian Museum of Nature on Saturday, May 22. As well, his poem will be shown at the Biosphere in Montreal for the rest of 2010.
Called "Birdsong," the poem conveys his sense of wonder for nature—“Nature, the playground of life, is valuable because it is knocking down, astounding, all inspiring, wonderful,” as he says in his poem, adding at one point, “I love you nature.”
“It was really important to me that everything I said in
the poem was factual, so I researched it pretty carefully,”
explains Mr. Boggild. “I'd heard lectures from people such as
Janine Benyus regarding biomimicry and was really inspired. I
wanted to bottle that feeling.”
— Marilyn Smulders
LINK: Canadian Biodiversity Information Network's Nature Matters! contest