Eighteen days without a single usable shot
The herd moved at night for almost three weeks. What that does to a crew, a budget, and a schedule — and why we did not…
Straight card pulls from the season, logged as they came off the cards. Frame numbers and timecodes are as recorded on location, and nothing on this sheet has been colour graded.
Contact sheet
Rushes, straight off the cards
Sheet 07
Reel A-014
8 frames
F-0114
00:41:22
F-0231
06:12:04
F-0388
11:55:47
F-0402
18:03:19
F-0455
21:40:08
F-0511
26:17:53
F-0603
33:29:11
F-0740
44:08:36
Frame numbers and timecodes are as logged on location. Nothing on this sheet has been colour graded — these are straight card pulls.
Ep 01 · Frame 0412
Frame of the season
The matriarch who remembers the road
She is fifty-eight years old and the only reason her family is still alive. When the seasonal pans failed in the third year of drought, she walked her herd 210 kilometres to a spring she last drank from as a calf — a route none of the younger cows had ever travelled.
Our tracking team followed at 400 metres for eleven weeks. She never once stopped to search. She simply walked, and everyone behind her learned the way.
- Estimated age
- 58 years
- Herd size
- 19, including four calves under three
- Distance walked on camera
- 210 km in 34 days
- Filming distance held
- Minimum 400 m at all times
Field journal
Notes written in camp, published unedited
Weekly dispatches from the crew while the season was still being shot — including the weeks nothing worked.
Rigging a camera 48 metres up and leaving it there
Nine months, four rigs, one lightning strike. The full method, the failure rate, and the two things we would build differently next time.
We moved camp twice because the ice would not hold
The freeze came late for the third year running. What that meant for the shoot, and what our guide's family has recorded about it since 1974.
Field dispatch
One letter a month, sent from wherever the crew is
Shoot notes, unpublished stills, and next season's schedule before it goes public. No sponsorship, no forwarding, one click to stop it.
Roughly 11 letters a year. We have never sent two in a week.