Photo credit: Kensie Wallner

Acclaim for North Dakota Video Producers

By Christopher P. Jacobs
Staff Writer

Several area moviemakers have achieved recognition of their efforts recently, one for a completed project and four for project proposals.

Les Sholes of Grand Forks has won an EMPixx Platinum Award for his internet video series, “Storyboard Tales” (storyboardtales.com). The 2010 competition had almost 700 entries, of which approximately ten percent received honors. Sholes “Storyboard Tales” website contains 27 short episodes of a minute or less, each of which is a darkly comic thriller along the lines of the old “Twilight Zone” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” TV series.

According to Sholes, the judges commented that his series “is addictive.”

The first ever Cold War Film Contest, organized by the Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile State Historic Site and the Friends of Oscar-Zero, has announced the four finalists in its competition. The contest was designed to encourage video projects that spotlight the Cooperstown, N.D. missile alert facility.

Recent MSUM film studies graduate Doug Mattis is one finalist, whose proposed movie “Cold Standoff” is a short suspense drama exploring Cold War paranoia and spy activity.

Dan Wakefield, a history teacher at Devils Lake High School, plans to involve his students to help produce a series of short vignettes examining the role of the military and civilians in North Dakota during the Cold War.

Larrie Wanberg, a retired Air Force officer and professor, plans to use a crew of area students to document the stories of five people who actually worked on the site while it was active, narrating their times as military personnel and recording their memories in a movie called “Warm Stories of a Cold War Missile Site.”

My own script “Cold Four” was the fourth finalist. It will be an approximately 25-minute science-fiction tale set in the near future, following the activities of two male and two female officers stationed at a remote winter outpost when something unexpected happens.

The four Cold War Film Contest finalists are to shoot their projects between now and the end of February, before the facilities re-open to the public as a museum site. They must be edited and submitted by June 30, and during summer of 2011 the finished movies will compete for prizes and be shown at the Cooperstown Theatre.

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