Recent History – 2001
Dec. 3, 2001
By Mark Nielsen, Daily News Staff
With the help of two high school students and a mentor, a video documenting the contributions of three women to building the Dawson Creek community has been completed.
Women of the Peace is a 12-minute look at Daphne Phillips, Lillian York and Angela Carberry.
Phillips launched a travel service in Dawson Creek and was a long-time council member. York was a well-known teacher and supporter of the local arts scene. And Carberry was a nurse who played an important role in the development of health care in Dawson Creek.
The video was commissioned by Friends of the Library, and put together by Tanya Farley and Jaimie Sheets when they were taking courses at the technology centre at O’Brien, under the guidance of Cindy Lorincz and Chris Aylward.
Lorincz, who is the registrar at Northern Lights College, has long held an interest in film, and was invited to participate in the B.C. Festival of the Arts film workshops in Fort St. John this summer.
“Cindy has mentored different students for me over the year and I believed that the girls would need a mentor to pull the right kind of information,” Aylward said.
Much of the work involved findings photos, film clips and information about the three; it meant more than simply shooting some footage and using the editing bay.
“They were really unsure about how to approach it. They didn’t really know where to begin because it involved more than just media arts,” Lorincz said.
“It was also research skills that were involved, story-writing that was involved, a host of inter-related skills that they needed to get this project up and running.”
Another challenge was to find colleagues of the three to interview — especially in the case of Carberry. As fate would have it, her daughter walked in one day and, when asked, agreed to tell a few stories.
Then there was the production process. Essentially an intertwined collection of stills, film clips and interviews, each minute of video represented about one hour of editing.
It took a few hours, but Lorincz said the work was rewarding. It was the first time she had written a script — Barb Swail was the presenter.
And she found that Farley and Sheets, who are now taking courses in the field at the post-secondary level, added a new dimension.
“When you’re working with high school students they don’t have any parameters, it seems, they’re wide open to trying out new things. They’ve got an amazing amount of ideas,” Lorincz said.
And the final result had a good reception when it was unveiled at the Dawson Creek Public Library in November.
“It was really interesting to see the emotion behind the families and the people. There were people who were weeping. . . it was just incredible,” Aylward said.
Women of the Peace can be checked out at the library.