The How It’s Made film crew at work at North House Folk School in Grand Marais. The crew filmed instructors processing wild rice, weaving birchbark baskets and making canoes. Here, Paula Sundet-Wolf demonstrates how to make a pine needle basket. North House Communications Manager Kate Watson said North House has been able to review footage and is looking forward to when the program airs sometime in 2016.
High tech met low tech last fall when the Discovery Channel’s How It’s Made set up cameras at North House Folk School in Grand Marais. The visit to the North Shore was a departure for the popular program that debuted in 2001 and has since shown us “how it’s made” for everything from Corvettes to Buggatis; from frozen waffles to bubble gum; from alligator handbags to snowboards; from fishing line to aerospace fuel lines and more. Although the show has primarily shown complicated construction projects or factory assembly lines, producers are also interested in more down to earth concepts. And that is what drew them to North House Folk School—by way of uranium mine in Saskatchewan, Canada.
Director Francois Senecal is constantly in search of interesting subjects for the program. When the show decided to do a segment on mining uranium in the province “about as far north as you can go,” he researched other places of interest along the way from their home base of Montreal.
Someone pointed out the little town of Grand Marais, Minnesota along the way and showed him a North House catalog. On Senecal’s wish list of things to offer on How It’s Made was a birchbark canoe, something North House Folk School is synonymous with. And the rest, as they say, is history.
A four-man crew—Senecal, Luke Robida, Anthony Rocray, and Lukas Adams—arrived at the campus to film a variety of northern crafts offered by the folk school—the making of a birchbark basket, pine needle basket weaving, wild ricing, the making of wooden skis and of course, birchbark canoe making.
“At North House, we are meeting several goals all at once,” said Senecal. “It is really interesting.”
High praise for the low-tech folk school from the film crew that has traveled throughout the United Kingdom, Japan, Mexico, Costa Rica and more. They shoot hours of film to be condensed into five-minute segments that are seen in 150 countries and heard in 35 different languages.
None of the fall visitors to North House appear on the How It’s Made program. The crew’s “mission” they say, is to film a five-minute “silent movie.” Then a narrative is written to run along with their recording, introduced by host Lynne Adams.
It is not yet known when the segments shot at North House Folk School will air, but Senecal said it will be sometime in 2016. So stay tuned to see How It’s Made at North House.
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