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Mining Documentaries

Ontario Mining Association’s SYTYKM video competition awards $36,500 to student film makers

Best Overall Video: Christian Peters “Mining and My Community” Henry Coaster Memorial School, Ogoki Post

First Runner-Up: Clarabelle Lee “Mining Style” Don Mills Collegiate Institute, Toronto

From drama, to musicals, to stop motion animation . . . Ontario students have showcased their talents! The Ontario Mining Association this evening announced the winners of its fifth annual So You Think You Know Mining high school video competition, which challenges students to tell imaginative stories about the benefits of mining to society.

More than 130 high quality videos from across the province were evaluated by an independent panel of media professionals to determine the winning entries in 10 categories, with prize money ranging from $2,500 to $5,000. In addition, OMA member company representatives voted for the $2,500 OMA Academy Award winner in a secret ballot. There was additional recognition for honorable mentions, as well as cash prizes for participating schools. Details about the contest, as well as the winning videos can be seen at www.oma.on.ca/en/contestpages/index.asp.

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OMA NEWS RELEASE: Curtain is about to be raised on 2013 SYTYKM video competition winners

This article was provided by the Ontario Mining Association (OMA), an organization that was established in 1920 to represent the mining industry of the province.

The suspense is building as the kick-off for the Ontario Mining Association’s fifth high school video competition So You Think You Know Mining awards gala approaches. All will be revealed tomorrow evening. Several talented teenage filmmakers will walk off the stage with SYTYKM Oscar-style statuettes and prize money. More than 300 people are expected to be on hand at the Royal Ontario Museum for the awards ceremonies on Wednesday, June 5, 2013.

This is the fifth edition of this video production competition and $33,500 in prize money is available. “We started SYTYKM as a way to encourage arts oriented students to learn something about the importance of mining to society,” said OMA President Chris Hodgson. “It has been gratifying to see the growth in interest of SYTYKM by students and teachers and the creative quality of the videos we look forward to seeing every year. Since it started, the OMA has provided $133,000 in scholarship support for high school filmmakers.”

The producer of the Best Overall video wins $5,000 and his, or her, high school receives $500 to support filmmaking. First and Second Runners-Up for the Best Overall will receive prizes of $2,500 each. Winners in other categories including Best Writing, Best Music, Best Directing, Best Comedy, Best Animation, Best video in a language other than English, Best 30-Second Commercial, People’s Choice Award and the Award from the OMA Academy will also receive $2,500.

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The Secret World of Gold – Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Documentary (April 18, 2013)

 

First broadcast on Thursday, April 18, 2013 AT 9:00 P.M. ON CBC-TV

The Secret World of Gold is a documentary exploring the power and politics of gold, a precious metal with more allure and fascination than any other. Valued for its permanence, beauty and scarcity, people will lie, cheat, steal and kill in the name of gold.

To finance the Third Reich, the Nazis went after the gold of Europe. Allied countries stored their gold offshore to keep it safe. In the first months of the Second World War, the gold of England and France was secretly shipped to vaults in Montreal, Ottawa and New York.

Those ships made it safely to port, but throughout history, many were not so lucky. It is estimated that worldwide, 3 million shipwrecks loaded with treasure lie at the bottom of the ocean. Odyssey Marine, an American company listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange, spends huge amounts of money to search for that gold. But there’s always the risk they will have to hand it over to countries claiming ownership.

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Brian McKenna explores The Secret World of Gold – by T’Cha Dunlevy (Montreal Gazette – April 18, 2013)

http://www.montrealgazette.com/index.html

Documentarian reveals the drama and danger behind one of the world’s oldest currencies

MONTREAL – Brian McKenna didn’t predict the recent nosedive in gold prices, but he knows someone who did.

“Andy sent me an email early Friday morning,” recounted the Montreal director. “He said, ‘There’s a big event happening. Someone’s dumping 500 tons of gold into the market.’ That ended up driving the price down by $78 an ounce. And 500 tons is 16 million ounces — we’re talking about a serious intervention here. Who’s got that kind of money?”

“Andy” is Andrew Maguire, a key source in McKenna’s fascinating new film The Secret World of Gold, which premières Thursday at 9 p.m. on CBC-TV. The hour-long documentary plunges into the dramatically rich narrative of gold, unveiling some shocking facts along the way. “I was just going to do a history piece, until I stumbled over a whistleblower,” McKenna said.

A veteran gold and silver trader, Maguire denounces the shady tactics of the industry, breaking down the ways in which precious metal prices are manipulated using insider trading.

“He was tremendous,” McKenna said. “It took me eight months to persuade him to come on camera, but I was willing to wait. I knew he was critical to the film. It turns out he was burned by the BBC. He spent seven months showing them everything, going online and showing them the way things worked. Then after all that, they said, ‘The show’s been killed.’

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McKenna documentary is a fool’s guide to gold – by John Doyle (Globe and Mail – April 18, 2013)

Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Here in the TV Cranny, financial management consists of occasional bouts of scribbling numbers on a scrap of paper followed by some basic addition and subtraction. Hopes for the future rest on six bucks spent weekly on the Lotto 6/49.

If I read the wonderfully written Streetwise Blog of this great newspaper, I do so with admiration and complete bafflement. I’m sure that Boyd Erman and Jacqueline Nelson are absolutely right about capital markets and equity backers, but I couldn’t explain why.

I am deaf to the countless commercials urging me to trade in my old gold jewellery for cash. I have no gold jewellery, new or old. Besides, those places where such transactions occur always seem to be located in areas of Toronna so obscure that a journey there would require a warning to friends and colleagues that if I’m not back in two days, send out a search party. If I had old gold jewellery, I wouldn’t go there.

The lure of gold. I get it. Precious stuff. Or I thought I did. After watching the wonderful documentary The Secret World of Gold (CBC, 9 p.m. on Doc Zone [April 18, 2013]), I’m not so sure. And, as the price of gold is crashing, apparently, this program might help to explain the situation.

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National Geographic – Down To The Earth’s Core (Entire Mining Documentary – 2012)

http://natgeotv.com.au/

From National Geographic website and Youtube descriptions:

Explore the extraordinary world beneath our feet, as spectacular CGI takes us to the least understood place on the planet: The Core.

Get up close and personal with Earth in a way you probably have never imagined. Down to the Earth’s Core takes viewers from the sidewalk to the centre of the planet in one epic unbroken shot. Using spectacular computer generated imagery; the camera smashes through almost 9 000 kilometres of solid rock to explore the hidden world beneath our feet.

Experience an earthquake inside the San Andreas Fault, blast out of a volcano, encounter bizarre cave-dwelling creatures and enter caves full of giant crystals — all inside planet Earth.

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Finding the Truth: Facts Behind Cyanide Beach Film – by Levi Rowe (March 22, 2013)


Levi Rowe is a Santa Barbara college student majoring in Entrepreneurship with a minor in Philosophy. levil.rowe@gmail.com

The recent film produced by John Dougherty, called Cyanide Beach, attempts to link Augusta Resource – and thereby Rosemont Copper – to a closed mine – the Furtei mine, in Sardinia, Italy. The producer aims to incite public fear and raise alarm over the proposed Rosemont Copper mine outside of Tucson, Arizona, with the goal of delaying and ultimately stopping the project.

The trouble with Cyanide Beach is that, like many “investigative” pieces, Mr. Dougherty started with a conclusion and worked backwards. When one starts research with a clear goal, or hypothesis, one must be extremely careful to adjust the hypothesis as their research disproves the original hypothesis. The investigator, or researcher, must resist the urge to become personally invested in their hypothesis lest they begin to distort facts and findings to fit the intended (hoped) result.

When these flawed, distorted findings are shared with the public as a means to inform, what we end up with is a grossly misinformed public.  And that’s the case with Cyanide Beach.

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Documentary: Gold Mining: “South Dakota Saga” 1941 Homestake Mining Company


 

“Gold mining and the life of gold miners in South Dakota, as seen by the mining company.”

Public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archive, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and equalization.

Gold mining is the removal of gold from the ground. There are several techniques and processes by which gold may be extracted from the earth.

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The Hemlo Gold Story – CBC Documentary

 

Just off the trans-Canada highway, half way between Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie, near the highway to Marathon, Don Mckinnon, John Larche and David Bell discovered Ontario’s fourth largest mining camp, Hemlo, in 1981.

A fierce legal battle errupted over the ownership of one of three mines – the Williams – between Teck-backed junior miner Corona and Lac Minerals. In August 1989, the Supreme Court of Ontario awarded the property to Teck and Corona. Over the past 25 years the Hemlo camp has produced 21 million ounces of gold.

For a good historical overview of Ontario gold mining by Sudbury Star mining columnist Stan Sudol, please click here: Northern Ontario: A Golden Klondike – 192 million ounces of gold and counting

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The oil sands are an amazing story Canada’s not telling – by Todd Babiak (Globe and Mail – March 1, 2013)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Todd Babiak is co-founder of Story Engine, a strategy company based in Edmonton and Vancouver. His next novel, Come Barbarians, will be published in September by HarperCollins Canada.

How Green Was My Valley, the novel by Welsh writer Richard Llewellyn, is about a young man born into a village of black air, of strikes, of deadly explosions. At the end, you’re keen to accompany the hero, Huw Morgan, out of the coal mines.

More than 50 years earlier, Émile Zola had come to similar conclusions in Germinal.

The novelists and filmmakers who adapted these two works for cinema focused on people – particularly the miners. They were sad, happy, passionate, defeated, pure, compromised, creative, dull, intelligent, stupid.

That is, alive.

Coal Miner’s Daughter, Matewan and other stories, in novels and on screen, do not elevate coal mining into the higher reaches of human endeavour. Of course it’s dirty. But the activity of putting on a helmet and walking every morning into a pit so the world can turn on its furnaces in winter and its lights at sundown is noble. It’s something that thousands of interesting human beings do to help raise their children.

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NEWS RELEASE: Canada’s Northern Iron Corp. Animates The Greatest Recycling Story On Earth: ‘The New Iron Age’ Premieres February 25, 2013

http://www.northernironcorp.com/

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada – February 25, 2013.

Northern Iron Corp. (“Northern” or the “Company”) (TSX-V: NFE) (OTCQX- NHRIF) (FRANKFURT: N8I) is pleased to announce the premier of its animated short video series entitled ‘The New Iron Age’.

“’The New Iron Age’ is a complete departure for the Company, and as far as we know, for the Canadian resource industry,” says Company CEO Basil Botha. “This highly entertaining and informative style of animation is the perfect medium for us to use to tell an inherently fundamental but necessarily complicated story to a wide global audience. We are an iron ore company, which is about as fundamental as it gets, but when we begin to tell the story of our primary asset – a value-added engineered metallic and form of direct reduced iron known as HBI (hot briquetted iron), we were losing a percentage of our audience amid the variables and complexities.”

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Review: Le Nord au coeur – by Brendan Kelly (Montreal Gazette – December 6, 2012)

http://www.montrealgazette.com/index.html

Louis-Edmond Hamelin shines a northern light

MONTREAL – Louis-Edmond Hamelin is quite the character, and when you have such a great character as your leading man, you usually have a pretty captivating film. Le Nord au coeur is no exception to that rule.

Seasoned documentary filmmaker Serge Giguère has made a brilliant feature about Hamelin, a key intellectual figure in the discussion of northern affairs in Quebec over the past few decades. But this is no dry academic piece; rather, it’s a lively, thought-provoking look at a fascinating man that also serves as a history of Quebec’s forgotten people.

From the development of the iron ore industry in the north in the ’50s to the James Bay mega-project in the late ’60s/early ’70s to the controversial Plan Nord unveiled by the Charest government, those in southern Canada have spent decades plotting the commercialization of the north without worrying about the people who actually live there.

Right at the start of Le Nord au coeur, Hamelin, 89, is seen getting into an Air Inuit plane and then a small seaplane to make his way to the aboriginal community of Mushuau-nipi, a place Hamelin hadn’t been to for 37 years. There he meets with locals, which is when the film moves backwards to look at his life’s work studying the north and its communities.

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Let’s hear from some 2012 So You Think You Know Mining winners

This article was provided by the Ontario Mining Association (OMA), an organization that was established in 1920 to represent the mining industry of the province.

Now that the Ontario Mining Association has launched season five of its high school video competition So You Think You Know Mining, perhaps it is a good time to hear from some of the winners from season four. These students who received their awards in June 2012 at the SYTYKM awards ceremony at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto are a talented and creative group of young people who are moving forward with their education and their careers. They have benefited from participation in this OMA film making initiative. Let’s see what some of them have to say about SYTYKM.

Hananeel Robertson from Don Mills C.I. in Toronto won the Best Writing Award for “OMG! Ontario Mining Girls.” “When the project was introduced to my class, the word mining just threw me off completely but when I started doing research, I was blown away. Not only did I learn from making my video but from watching others,” she said. “The whole contest opened my eyes to realizing that the necessities in our everyday lives would not be available to us without mining.”

“Winning means the world to me and it has definitely been one of the best experiences of my life,” said Hananeel. She is using her award money to help cover tuition at the University of Ottawa, where she is majoring in Communications. “I am not quite sure what exactly I want my career to be but I am leaning towards the media or public relations,” she said. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll end up in the mining industry.”

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Lights, camera, action: Let Season Five of Ontario Mining Association’s SYTYKM begin

 

This article was provided by the Ontario Mining Association (OMA), an organization that was established in 1920 to represent the mining industry of the province.

So You Think You Know Mining (SYTYKM)

The Ontario Mining Association has launched season five of its province-wide high school video competition So You Think You Know Mining. Every year, this contest has grown in interest, in the number of entries and in prizes. This year is no exception. Available prize money for season five is $36,500, up from $33,500 last year.

The award for the Best Overall video is $5,000 and most other Oscar-type award categories carry $2,500 cash prizes for winners. “We strive to make SYTYKM interesting and innovative every year,” said OMA President Chris Hodgson. “The SYTYKM award prizes are like scholarships and we have been gratified at how past winners have utilized their prizes to help finance their post-secondary education and in some cases film and arts careers. We want to enable, inspire and engage the opinion makers and story tellers of tomorrow.”

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