Online Course Login
0
  • No products in the cart.
Total:$0.00

13 May

Posted at 22:12h in Uncategorized

Hi All,

James Here,

In our upcoming Dirt Time episode on the Willow Creek Project, we go through a lot of different slope and streambank stabilization techniques (we’ll post a list soon).  But one of the cooler techniques we cover is Slope Nailing – or Soil Nail Launching.

For those of you who don’t know, Soil Nail Launching is a slope stabilization technique wherein steel rods are shot into the slope, providing structure for the slope to stabilize itself around.  That’s a pretty loose description, for more information, definitely check out:  www.SoilNailLauncher.com

Now, from what I understand, in the past slope nailing was somewhat of an involved process that dealt with drilling, grouting, and had multiple steps….kind of complicated. 

That is, until Morsky Industrial Services, out of Saskatchewan, brought a way-cool machine  to the site that shoots the rods (with great force) directly into the hillside.  No muss, no fuss.

You can check out a little more about the Soil Nailing Machine machine here.

In the finished video (due out soon) we talk quite a bit about it.  But here is a quick little video showing what I’m talking about…

That is apparently one of only FOUR machines in the world! (currently)

The edit is just about done.  I’m actually headed back to the site soon to get some ‘after’ footage.  So there will be tonnes of updates on this site in the near future.

Keep checking back!  …Or better yet, subscribe to our RSS Feed.

 

-James

11 May

Posted at 11:39h in Uncategorized

 

Back in March, I was covering the Game Developers Conference down in San Fransico for New Media Manitoba here in Winnipeg. While there, we came across City Rain – An award-winning video game that is all about sustainable development. For all you gamers out there, it’s a mix between SimCity and Tetris.

In the game, you play the role of Mayor, making decisions on what’s best for your city. To quote their website:

City Rain has simple mechanics: the building fall from de sky, or “rain”, randomly and it’s the player’s duty to choose where is the best place to put them. But don’t think that the player is all alone in this task. He can count on Catherine, who will help him by giving advices or criticizing the administration of the city.

It’s a fun game and would be a really useful teaching tool – especially for a younger demographic.

There is a free demo of the game on the site, here.

Check it out.

-james

 

08 May

Posted at 20:26h in Uncategorized

 

John was recently out and about, checking up on his Sulphur Creek project.  Here’s a snap of a ‘Viffle’ in action.  A Viffle is what you get when you take a tradtional ‘Newbury Rock Riffle’ grade control structure and cross it with a rock vane control.   So you get all of that lovely step-down, scour pool grade control action of the Newbury Rock Riffle, along with the current, re-directive control of a rock vane. 

Here’s a sample typical detailing what’s going on below the surface.

 

For more great streambank stabilization material, check out:

E-SenSS and/or BioDraw

 

07 May

Posted at 19:51h in Uncategorized

Hi Everybody,  James here.

For a long time, the restoration of Sulphur Creek in Redding, CA has been a passion project of John’s.  The cleanup, re-channelization, and rehabilitation of this long abused Salmon habitat has occupied over a decade of John’s focus and effort.

But, over the last three years, with tremendous support from DWR and other agencies, real progress has been made. Though, there is still more to go, when it’s complete, Sulphur Creek will be a shining example of community stewardship, state of the art Biotechnical techniques and perseverance. 

And of course, I was there to capture some footage.  We’ve collected a mountain of footage while the aims of producing a longer-form documentary.  For fun, we cut a (very tiny) preview of what’s in store.  Check it out…

 

07 May

Posted at 03:21h in Uncategorized

Ahh, the joys of a new website.  

If you’ve previously subscribed to this site.  You must re-subscribe.

We just added a couple of tweaks to the RSS feed.  It will now list WatchYourDirt as the author of the feed (no longer just lists ‘Blog’), so you know where the email is coming from.

Unfortunately, this will break your old feed.  Easy enough to fix though.  Just delete your old feed and re-subscribe.

For those of you who aren’t subscribers to the blog. It’s a great way to keep up to date with the blog.  Basically, it sends you a notification/email every time a new blog entry is made. The email will have a link and short description of the blog entry.  

If this sounds like something you may like, just add our RSS feed to your email program or web browser.  It’s located right on the left hand side of the page, under subscribe.  If you’d like to get more familiar with RSS, read here.

06 May

Posted at 17:36h in Uncategorized

 

Some exciting news for us to pass along!  

We are very proud to announce that John has been invited to be a keynote speaker at the IECA Australasia Chapter’s Erosion and Sediment Control Conference this Summer.

The conference takes place June 21-24th in Auckland, NZ.  All the details can be found here.  It looks like a great conference, and we are so excited that they’ve asked John to attend.

Hope to see some of you there! …if you’re in the hemisphere; drop by!

 

05 May

Posted at 02:04h in Uncategorized

At Dirt Time, we are always evolving.  If you take a look at the first episode, and now at our 25th, you can tell we’ve come a long way.  The show just keeps getting better and better.  And as I edit our Willow Creek project, I’m starting to play with the material’s look a lot more than in the past.

A few months ago, I saw a promo for a show called ‘Ax Men‘. For those of you who don’t know, ‘Ax Men’ is a History Channel show that follows the rough n’ tumble lives of loggers. It’s actually not unlike ‘Dirt Time’ in many ways (Camera’s in the middle of the bush, watching things get torn down…).

This Ax Men promo was very cool, very stylized and color graded out the wazoo. It was slick. I made a point to watch the show after, hoping to see more of the same visuals. The show is very neat and really interesting, but unfortunately the commercial visuals don’t carry through to the show.

But it (along with the work of Phillip Bloom) got me thinking about Dirt Time. In the past, we’ve kept color grading pretty minimal, pretty safe. But what if you gave it a highly stylized look the whole way through?

Well, that’s something we’re playing with right now. Here is an untouched rough cut of the first five minutes of our upcoming Willow Creek Episode(s):

Here is that same five minutes with a more severe color treatment:

And just for fun, here’s a side by side:

So far we like it where it’s heading. A few shots need to be tweaked and perhaps went a little far too in one direction. But, we’ll see where it ends up…

Let us know what you think.  Shoot us a comment below…

 

-james

 

02 May

Posted at 18:11h in Uncategorized

Hi all,

James here.

Last August, me and my production company, BlinkWorks were invited by East Metro Water Resource Education Program and the Washington Conservation District, out of Minnesota, to work on a series of training videos aimed at Parks Maintenance Workers.

These videos were to be part of an MS4 toolkit that would be provided to all counties in the state.  Spearheaded by Angie Hong, the Minnesota team had the absolute perfect outlook on what they wanted the video to be.

Basically, they had key pieces of info that they wanted to convey, but NO restrictions on how to convey that info.  The final videos had to hit two marks:  

1) convey the info points and

2) be as entertaining and engaging as possible.

They had seen too many dry, lengthy videos to let their video suffer the same fate.   So, after pitching a few ideas, we all settled on the concept of making a stylized training video from a the completely fictional Minnesota State Academy for Parks Maintenance, Preservation and Beautification.

 

Here’s the first video.  It focuses on regular Park Maintenance and how it relates to stormwater runoff…

Here is video number 2.  It deals specifically with Raingarden Maintenance.

Minnesota has some really great stuff happening with Low Impact Development and Stormwater education.  There are a lot of fantastically passionate people up there, putting out some really impressive programs.

Check out some of the things they’re up to:

Minnesota Water

MS4 ToolKit (part of Minnesota Water)

The Blue Thumb Program (bluethumb.org)

 Special thanks must go out to Angie Hong and Jay Riggs for letting us create this fun video.  It was a total blast making it.

-James

29 Apr

Posted at 22:15h in Uncategorized

Over the course of Sept-Nov 2008, John and I made frequent visits over to Alberta, just outside of Calgary.  The Alberta Department of Infrastructure and Transportation (AIT) hired John to consult, design and deliver a very big, very impressive BioEngineering workshop.  And of course, we were there with cameras (due to the great support of AIT).

BlinkWorks is on the homestretch of the video edit, and the episodes should be available quite soon.  But, we wanted to give a sneak peek and show a rough cut of the first 5 minutes.  This early footage gives a pretty good idea of what the project entailed.

The workshop centered around a project that aimed to save Highway 2 (a major highway connecting Fort McCleod and Calgary) from being undercut by Willow Creek.  A harmless enough looking waterway, Willow Creek had developed the devious little habit of eating away its banks toe, which led to major landslide failures.

In the past, we did similar projects for AIT up in Hinton Alberta.  Check out our ‘Hinton’ episodes in Season 1 and Season 2.

We’ll definitely be posting more material soon.  And of course, stay tuned to find out when the entire video is released.

Or better yet, send me an email through the contact us link and we’ll let you know as soon as its released!

 

Select your currency
USD United States (US) dollar
CAD Canadian dollar