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Documentary
The Last Elevator
A wooden grain elevator gets one more winter, and the town around it decides what is worth keeping.
Watch trailer- Location
- Fleming, Saskatchewan
- Year
- 2024
- Runtime
- 42 min
- Format
- Single-camera documentary
Trailer
Synopsis
For eighty years the elevator was the tallest thing for forty kilometres. It took the harvest, set the price, and gave the town a skyline. Then the branch line closed and the company that owned it stopped answering letters.
The Last Elevator follows three winters of meetings, fundraisers and quiet disagreements as a volunteer committee tries to buy the structure outright. Nobody in the film agrees on what it is for. Everybody agrees it should stand.
We shot with a two-person crew so the committee could keep meeting the way it always had, in a cold room with the coffee on.
Our role
- Director and producer
- Story development, access, and a shooting schedule spread across three winters.
- Cinematography
- Single-camera observational work, long lens exteriors, available light throughout.
- Interviews
- Eleven sit-downs recorded across two winters and cut to one narrative spine.
- Post-production
- Offline edit, colour grade, sound mix and delivery in four broadcast formats.
Production highlights
- Forty-seven field days across three shooting winters
- Cold-weather rig with battery swaps every twenty minutes below minus thirty
- Family photographs scanned and restored from committee members' own albums
- Delivered with open captions and a described audio track
Stills from the shoot
Select an image to enlarge