Dry Fly Media has an interesting DVD series (Rivers In Motion) they introduced a couple of months ago. They have a nice offer to bloggers that we could receive a free copy if we would review it for them. Being a sucker for free stuff, I had them send me a copy of “The Gallatin.” You can read more about the series offerings (currently five rivers are available) and pricing from their website.

The idea behind the series is to show a river and its surroundings from the point of view of an angler, but with no human presence within the field of view.  I believe the film crew set up the camera on a tripod, pressed record, then let it run—no panning, zooming, etc. Something between 7 minutes to 10 minutes About a dozen different locations are captured along the river in this manner.

This is a really nice, quick fix for those of you suffering the winter doldrums and would like to see a river in its spring, summer or autumn glory.

These are not sit and watch movies. I tried that when I first got the DVD. It didn’t work (the DVD worked, but it didn’t work to just sit and watch). I became restless after the image was static for about four minutes. I went ahead and stuck it out until the scene changed. I did this for the first 30 or so minutes of the 72 minute DVD. I then scanned through each of the remaining scenes watching about the first one minute or so of each scene to see what it looked like.

The other way of using the DVD is playing it in the background while working on something else, maybe tying flies or just sitting back relaxing with a book or something that allows you to glance up every now and again for the visual aspect. It is nice having the soothing water sounds in the background (more about that later).

I chose The Gallatin because I have never fished it and thought I would get a good idea of what the river was like from the DVD. I saw a dozen different views of the river, so it did give me an idea of the river, but I don’t know how complete a view. It was not enough to make me say, :Gee, I really need to fish there!” Just more of a, “Oh, that’s what it looks like.”

I’m not sure how the DVD would affect me if I had fished the Gallatin before. I imagine it might be nicer to see views of places I love to fish, possibly getting me excited to fish there again. Other than viewing the first little bit of each scene, I really didn’t find myself looking at it when I’ve played it in the background. The longer winter lasts, maybe the more I’ll look at it too.

This DVD can be broken into two elements: audio and video. Duh!

Audio

The only audio is the sound of the river (there may be some brief additional sounds on some tracks, but they would be incidental). I would imagine that many people who would like this DVD would mainly enjoy the river sounds.

Acoustic ecology looks into the relationship between sounds within nature and the effects on humans. Biomusic looks at the musical sounds among and between species. We know that sounds and music impact humans. Many soundscapes are created to help relieve stress or in the meditation process.

If this aspect of the water sounds is the main thing you are looking for, you might want to try CDs made specifically for that purpose because the Rivers In Motion series has the same sound for the entire 7-10 minute segment, which could get a little repetitive.

Instead, you can find such tracks from Nature Sounds or Rhapsody. A fun, free website is Sound Sleeping where you can mix your own nature sounds (including the following water sounds: creek, ocean and rain) and let them play in the background. Sound Sculpture also has some online sounds that you can manipulate.

Free Sound Effects Download thousands of free sound effects from PartnersInRhyme.com then mix your own soothing tracks. You can also buy higher quality sounds from that site.

Video

The video aspect is interesting because the camera is static—it just sits there. The water is moving, but the camera doesn’t for the entire 7-10 minutes of each scene location. I’m not sure what I think about this. When I first viewed it, I was hoping to have some pan or zoom shots so I could see potential holes better, or maybe some fish finning in the riffles. But it never moved until the next scene.

When I played the DVD again, while doing something else, I really didn’t find myself compelled to look at the video very often—there really wasn’t very much to see to make me want to look.

To really get me to look at the video aspect, there would have to be some camera movement, more frequent location changes, or some pictures that I was interested in (such as pictures I had taken on my trips).

You could accomplish the last idea by easily setting your computer to show a slideshow of all your fishing pictures or burning all of those pictures/videos to a DVD and running them on the TV. Even better would be to run the audio you downloaded/bought from the above sites and play/burn them at the same time to create a personalized experience.

But most of  us would never take the time to actually do this. For us, and for those who need a quick fix for the winter blues, there’s Dry Fly Media’s “Rivers In Motion” series.

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