Blue River Fly Classic

Blue River Fly Classic
A One Pattern Fly Event

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Lights, Camera, Action!





























Ralph James, Chris Adams, and yours truly met on the river Blue today to try our hands at pulling off a video performance tying flies and sharing our fondness for Blue River.

This project is a test project to see how things would go and if there is a potential in video production about fly-fishing Blue River that could prove as a way to raise money for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife.

Videographer Gary Walker of Durant, Oklahoma was enlisted and met us at Scotty's at noon. Soon my daughter Mercy would arrive and Mercy's assignment was to take stills that we can use for the dvd jewel case.

Ralph started things off tying two of his favorite flies the red midge larva, and a fly he calls silverside. Soon after Ralph heard "we're rolling", it became obivious to all of us making the video it's not as easy as it looks. Lighting was a major concern as noise control and with the traffic on Blue River this weekend and the wind blowing at 10-15 mph the noise factor became a major obstacle. However, Ralph being the trooper he is got through his two flies in natural fashion. Ralph is a natural.

Then Chris was up and by the time it was Chris's time to tie the sun had changed and we had to move everything to do his shoot. Now Chris is a very technical and methodical tyer and he chose two nymph patterns to tie and he does a very good job on these patterns. And if we didn't have enough noise to deal with it seems Ralph scared up an armadillo from under his chair and the dillo started rustling through the leaves headed toward Chris and the tying table right in the middle of Chris's second pattern. It was a hoot to watch and Chris never realized what was going on.

Then it came my turn to tie and I planned ahead by selecting two simple and quick ties. One was the skinny bodied bugger that has blue lateral lines and the other being a simple size 20 black midge pattern. It was one, two, three, and I was pretty well done.

Next up was the up close and personal clips of the three of us telling about our fly fishing on Blue and sharing our love and concerns for this river.

Now with that done we simply needed some footage of the river itself so we could run opening and closing credits and you would think this would be a simple task wouldn't you. Well it wasn't because you can't have any other person in your video production without their consent and there was people all over the crossing but anyhow we figured it out.

Honestly I thought this whole project would take less than two hours but we ended up spending four hours plus trying to pull this thing off.

If it looks good on dvd there will be future projects.

This DVD will have the title of "On The River Blue" subtitle "Six Great Trout Flies".

We'll see how it goes.

Barry



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