The story of Val Di Non through the eyes of an archaeologist

Shortly after touching down in Milan, Italy on a rainy October evening, our small film crew hopped in a car and headed straight for the Dolomite mountains in the far North of Italy. Our destination was the small town of Cles in the Val Di Non region of the mountains. We were immediately taken with the natural beauty and cultural landscape of the region and it didn't take long to realize that we were in for a once-in-a-lifetime shoot.

In true Italian fashion, our client had very few set-in-stone plans of what and where we might film in the valley, but we did know that our project would focus on following two archeologists named Alessandro and Luca. We spent the first several days of our trip taking in all that Val-DiNon had to offer. Over glasses of wine on a rooftop bar we met the two brothers who had dedicated their lives to uncovering the ancient hidden treasures in the valley. As we learned more about the valley and what made Alessandro and Luca tick our project began to take shape. Through these long conversations we learned about the brother's lives, why they chose to do archaeology in the region, and what their favorite historical and natural locations were.

Armed with all this information we headed back to our rooms to map out our storyline for the final video as well as what locations we would film at in order to deliver on our storyline. Developing a project like this on the fly is no easy task, but we quickly learned that immersing ourselves in the region and the personalities that would be on camera was indispensable for this particular project.

As we launched into our production days, we settled into a rhythm of waking up early to catch the sunrise and spending long hours bouncing up and down in the back of a Land Rover as we attempted to access some of the more remote areas of the valley. Throughout this project we hiked our camera rigs up mountains, into remote lakes, and down to the bottom of mile-long caves...and we loved every minute of it. Sooner than we could have expected it was time to put down the cameras and pick up a microphone to record the voiceover portion of the video.

Before our filming days got underway, we chose to focus our story on Luca and we cast him as our main driving character. Because of this, it only made sense to utilize him as the voice of the videos. On our final day of production we sat with Luca in a makeshift audio recording studio in our small apartment room and recorded what would become the voice of this piece.