Local Studio Takes Global Award

There’s a well-concealed studio on Cannery Row that sits hidden behind a shop. Nondescript as it is, Sea Studios produces documentary films on topics that are anything but hidden or obscured. Their latest effort tackles a subject on a global scale and has just been lauded on that level.
Produced for Seattle-based Vulcan Productions as well as National Geographic Television & Film, a four-part series by Sea Studios called Strange Days on Planet Earth recently won the nature documentary industry’s equivalent of an Oscar at the Wildscreen 2004 film festival, Oct. 13, in Bristol, England.
Although it’s not scheduled to be broadcast on public television until April 2005, Strange Days on Planet Earth documents a dizzying array of threats to earth and its inhabitants.  
Strange Days won the coveted Panda Award for best series. One segment of the four-part film won a separate prize for its examination of global warming.
The Sea Studios Foundation was created in 1996. It mixes various forms of media, such as film and the Internet, to create educational tools—such as documentary films on scientific and environmental topics. (In the interest of full disclosure: Monterey County Weekly owner Bradley Zeve is the president of the board of directors of the Sea Studios Foundation.)[AS]

Artist Creates Grave Tribute

Ed Leeper is a war veteran, but peace is his primary concern.
Leeper, a longtime Monterey artist with a legacy of political art projects, has created a temporary memorial with 1,000 headstones portraying the American men and women who have died thus far in the Iraq war. The headstones, made of wooden stakes and paper with pictures of the soldiers and information about them, will be set up at Window on the Bay this Friday and Saturday.
“He’s doing this with a sense of honoring the men who died and helping people understand what we’re doing in Iraq,” says Joyce Vandevere, a longtime friend of Leeper’s and the interim chair of the Monterey Peace Coalition, with which Leeper has been active in the past.
Vandevere says that Leeper, a veteran of both the Korean and Vietnam wars, wants to make it clear that although he opposes the war in Iraq, he supports the soldiers who fight.
“When you see it this way you can’t fail to see that these are real people with real families and how important they are,” Vandevere says. [JT]