A preview of a documentary about Mammoth Cave National Park will be shown Thursday at the Mary Wood Weldon Memorial Library.

The 60-minute high-definition film, “Mammoth Cave: A Way to Wonder,” was done by Western Kentucky University’s public television service, WKYU-PBS, and is being produced in conjunction with the national PBS Ken Burns film “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.”

The film is not scheduled to be released statewide until Oct. 4, but when library officials learned about the film they offered to allow WKYU-PBS to give everyone a preview of it at the library.

“The way this came about is our new director, Lynn Andrew, heard Patrick Reed speak at Rotary and they had a discussion about our library offering a preview of the event,” said Martha Nell Thomas, outreach services for the library.

Thomas has seen a snippet of the film.

“The photography, it was so gorgeous,” she said. “It was beautiful. I was just amazed.”

Mammoth Cave officials came up with the idea to do the documentary when they learned that Burns’ six-hours series on the national park system featured on a small amount of information about Mammoth Cave. They discussed the idea with WKYU-PBS and decided to work together on the project.

“We really felt Mammoth Cave deserved a show of their own because there is such a rich history behind the cave,” said Cheryl Beckley, producer/director for WKYU-PBS. “It really is in a way very, very unique in the national park system considering it is an international biosphere, an international heritage site and a national park.” 

WKYU-PBS crews filmed the documentary over the course of a year, developing various stories relating to the national park.

“We’re using all of those to tell the story of exploration and discovery in Mammoth Cave National Park,” Beckley said.

Mammoth Cave officials gave the film crews unprecedented access to the national park that the general public normally doesn’t have, she said.

Filming began in September 2008. Film crews would visit the park a couple of days a month.

“They were trying to get all seasons of the park and all aspects of the park and many, many locations,” said Vickie Carson, public information officer for Mammoth Cave National Park. “They’ve shot over 60 hours of footage on the surface, underground, places where they received special access to go to, even special permission from the U.S. Wildlife Service to film endangered bats and places in the back country.”

The documentary was filmed in high definition format. WKYU-PBS will serve as a depository for the film.

“HD is such a new format and so few places have footage of their park in HD format,” Carson said. “This gives us a huge jump on this new media and showcases the park. It’s almost a reaffirmation of why the park was created. It’s just a great overall asset to the park.”

The footage will be used to create short pieces for the station to use for subsequent programming and that the national park can use in its visitor’s center, she said.

“It will also compliment our curriculum that our environmental education folks have put together here,” Carson said. “We will be creating podcasts from the footage that will be posted on our Web site. Some of it will be tourism related and some of it will be related to the curriculum.”

Carson saw the film on Sept. 2.

“It’s just beautiful,” she said. “It’s been a huge effort on their part and the park’s part.”

Many people assisted in one form or fashion or another in making the film, whether it was taking the film crew out to video research, lead them to a limited access area or provide them with a boat if they needed to film along the Green River, she said.

The preview of the film at the library “is so cool,” Carson said. “They just came and offered it.”