Film crew in Poplar to shoot scenes for video game

POPLAR — A church on the northeastern Montana prairie that once served family and band members of the late Lakota Sioux Chief Sitting Bull will soon be featured in an upcoming video game.

The Mni-Sda (Still Water) Presbyterian Church, known locally as the Chelsea Church, sits just off U.S. Highway 2 between Poplar and Wolf Point.

Its belfry is what attracted filmmakers to the structure, which was constructed in 1904, and is the oldest church on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation.

Monday, crew members used a drone that repeatedly flew by the belfry filming a man fighting with another man near a hanging bell as a train rolled by on the tracks a half-mile away. The footage mostly will be used for promotion of the video game.

The fiberglass bell built specifically for the scene was shipped to Montana via airplane.

Producers couldn’t release the name of the video game but said production areas for it stretched more than 5,000 miles from California to Montana.

“This is a sequel to an existing global franchise,” said Los Angeles-based Producer Jeff Guillot, who came to the reservation with 11 other crew members from Paris, Los Angeles and Bozeman.

The backstory of the video game, which will be released in September, is of a world that takes place in an imaginary location, Guillot said.

The location and art departments for the film are manned by a Bozeman crew, including location manager Will Brewster who was charged with the task of finding the perfect belfry for the project.

Brewster scouted 25 church belfries in Montana and had found three in small communities that matched the producer’s criteria: It had to be in the prairie, on a hill, have an open belfry and good angles for shooting.

Belfries in Canton, Melville and the Chelsea location were in the final configuration, Brewster said. The Melville congregation declined so it came down to the Chelsea and Canton sites.

After reading more about the Chelsea church on the internet — including the infamous “Goat Man” story — in which some locals claim to have seen in the area years ago – Brewster traveled seven hours one way to the reservation to check out the Chelsea church and by the process of elimination, selected the white structure with its green roof located 8 miles west of Poplar.

“When I pulled up, I knew this could work,” said Brewster, who added that the back lighting from a Montana sunset was also a factor in the decision.

The Chelsea community was originally settled by some of Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa Sioux band who had moved to the area after the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.

Survivors of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota, in which nearly 300 Lakota men women and children were killed by the U.S. Army, had also made their way to Chelsea, which was close enough to the Canadian border should the bands be chased by the U.S. Cavalry.

Sitting Bull also held his last Ghost Dance in Chelsea before he and 35 families traveled 65 miles east in 1881 to surrender at Fort Buford, North Dakota. Some of his band that remained in Montana later converted to Christianity and built the church in 1904 while members of other Dakota Sioux bands had also begun settling in the area.

Grace Pipe of Wolf Point, who can trace her family’s lineage back eight generations to the Chelsea community, said the church is still used by 30 to 40 people during Christmas Eve, Easter and occasional weddings.

At the cemetery about 100 feet away, hundreds of former church members have been buried there throughout the past century.

“It’s a very powerful, old church and it’s nice to know we’re part of something,” she said, after watching some of the preparations for the filming.

While on the location, Brewster and his crew also used their construction skills to repair and reinforce the belfry, which has given the congregation problems each year.

In the winter time, a cold draught always was present during Christmas services and pigeons always had managed to get inside, said Pipe, also a caretaker of the church property.

The location crew sealed off an opening in the belfry and put better bracing on the fragile structure.

“They pushed it back into place and it’s a lot better now. We won’t have to keep sweeping up bird droppings and it’ll be a lot warmer for Christmas services,” she said.

Guillot said it was no problem helping to fix the church as the community was very friendly and welcoming to the crew.

In fact, shooting in Montana has been nothing but a positive experience for the crew, he said.

“For the first time ever, that I’ve been on a shoot, a film commissioner and the state tourism bureau comes to welcome us and bring us goodies,” Guillot said. “That would never happen in California. There’s going to be some beautiful memories made here.”