Tag: the last shark

Seeing in Color

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I swore that I would come to Atlas Coffee to just read this morning. But alas, my laptop was in my backpack by accident. I will still read. But I have to write first.

You’d think I’d be out of creative juice by now, but no. Because today, I am seeing in color for the first time in so long. Don’t get me wrong. Over the last 5 months I have had many incredible moments in nature. I have had so many amazing experiences along the way keep myself afloat as I edited The Last Shark. And I am not done yet, but I have turned the corner. I turned in the picturelock version to the composers last night. The Director, Frankie, who will be repping at the Premiere and other South Africa screenings, just landed in Capetown this morning. It’s hitting hard that this is a reality, that we have made it.

But back to seeing in color…as I pondered what drink to order at Atlas Coffee here in Charlottesville VA, I realized I was actually looking at the world around me. There is a thing that happens to you as you begin a project of this scope. There is a massive weight that settles upon you that will not lift until the work is nearly complete. It’s a wholly unique weight and no other work I have done comes close to how awful it feels.

I am reminded of a conversation I had with a wonderful guy named John Kim. John has since died, but he and I were in touch way back in my first heady days of film making. The very first project I ever did, he watched it while we were on a phone call and gave me feedback. He also shared his process of how awful it feels at the beginning of a project, how you are under this overwhelming cloud. John also worked in the big leagues. Editing for TV shows and outlets you would all recognize. He reported to me how, in his field, that he would create this beautiful and intuitively led edit…only to have it then chopped up and dumbed down by studio execs. He hated it. He felt like it was the death of creativity. But he seemed to live for the edits that he got to do and just found ways to live with how the higher ups were going to shave it down to a nub. That reminds me of how appreciative I am that on all the projects I have worked on, I have never had to do what John did. And he told me that. He told me to stay in the areas where I would not have to compromise the art for the profit. I have stayed true to that so far.

We talked about coming out of the haze, when you know you have wrangled a story out of the disparate globs. So today I am seeing in color. And I would have written to John to tell him about how glad I am to not have had to compromise. This project has been all volunteer and you get something wholly different out of a movie when profit is literally not a part of it. Everyone gives their best and they don’t feel compromised. It’s pretty fantastic. Money always has a cost. Essentially that’s at the heart of every conservation movie and lived experience.

Another thing I was reflecting upon was something Jay Siebold said to me just the other day. Jay is my sound guy for many projects. He heard about how many hours I was putting in and was like “hey man don’t underestimate how that amount of screentime will fuck you up”. In all honesty, I would say that I finished the hard parts just as I was hitting that very tipping point. I was starting to mindblank in the middle of spoken sentences, I was seeing things in my peripheral vision…it was definitely starting to impact my health. Ironically though I lost weight while working on the movie lol. I always had a standing workstation. So at the end of the day I would have stood for 12 hours while editing without a break. Mentally though, I was starting to decline for sure.

So today as I waited for my dirty hot chocolate order today I looked out and noticed birds, colors, people, cars, clouds, leaves and I realized how much, over the last 5 months that I have looked…but I wasn’t really seeing. The cloud is gone. It’s wild. I feel like running through the streets and shouting! It’s really fucking fantastic.

I am also here at Atlas this morning because I promised myself, while staying here in Charlottesville, that I would return to this coffee shop on a cool Fall morning. I made that promise to myself back in 2019. I drove by this spot my first time ever in this town. I was in the car, likely with mom and dad. I would have been driving. And we were on our way to one of the first consultations at UVA’s Cancer Clinic for mom. I recall so pristinely seeing this tiny taxi sized coffee shop off to the right. The windows fogged up from condensation so thickly I could not see inside. I only went in there once back in 2019. This place has seating for literally 6 people. That’s it! I had no place to sit back then, so I left- but vowed to rectify the situation. This morning, I literally woke up singing. Lighter. And the air was worth a hat and coat. The windows aren’t fogged but I am here to drink coffee and read a book for a while.

No more humble bragging about how much work there is to do on the timeline. I feel like I am just now realizing there is an entire world out here and wow. It’s a paradox right? You go head down into this narrow and isolated path, away from people, away from the world…in order to focus hard enough to make a movie that will impact people and the world around you. So strange. But so worth it-if you don’t take it too far. But also, you have to have a team of people around you. No movie is made alone. For me, my team was Frankie. I could never have made this movie without Frankie’s energy and enthusiasm and laughter. What also sustained me though was the 24 people who’s interviews I was editing and reading over and over and over and over. I have about 24 hours of interviews from shark conservationists locked into memory forever. And their dedication, up there on my screen, and in the pages of transcripts, kept me fired up for the project when I was struggling with the next steps…and event that happened nearly every day.

I don’t know how long it will be until I have the inner strength to muster another movie like this. It’s going to take a while til I feel full strength again. But yeah…at the end of the day, this movie is something I am immensely proud of.

Recursive

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In my field of work, there are times when the truth can’t be talked about by those who I am interviewing. There are those who can’t even be involved on any level with a production for fear that they will lose their jobs, or that even their spouses will lose their jobs-job loss by association.

It’s happened in two of the movies that I have made: Bolin Creek Unpaved and 400 Feet Down. It has happened in the podcast series that I am currently releasing; Salmonfolk Radio. In these three instances I am helping others illuminate the truth about environmental concerns through interviews and filmmaking. The goal is always the same…bring these issues to light for an audience so that they can know the issues exists and how to do something about them. 

These issues need highlighting because there are people who will do anything to make money and the Earth is, so to speak, what they use to convert their greed into cash in their bank accounts. Some people are motivated by greed. Some already have more than they could spend in a lifetime. What runs greed though, is fear. Every hoarder runs on fear. If you’ve been in the home of a true hoarder, the stacks of dross, the 30 year old newspapers, the dust, the waste…it’s the same mentality that drives some of us to just collect more and more money. Fear of not having enough, fear of letting go.  The earth’s creatures, mineral deposits, are what stands in the way of the money making machinery. And the only thing that can stop this machine is when the truth becomes the monkey wrench. This requires people to talk about the truth…because those motivated by greed can’t find it on a map of the Earth any longer.

I am making these movies and podcasts about that machinery and the people who I am interviewing become the monkey wrench. 

Those who are motivated to protect, to rescue, to conserve. Somehow, they have slipped out of the monetary padlock. Yet, there are times when the truth can’t come out. In every documentary about protecting the planet I have worked on, there are moments where the camera and mic had to be turned off. And it was when the person I was interacting with said “this can’t be on the record…I could lose my job” or “I could be attacked if they knew I said this”.

Those moments and the things that were said…if they had been shared in the film or podcast, would have been silver bullets to the werewolves. When you sit down with someone for a feel good documentary about doing the right thing and they look at you and say the truth only when it’s off the record…it really shows you, so starkly-what the world of human relations is really like. It’s so recursive.

The reason I am making the documentary is the same reason that the person can’t come forward. 

The documentary is needed because there are people who can’t tell the truth without facing consequences…monetarily, physically…possibly both.
I am trying to tell a story about how to reverse damage to the very home we live upon but  every environmental story is really a tale of people vs people.

Recursive.

Until we figure out how to escape these shackles…

I think a lot about door locks. On every house. On every car. On most doors to buildings. We say that we live in free societies. We talk about community. Every time I see a door lock I know we haven’t gotten there yet. When you are a person who needs protection from other persons…I don’t know how we call ourselves free at all. It instead only happens in small pockets, micro scale.

I am writing this due to a recent development in my work on the story of The Last Shark.  It’s a documentary movie about one of the main sources of the disappearance of the Great White Shark off the coast of South Africa. Spoiler Alert: It’s people.

I am Co-Director and Editor. And for the 3rd time, since starting work on this movie, I have had to wrestle (today) with the fact, that for others to be involved in this production, they run the risk of experiencing bodily or financial harm.

And it’s because of people. People who have are driven so powerfully by fear that they would seek to crush the truth spoken by others. And that’s recursive. Because what it really shows about the oppressors is that the truth in them has been crushed already.

It’s easy to read this and think that I feel crushed under the weight of being close to these heavy topics. Beaten down and wanting to give up. That is there for sure.

But what I get to do in my work is be close to people who want to tell the truth. And that fucking matters. It matters. Whether they go on record or not isn’t important to me. The point for me is that I get the privilege of interacting with people who take the time to observe, think and care about what is happening around us.

What I also have observed, through the films I have worked on and the podcasts…is that even if the fearful many have the numbers…it doesn’t take more than a few honest voices to help dispel that fear and get people back on the right course.

In closing, the theme of this writing is fear and the word “recursive”. It just occurred to me now that recursive is an adjective that one could use to define how fear works. I think only truth can break that cycle.

The Last Shark is a movie about protecting the Great White Shark. I can’t think of a more feared creature than Great White Sharks. So dispelling and overcoming fear is truly the topic of this film.

Restorying Great White Sharks

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I simply have to clear my head before I embark on this next project, The Last Shark. Before jumping into dropping the first sequences onto that Premiere Pro timeline tomorrow, there’s just some things I need to work out-otherwise I won’t have a North Star. Come along for the ride…

The topic of this next film is so…intense. And loaded. It’s without a doubt the most public facing film I have ever worked on and the stakes feel really high. 

Here’s where my mind is at…There’s no way to work on deeply involved environmental topics without coming to hate the stupidity of the humans that keep doing the same stupid shit to the planet over and over again. Yeah, I said it. I am just gonna be really blunt. I have made movies about deforestation, open net salmon farming, species loss…and it’s always the same story really. 

When you really look as closely at these topics as you must, in order to make a movie…you get close to the ugly stuff. And we (humans) are always the one’s making the ugly stuff. And it always comes back to the story we are creating from.

My big question whenever I start on a movie, or even a short conservation movie, is how to wrangle my deep disappointment into something positive, into compassion. Because if I allow my anger to come across in the movie, it just results in more anger, not solutions. 

The only way I don’t devolve into hate and embitterment is to dive into the historical record and find context.

I avail myself of the stories most of us have been told…at least in what we call “the Western World”. The problem is that the story we have been told is that we are superior and evolved beings, with all the exploitative privileges that comes with that bearing. 

To find compassion for this perspective, I have to remind myself that I too was raised that way, and for a time fully believed that. 

The true context is that we are technologically advanced but that is where the advancement ends. For most of us, the technological advances all around us serves as evidence of how right we must be about our superiority.

The truth is that species wise, we are still barely past the cusp of tribalism in the most negative sense.  We will fight each other at the drop of a hat or upon the hint of differences in perspective. We will still quickly fight over resources instead of sharing them.

So I like to think about what brought me into seeing the environment in a non-dominant perspective and not separated from it. What changed me was “story”.  I bumped into different stories and presentations of different contexts that showed me something different than the capitalistic love story I grew up with…the one where everyone gets to have whatever they want however they want it. The one where nature and “the environment” is this far off thing that happens in State Parks.  I started to be exposed to stories that asked me “what if it’s better to let natural things live as they wish? What if it’s better to leave something better than you found it, cleaner, more pure, more sacred?”

And so as I embark on editing my fifth feature length conservation focused film, this is what I need to remember and this is the challenge. 

I have to remember that we are crafting a story that can’t blame people for living fearfully and in this case “fear” is very specific. I ask you…is there any animal on this planet that people are more afraid of than a great white shark? Collectively it is likely the most feared creature-most would agree. Are there any blockbuster movies where Great White Sharks are the heroes? Nearly all media portrays great white sharks as aggressive, hungry, human killing, death machines.

So how do we (the filmmakers) use 18 interviews and b-roll to convince a inherently fearful audience that a living shark is more important to them than a dead shark?

I won’t lie, the pressure I feel is real. I’m aware that Frankie (the director) and I are not the last word on this topic and many are pushing back against the anti-shark narrative-and have been for decades. But still, the pressure to create something magical and life-changing, feels pretty large. Also the decimation of sharks is astounding and things have to change quickly. In the ideal world, we are hoping this movie can be a part of restorying people’s relationship with the Great White sharks. 

I came into this project skeptical, just knowing that it was about conservation was enough for me.  But honestly I still lived in fear of great white sharks because of all my cultural storytelling programming. 

When I first came into this project I really didn’t know anything about great white sharks and I know now that after watching and reading the transcripts from our 18 interviews— that my mind is absolutely made up about great white sharks. They are not at all what I thought. I feel…pretty duped by the media. And I also feel that mainstream media should stop what they are doing. The harm is just irreconcilable.

So that’s really what we’re up to here… we are now trying to craft a story that hopefully someone else will bump into, just like I did in my past.  We are hoping that someone might have their mind changed because they’re now telling themselves a true story about Great White Sharks. I think it’s restorative to believe in a story that is actually real. That’s what we need to make.