2022 | climate storytelling portfolio

HIGHLIGHT Reels

These highlight reels are from 2016; while I’ve upgraded my recording equipment several times since then, they’re still a good intro to my filmmaking practice.

2021 - 2022 | We Are Nature Video + Photo

Here’s the original project proposal that I wrote for the museum. The first page is helpful context for this work, and for potential future Anthropocene storytelling work.

Below, find a work-in-progress excerpt of one of the documentaries I’m editing for CRSP. There’s a “Part II” presenting a step-by-step guide to climate justice advocacy. Part II uses Mountain Watershed Association’s work in the Laurel Highlands as an inspirational case study.

Some photo highlights from this summer’s CRSP tour.

2017 - ONGOING | POLLINATOR SOLIDARITY

Pollinator Solidarity is an independent documentary series about how life in the undergrowth is connected to life at human scale. It centers pollinator decline as a window into interdependence, mass extinction, and cultural attitudes towards nonhuman nature. The goals of the series include…

• Defending biodiversity as necessary for climate resilience and human happiness.

• Proposing a conservation framework centered around small organisms—pollinators, fungi, soil microbes, corals—that (much like the human working class) create the foundational conditions for ecosystems to flourish.

• Teaching practical methodologies for stewardship and remediation at both individual and collective scales.

This project is in production, meaning that I’m working on it in-between client gigs, mostly during the seasons when the weather allows me to record tiny creatures. It evolved out of an earlier project, which I’ve included some info about below.

To start, here’s some video stills from recording this past summer.

This independent climate storytelling project started with Impending Doom —> Doom, a zine that I made in 2017. Highlights below, full PDF version here.

This zine was well received, and many readers told me that this was their introduction to the word “Anthropocene”. I outlined a documentary series concept about anthropogenic extinction pressures (habitat destruction, pollution, etc) and corresponding mitigations & solutions, then began making a pilot episode using pollinator decline to tell the story of habitat destruction & conservation.

This is a rough cut of that pilot episode from 2018. Rather than watch the whole thing, please watch one or both of these excerpts: excerpt 1, 0:00 - 2:55 // excerpt 2, 6:25 - 9:16.

95% of that rough cut was recorded on an iPhone 8. I’ve since upgraded to a 6K cinema camera, a 4K slowmotion camera, and a collection of professional macro lenses. Here’s some footage from two days of early testing with that gear.

While recording fancy new 6K footage to replace the iPhone video in my pilot rough cut (and rewriting, recording new interviews, and commissioning a soundtrack), my studio got hired by the University of Pittsburgh for what would turn into an aggressively productive retainer agreement. I put The Dying Earth Scouts project on pause to focus on my growing business.

When I picked the project back up last year, I found that my takes on stewardship had evolved since writing the pilot script in 2018. Between major shifts in the world and personal experiences—especially my time organizing with the Sunrise movement—my views on everything from doom to effective communication have shifted. Dying Earth Scouts evolved into Pollinator Solidarity as a way to explore and communicate material ways to express solidarity with nonhuman life.

2019 - 2021 | Client work samples

While the work I imagine doing with the museum is more educational than promotional, I wanted to share selected doc-for-hire marketing content to show more of the range of storytelling I’m experienced with & the production quality that I can deliver.

2013 - 2017 | SocialChange101

SocialChange101 is a free online educational resource and youth workshop series for students of social change. I was hired at the beginning of the project to make a 3-part minidocumentary series about the history of social change movements; within a year, I’d helped fundraise $60,000 to expand it into a 15-episode partially animated video series with accompanying minigames, educational comics, and teacher’s guide resources. These resources have been used by thousands of students in PPS classrooms, college courses, and out-of-school workshops.

I’d suggest a quick scroll through the unit on Rachel Carson, and/or watching these short animation samples from the project.

Thank you for taking the time to review these samples! There’s so, so much more. If you’re looking for additional examples of anything in particular, just ask. You can also peruse a more comprehensive portfolio here, and read my resume here.