COMPLEXLY PORTFOLIO

Michael Pisano | 609.273.3989 | michael@pisanofilms.com

sample 1: We Are Nature | Video + Photo + PODCAST SERIES, 2021 - ONGOING

Overview | A collection of stories about climate action + climate justice on the frontlines of the Anthropocene.

Commissioned for exhibitions and educators at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. My team and I packed recording for nine stories into 2 busy production months last fall. Some of what we collected is on display in the museum’s Anthropocene Studies section We Are Nature exhibit; the rest is being edited into forthcoming videos and a podcast series, both for the museum’s content channels & for educator kits that the museum distributes to classrooms across the region. We hope these stories will…

• break down how real people are working to mitigate climate change.

• break down those approaches into actionable methodology, and provide points of entry for the audience to get involved.

• be informed by natural history, as well as the history of how we talk about natural history.

• emphasize collective action and intersectional justice. This often includes collaboration and solidarity with nonhumans.

My Role | Producer & Director.

Collaborated with museum educators and researchers to identify regional climate action stories to highlight; proposed and developed series concept; co-wrote questions for 27 interviews; hired, scheduled, and supervised three production units to collect those interviews, supplementary b-roll, + photo sets for all nine stories; acted as DoP and conducted interviews for four of those stories (five shoots/ten interviews); currently, I’m editing three stories into a gazillion different video deliverables for the museum and its educational partners; in the next phase of the project, I’m slated to act as Editorial Director on videos telling the other six stories; finally, I’m editing (and hosting) a new podcast series that includes all 9 stories. Phewph!

Sample | Two excerpts (TRT 4:00) from one of the podcast episodes.

The episode, Coal Goals, Part 1: Coal, Climate, and Community, features interviews with community organizers fighting coal extraction, cleaning up abandoned minelands, and working towards a just transition for fossil fuel workers in rural Pennsylvania. I conducted these interviews, wrote the narration, recorded the voiceover, and edited the episode.

Interest whetted? Doing chores later and want some audio to drown out your anxieties? Here’s the full podcast episode. If you’d like to see some video from the project, here’s episode 1 and episode 2 of Natural Histories, Livable Futures, a six part series about energy, justice, and climate action in Appalachia.

sample 2: SOCIALCHANGE101 | MULTIMEDIA COURSES, 2013 - 2017

Overview | a free online educational resource and youth workshop series for students of social change history.

I was hired at the beginning of the project to make a 3-part minidocumentary series about the diversity 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. These free resources have been used by thousands of students in Pittsburgh Public School classrooms, college courses, and out-of-school workshops (many of which I taught in person).

My Role | Creative Director.

I managed a team of writers and artists in the creation of every resource you see on the website. I also made all the video and animations myself: I co-wrote scripts with historian Nico Slate, designed and conducted interviews, recorded and edited all the video, and made every drawing from storyboard to final asset in the animated sequences.

Sample | An excerpt from a minidocumentary about Rachel Carson.

You’re also welcome to take a quick scroll through the full course module about Rachel Carson.

sample 3 | POLLINATOR SOLIDARITY | Video SERIES, 2017 - ONGOING

Overview | 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 connection with 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/”essential workers”) 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.

My Role | Everything.

Research, scriptwriting, interview design and outreach, camera and animation, voiceover…everything.

Sample | an excerpt from a 2017 pilot episode.

95% of it was recorded on an iPhone 8.

You can see an additonal two-and-a-half minute long excerpt about flower diversity here.

I’ve since upgraded to a 6K cinema camera, a 4K high-framerate camera, and a collection of professional macro lenses. Here's a macro tour of my backyard using that gear, and here’s some video stills from recording last summer.

This independent climate storytelling project started with Impending Doom —> Doom, a zine that I made in 2017 as a release valve for the dread I felt researching mass insect extinction. It’s 25 pages of flowcharts, timelines, drawings, and other shrapnel about the Anthropocene. Read a full PDF version here.