November 2, 2025 • 48 mins
In this episode, host Damien sits down with filmmaker and conservationist Arix Zalace, the creative mind behind The Paper Bear — a visually stunning blend of animation and live action that tells the story of Florida’s disappearing wilderness.
Arix shares how his journey from producing corporate films evolved into a years-long mission of documenting Florida’s black bears and protecting one of North America’s most biodiverse regions. What began as a passion project became a cinematic call to action that uses art and emotion to reconnect people with the natural world.
🎧 In this conversation:
W: https://www.thepaperbear.org/who-we-are
IMBD: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm7730373/
Arix shares how his journey from producing corporate films evolved into a years-long mission of documenting Florida’s black bears and protecting one of North America’s most biodiverse regions. What began as a passion project became a cinematic call to action that uses art and emotion to reconnect people with the natural world.
🎧 In this conversation:
- How The Paper Bear combines animation and real-world storytelling
- The challenge of filming wild black bears in Florida’s forests
- Arix Zalace’s evolution from commercial work to conservation cinema
- The emotional power of father-son themes and 1980s-style adventure filmmaking
- Building partnerships and funding an independent environmental film
- Why storytelling and animation are powerful tools for conservation
W: https://www.thepaperbear.org/who-we-are
IMBD: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm7730373/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more
amazing filmmaking and screenwriting podcasts, just go to IFH Podcastnetwork
dot com erics.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
How are you today, I'm good?
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Thank you? How are you?
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I'm good? I'm good. Thanks a lot for asking. I'm
having a good day and even better now that I
get to speak to you, which is an added bonus
for sure, especially since I've seen The Paper Beer, which
is a brilliant film that I was lucky enough to see.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
That you made. I appreciate that.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
And before we start speaking about that brilliant production of yours,
can you tell us about your journey and what led
you from production work to co founding The Paper Beer.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Yeah. So, as far as production work.
Speaker 4 (00:53):
I've owned a production company for over twelve years now
and most of the work, most of the work we
were doing with the product company was more short films
for businesses and corporate type entities. They were used internally,
so it was I enjoyed it because it was short projects.
We'd make a good amount of money, but they were
(01:14):
still feature film esque in the storytelling and the quality.
And then these companies would use them to train their
staff and really create emotional connection between the company and
the brand. So I've been doing that for a very
long time. Knew I was going to move into feature
film eventually, but feature films, as we all know, can
be very time consuming and very expensive when you start
(01:36):
getting into bigger and bigger projects. Oh yeah, the paper
Bear really started when COVID hit. My wife and I
live in the Panhandle of Florida, and in the last decade,
this county that we're in has been the fastest developing
county in the United States multiple years in a row.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
And so somebody being somebody who's grown up here for.
Speaker 4 (01:59):
Me most of my life and have a really strong
connection to the area, seeing it change so rapidly and
with such abandoned for any level of understanding of what
was here the history was just hard. And so one
day she just said, you know, stop complaining about and
do something, and so it was COVID. I met Sean Couchho,
with my writing partner in this, and he runs a foundation,
(02:22):
a family foundation, and I just gave me the idea.
I said, hey, man, I've been thinking about this project
for ten years, about telling the story of our home
here and how significant it is to the world.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
And he said, yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
So in the beginning it was supposed to be a documentary,
and then as we started, I was about six seven
months in. I was out in the woods every day
and we're from you know, fourteen to sixteen hours a
day filming, and when we started getting some of the
more incredible footage and dramatic footage, we realized we had
a much bigger story here and decided to take it
(02:53):
in the future film direction and it just kept evolving
from there.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Conservation so important to you, you.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
Know, that's a good question. It's just been something that's
been at my core since I was as long as
I can remember, since I was two years old. I
think a big part of it. It's interesting you asked
that question because when we do the when we were
doing the fundraising for the film, we would travel around
and I would do this presentation, and in the presentation,
(03:21):
I would show the behind the scenes of how we
captured a lot of the footage for the film, but
part of it was me telling my story. And I
have this footage when I'm two years old of the
house we lived in here in Florida, and it was
right on the edge of what's called a steep head ravine,
and it's a type of ecosystem that only exists here
in the Panhandle, where groundwater spring water just comes right
(03:44):
up out of the ground. And because it's all sand
in Florida, if you have this happen anywhere where there's elevation,
it just starts eating this sand away and so it
forms these really deep canyons, kind of like something you'd
see out west, and instead of being rock, it's all sand.
And then at the base these canyons, you have a
lot of different plants and animals that exist there and
nowhere else. And the temperature usually drops like five to
(04:06):
ten degrees when you get down into the base of
these canyons. So it's a really unique ecosystem. And our
house growing up was built right on the side of
one of these canyons, and so the front of our
house looked like a one story house, but when you
walked around the back, it was actually two stories because
the first floor was half underground in the front, and
then the back opened up. And so I spent my
(04:26):
childhood playing in one of these steep head ravines, and
it was it was like Indiana Jones or you know,
romancing the Stone. All these movies from the eighties where
they're running around in the jungles. It felt like that
as a kid, and I created all these movies in
my head, and I think, you know, if I had
(04:46):
to go back to one moment that I would say
really flued me into conservation and a real love for nature,
it was probably that. A big part of my childhood
being that. And then also all the sports I did
growing up were like surfing and things that were very
tied to nature. So just always had a strong connection
to it.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
And The Paper Bear is more than just a film,
It's a mission. How would you describe the heart of
the project and to someone a hearing about it for
the first time.
Speaker 4 (05:15):
Yeah, so again, I have to go back to where
we live. The Panhandle of Florida has a really crazy
history and story, and the Paper Bear the bigger mission
is to really open the eyes of the people that
not only live here, but vacation here, and then from
there the wider global community on what we have here
(05:36):
and why it's so important. You know, in the nineties,
a scientist in a large multinational conservation group went around
and started designating biodiversity hotspots around the globe. As we
started realizing the effects of climate change and the need
to start protecting different biodiversity. And these biodiversity hotspots are
(05:58):
defined by a list of definitions, but basically they make
up the spots on the planet that have the most
biodiversity and it's very concentrated, and I think it was
twenty sixteen they defined the thirty six biodiversity hot spot,
which was the North American coastal plane and the Florida
Panhandle is the epicenter of that. So to put all
(06:18):
that in context, if you took all thirty six of
these biodiversity hot spots and you combine them, they make
up only two point five percent of the at of
the Earth's land mass, and yet they contain more than
fifty percent of the planet's plants and animals the biodiversity.
So the paper Bear became a mission to really educate
(06:44):
about that because, like I said, our county is one
of the fastest growing counties in the country. Multiple years
in a row, our population the last ten years is
more than doubled. And still our year round population here
is like seventy thousand. But every season we have just
to our county, we have over seven eight million tourists
come down and visit. It's a very heavy human impact
(07:06):
yearly because we're a tourist economy.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
And yet nobody knew this story or this history, even
people that I knew that had, you know, spent.
Speaker 4 (07:14):
Their entire lives growing up here. So much of the
history of the area was lost after the Civil War,
and with a lot of the things that happened and
occurred during that time period, a lot of it was
like an oral tradition, you know, passed down, but as
many families dispersed or got broken up or separated, a
lot of that history was just lost. And so we really,
(07:36):
looking at the film, we decided we were doing a
future film. We're like, man, how do we tell this
in a way where someone who's four years old could
watch it and understand it, and then someone who's eighty
years old could watch it, understand it and want to
watch it.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
How do you capture you know, both of those groups.
So that became the big challenge.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Really, I can certainly imagine. And one of the things
I thought when I watched the film was wonder in
your words and your own words, not mine your words,
and more important today, how does a comment of age
adventure narrative help connect audiences emotionally to conservation.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
Yeah, I mean, I love that question. I'll tell you why.
Speaker 4 (08:16):
You know, I live in in a part of the
country that's I'm kind of in a bubble because we're
a tourist economy where we are, so we have people
from all religious spectrums and all political spectrums in our
little bubble. But then you drive five ten miles north
or you know, east or west, and it's far more conservative.
So it's an interesting place because as a filmmaker, one
(08:41):
thing I've learned, and I get a lot of this
from having done the more commercial work for ten twelve years,
like you don't have the luxury when you're in the
commercial world to just say I'm just going to create,
create art. If it doesn't connect, you know, that's fine,
because I need to get my message out there. You
have to connect because you're being paid to connect. And
(09:01):
so I brought that into the feature film world in
that when we started, you know, doing first edit, second
second edits, we were testing this the film with people
that we knew would love the film and then people
that we thought would just absolutely hate the film, And
so much of it was understanding how do you get
people to connect to that, you know, to something that
(09:25):
maybe they don't connect to, or something that they maybe
they don't really care about.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
And what we found was.
Speaker 4 (09:32):
The coming of age story and that connection between generations
of father and son is something that you can It
just taps into everybody. And we found that with our
test screenings that didn't matter what audience it was. You know,
people just connect to that. People connect to family, they
connect to heritage and lineage, and if you can tell
(09:53):
that story, well, I feel like you can really rope
anybody into any story that you want to get them involved.
And on a much bigger scale.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Is there any Father and Sun films that may have
helped influence this project or you yourself. Did you have
a particularly nice relationship with your own father growing up?
Speaker 5 (10:14):
Oh, we're getting with my father. No, it's wild Because
Sean and I my writing partner and partner in the
organization is named Sean Couch. He and I co wrote this,
and in many ways, I would say that, like a
(10:34):
lot of the live action, I wrote, So I wrote
all the live action first, he wrote all the animation.
We brought the two together and then we worked the
whole screenplay. So if you saw the screenplay today in
the movie today, it's very different than the two stories
that we brought together. But the bones of the two
stories came together in the beginning. And so he wrote
a lot of the animation.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
Aspect from his perspective as a father and from what
he had been learning from me about the history of
the area, and like, how do you get kids to
gravitate towards this story and understand it without overwhelming them
or scaring them. And then a lot of the live
action part that I wrote came from a real world
experience of me being out there, you know, living in
the woods and being with the bears for so long.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
And then also my idea of what a perfect.
Speaker 4 (11:22):
Father son relationship would look like. And you know, in fairness,
I don't think anybody can say they have a perfect
father son relationship, but my idea of what a good, fun, healthy,
you know, bonding relationship between a father and son.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
Is really what that story evolved into.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
That's very interesting that the writing was split in half
in that way, animation and real time. What was the
decision to go down that road in terms of the
writing process.
Speaker 4 (11:53):
Yeah, So, so the decision took for us to split
and write the script separately really came from a not
agreeing in the beginning. So, like I said, we had
planned to do this as a documentary film, and once
I got out there and started filming the wild bare footage,
we realized we had something much bigger and more profound.
(12:13):
So I had an idea of how the film would go,
and Sean had a separate idea of how the film
would go. And so we were sitting around one day
drinking coffee and we just couldn't agree. It's probably one
of the only times we couldn't agree, And so finally
we just agreed to go our separate ways, each write
our own screenplay and then come back and decide which
one we thought was the better one, and then both
(12:35):
work on that one and strengthen it. And so Sean
went and he, you know, he's got four kids, and
he was just very driven by this idea of doing
something just for kids, and so he went and wrote
this whole animated story, and I went and wrote my screenplay.
And my screenplay was really based on my experience having
lived in the woods with the you know, with the
(12:56):
bears for two and a half years and all the
things that had happened and the things I had learned,
and so mine was written from a.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
More real world perspective.
Speaker 4 (13:05):
So we came back the next day and I'm sorry,
we can't make the next week, we had sent each
other the screenplays, read them, and when we came back
together for coffee again, we both realized, Oh, my gosh,
these stories like actually blend together perfectly, and like, how
can we make these come together? And we both looked
at each other and just said, stories around the campfire
(13:26):
every night, That's the way we can make these come together.
So at that point we brought the two screenplays together
and then just started weaving them. And I would say
that the screenplay that you see in the film today
is very different from the original two screenplays we brought together.
But that was that was the process that really brought
that into being.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
And is that the type of process do you think
you'll go down on another film?
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Ooh, probably not.
Speaker 4 (13:52):
I you know, I think it works so well in
this film because you know, one thing I love about
Sean is he had just moved to the area right
before COVID and I've been here my entire life, so
you know, so much of this information is so ingrained
in me and who I am that you can sit
down with me and we can talk for hours and
I'm just like an encyclopedia and a lot of this information.
So he and I had spent a lot of time together,
(14:13):
and when I convinced him to even start the film project,
he was just like a sponge absorbing all this history
and information. And like I said, a lot of it's
oral history. So it's you know, it's really the telling
of stories which have been passed down over generations.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
So I don't know.
Speaker 4 (14:30):
I only say all that to say that while I
enjoyed it in this film, it was a very long process.
I mean, we spent five years working on the film.
I just don't I'm not sure how.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
It could happen like that. Again, I feel like it was.
Speaker 4 (14:46):
It wasn't a forced thing, and it wasn't something we planned,
and I think that that might be why it worked
so well.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
I think if we.
Speaker 4 (14:53):
Tried to plan it out and do it again, I
don't know that it would work as well.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
That makes sense completely understandable the film itself. One of
the things I took away from it is how little
we see animation and real life people in films together
and he's saying, I want to explore in the future.
I was really inspired by that. How much time does
it take to do that much animation in a film?
And were there any projects in particular that inspired you
(15:19):
to recurate such an amazing project.
Speaker 4 (15:23):
The animation took over two and a half years, and
one aspect of the animation that was took so much time,
and you know, our animation team there in Bulgaria, it
took us. We had to find the right animation team.
I had been reaching out to. I mean, we had
even started reaching out to Disney animators, but just budget wise,
(15:46):
we couldn't get any of these guys.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
And then when we found our friends Stanni in Bulgarian
he was just starting up his animation company and he said, oh,
I'd love to do this project. It's amazing. So if
you saw the animation that we started with what we
have in the end, it's like night and day different.
And I'm beyond proud of what we have in the end.
Speaker 4 (16:06):
And a big part of that was, you know, I'm
not trying to like pat myself on the back, but
part of that was as the director just getting everybody
so excited about the project and the mission that they
wanted to bring their best, and then just being there
every day all day. So it's like working with the
animators on Zoom for hours and just really keeping everybody
(16:28):
inspired so that they, I mean, they elevated their abilities
to what you've seen, which in my opinion is like
world class. It's just amazing.
Speaker 3 (16:38):
So as far.
Speaker 4 (16:40):
As what were some of my inspirations on that, you know,
I grew up as a young boy in the eighties
watching a lot of those classic films of the eighties
and then into the nineties, and so the thing we
really wanted to do with the paper Bear Sean and
I both we sat down and talked about it, and
we said, you know, we want to create a film
that is reminiscent of those nineteen eighties nineties films Goonies, Jones,
(17:02):
you know what I'm saying, or Roger Rabbit, Remember Roger
Rabbit where the anime, Yeah, interacting with the characters. And
so I'm so glad you said that, because it's like
a testament that we kind of were successful in what
we did, and then we created a film that really
harkens back to the films that we grew up on
and really shaped a lot of who we were as kids,
(17:24):
and you know how we viewed the world and interacted
in the world.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
And the audience reaction to your work. Have you been
pleased by that? Is it something you was that is
in line in the way of you're thinking?
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Absolutely.
Speaker 4 (17:39):
You know, you create art, and once you create it
and you put it out in the world, you you know,
if you're a good artist, you know you're going to
lose complete control over it.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Once it's out there.
Speaker 4 (17:48):
You might have an idea of where it's going to
go and what message it's going to say, and then
once you release it, you really don't control how it
lives in people's minds and psyches. Yeah, the you know,
the response, it's been overwhelming, and it has been just
very gratifying. I would say, I knew we had made it.
(18:08):
Let me put it this way, I knew we had
made it. When we came back. We'd started the film
festival circuit, and then we decided to come back to
our hometown and do a day of three screenings in
this theater, this local theater for all the people that
had supported us, And so we split it into three
different screenings. The one in the morning was for all
these people that work at these different conservation organizations. We
(18:30):
knew they would love it across the board, just because
of who they are. The second screening was for all
these families that had financially supported us, so it was
parents with kids. We were confident they were going to
love it because you know, it's kids animation, it's a
fun story, and they loved it. And then the third
screening was the screening of anything we've done that I
(18:51):
was most concerned about. It was a lot of people
who supported us, either financially or just supported us any
way they could. Most of them had no idea what
the was about, but some of them were developers and architects,
people that would you know, would find a message about
conservation and being conscious about development potentially a challenge. And
(19:14):
so that was the screening that I was most worried about.
And when the when the film finished, we left the
room dark and let all the credits run, just because
I love to, you know, give give everybody their time,
And as soon as the lights came on, we got
a five minute standing ovation, which is the only standing
ovation we've gotten, so for me, it was like, Wow,
the people that I was most worried about were the
(19:35):
people that gave us a standing ovation. And at that
point I said, you know, this film is touching nerves
in ways that we had hoped, but also in ways
that we just didn't even know. You know. It's people
coming up and saying, oh, this reminds me of my
great grandmother, who et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and
you just start seeing people in a new light, and
it really I think, you know, I think, Damien, the
(19:55):
big thing is with with conservation and climate change, we've
reached a point where we're at a crisis of reality.
So you can travel the country and you can travel
the world, and the crisis we're in right now is
that people have completely different realities. You know, some people
are like the sky is blue. Other people who are
saying the sky is red. And that's a kind of
(20:16):
a scary, dangerous time to be in if we're trying
to come together, either as nations or as the world
and find real world solutions to these real world problems.
And I think as artists, as conservationists, the more we
can find ways to tap back into that part of
the human psyche where we can communicate and not fight,
(20:38):
and we can communicate on some level that then allows
us to broaden that conversation and reach points of understanding
that wouldn't normally be there.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
I don't know. I just think that might be the
only chance we really have, which is kind of why we.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
So I go ahead, I'm just going to say, that's
kind of why we went down that avenue. You know,
for a conservation film, this is a very unusual film,
and I think that's why we went down that avenue.
It was like, how do we get the people that
normally wouldn't watch us to watch it?
Speaker 2 (21:10):
And one of the things I thought, and this may
be a city question saying that, you know, I'm very
much a city guy from London. But you picked a
black bear. There's different types of beers in the world.
Why did you pick the black bear?
Speaker 4 (21:24):
So, for the straightforward, honest answer, we only have black.
Speaker 3 (21:29):
Bears in Florida. So there's the Florida that's the only
type of bear that we have.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
In your ability to cast the right characters, tell us
about your casting process and who are the really talented
people involved on screen in the film.
Speaker 4 (21:43):
Yeah, Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up. So
when we did the casting, we actually did a national
casting and we had over one thousand men and over
a thousand boys auditioned for the pr And what's crazy
is we ended up choosing Jason Burkey for the Father
and Max Ivouten for the Sun, and both of them
were out of Atlanta, and they were both with the
(22:05):
same talent agency, which is hout and Talent.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
So it was crazy because we we live.
Speaker 4 (22:09):
About five hours south of Atlanta, which which is where
they're based, and yet we did this whole national search
and ended up finding our talent just you know, right
right right north.
Speaker 3 (22:21):
Of us by four or five hours.
Speaker 4 (22:24):
It was fascinating because when we did the when we
did the casting, we sent it to multiple casting agencies,
but also a talent scout who took it national and
got all these people to apply. But it was less
you know, there was an element of understanding the backstory
of the characters, which I sent you that right up on,
(22:46):
so you have a little bit of a better understanding,
which wasn't like one hundred percent critical in terms of
how they look, because I've met many many mixed people
might say mixed people I'm talking about the indigenous, yeah,
cultures from our area, mixed with Scott's Irish.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
And so you get people.
Speaker 4 (23:04):
That now that I know that have a lot of
these oral traditions and oral histories of the area, and
you might start talking to them and you would never
in a million years know that they have Muscogee in
their lineage, and yet you know they look like somebody
from Ireland or but as you talk to them more
and more and they start talking about their great grandmother
who is Muscogee or Appalachi or so part of the
(23:27):
scripting and part of the casting was less about I mean,
the looks important obviously always we're visual, we're visual creatures,
and so when we watch movies, we like to see
something that's believable, but also, you know, see something that
we want to watch.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
So the process was fascinating. I think. I think what
really happened was I knew that.
Speaker 4 (23:54):
I knew that the characters had to be able.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
To do what we needed them to do.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
So, for example, Max has this really intense scene in
the movie where he interacts with the with the black
Bear and he thinks he might die. And when you
watch that, you believe that you're right there with the
boy and the bear. But you know, the boy, the
actor was never around any wild animals or any animals
at all, and so we had to find a boy
who could we knew could really do that act in
(24:21):
a way that was believable. So for me, when we
did the the auditions and the casting, it's funny because
we're talking about eighties and nineties.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
When I did the.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
Character right ups for the father, I said, he's kind
of like an Indiana Jones character, and you know, he's
adventurous and yet he's a kind of this loving father
and et cetera, et cetera. And we get all these
taped auditions and all the guys come on with like
these leather jackets that are n't buttoned and their chest
is hanging out and they've got their Indiana Jones hat on.
I'm like, ugh, And they go and audition and you're like, Nope,
(24:54):
not the right person. And then Jason auditioned and he
comes on the camera and he literally's just got a
like a plaid shirt on, looks like he just you know,
finished maybe working in the yard with his wife or something,
and you know, just not he didn't put on a
whole wardrobe for the for the for the audition, and
(25:16):
then he just starts reading and acting and he just
nailed it. So from from the very beginning, I knew
Jason was our guy. Sean was a little bit he
was like, maybe he is, maybe he's not. And then
with Max, he was just such a lovable character in
his audition, but I was concerned about him being able
to pull off the drama, especially the drama of the
(25:37):
bear interaction scene, and so Sean was one hundred percent
sold on Max from the get go. But I actually
drove up to Atlanta and once we had chosen Jason,
I called him and I said, hey, I want you
to be in the room with me when we auditioned Max,
because I want to get your feeling in your opinion,
because if you don't feel like that chemistry is there,
it's not going to be believable that there's you know
(25:59):
that you guys are father and son. And so we
drove up and we did a live audition with Jason
and Max in the room and just really had to
I had to believe that he could not only pull
off the drama, but that when I got in the
room with the two that I could believe that they
were father and son and they had you know, we
brought three boys in because I wanted it. I didn't
want Max to show up and just immediately think, oh,
(26:21):
I've got this because I'm the only one here. So
we had two other boys that that actually had a
real shot at getting the part two. One was from
North Carolina and I think the other one was from
like Missouri. They came in and auditioned as well. But
immediately Jason, the father character, said yeah, no, I have
a real connection with Max, like instantly, and you could
(26:41):
feel it in the room. You could definitely feel that
they had this chemistry that was very believable as a father.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Son and they they you know, they joked with each
other like a father and son would and it was
it was almost instant.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
How many days would you say, this shoot took and
a lot of the time, you know, we finished films,
people finished filmed anything. Oh if I only had one
more day, two more days or or something like that,
I could have done this. So kind of done that.
Did you have that feeding when you finished your shooting days?
Speaker 4 (27:14):
Some days, yes, we had some craziness. So from start
to finish, I had it so planned out that once
the whole crew arrived, and I think our crew was
a total of twenty one people at the at the peak,
but most of the time it was around seventeen to
eighteen and I think we filmed all the live action
sixteen days, and it was all films on location in
(27:35):
every spot, so we didn't recreate any of these amazing spots.
It was very important to me that we actually filmed
these natural locations so that when people see the film
and we're saying, this is how amazing it is here,
you actually go, oh, that's actually real places. It's not
just some studio or you know, back lot. So, yeah,
(27:57):
sixteen days, and then we had one day of pickups.
And I would say, it's funny because when you know this,
when you're making a film, you have all these scenes
and you're filming everything, and you just think all of
it's going to be in the film, and then you
hit the editing room and so much of it is
cut and hits the floor. But there were certain scenes that,
you know, things didn't work out or we weren't able
to get exactly how I wanted it, and I was like,
(28:19):
I was really.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
Upset about that.
Speaker 4 (28:22):
But then once we got into the editing room, I'm like, oh,
that scene didn't even make it into the movie. So
on some levels, you a friend of mine, As a
friend of mine always says, the camera never lies. Once
you get in the editing room and actually see the footage,
it doesn't matter how how perfect you think something is
or how wrong you think something is. When you actually
see it, it'll let you know if it's perfect or wrong.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
And do you sit in with the editor or do
you allow him to have a few more days with
the footage? And then you come in what is your
process like with the editor? And is it something you enjoy?
Speaker 4 (28:55):
So I actually edited the whole film. Oh yeah, so
I've been because I've been doing this for so long.
I did all the editing and all the color grading,
and a big part of that, right, yeah, in the grade.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
And we wanted with the grade, I really, you know,
we wanted to go that nineteen eighties.
Speaker 4 (29:12):
So we did a Fujifilm. Started with a Fujifilm. I
think it was a fifty three sixty five lot. So
I took it back into that nineteen eighties kind of
a really rich film stock look, and it gave us
that that old nineteen eighties nineties film look. Yeah, you know,
with the edit, it was like I've been editing for
(29:33):
so long. I just I knew there was no way
because I was the only one that knew all the
wild animal footage as well as I did, because I
filmed it over you know, two and a half three years.
It's just been really difficult, I think to edit.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
It really nice. Sorry, that's what I had to tell
you that.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
What was that I was just saying, it was all
really nice.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
Oh, thank you, yeah, really nice, thank you, thank you. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (29:59):
So I think being able to you know, when we
filmed with the live actors, getting them to act like
they're right there with the wild animals. I knew that
footage like the back of my hand. I had filmed
that footage with you know, but the year and a
half prior, I knew I was gonna have the boy
come and climb around this bush here and look like this,
and so so much of it was because we're working
(30:19):
with wild animals, and we had this set of rules
that we put on ourselves. There was no coaching the
wild animals. There was no making them do something that
they weren't naturally going to do so, so much of
it was capturing the footage that we knew that we needed.
But you know, one five ten second shot with a
bear might take me a month and a half of
being out there sixteen hours a day to get that shot.
(30:41):
But because of that process, it was so seared into
my brain. Once you get to the editing process, to
try and download all that and pass it on to
another editor, I think would have been very difficult.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
And what was your editing process? Like, sorry, I'll rephrase
that question. What was your go to editing software for
the project? Now we're at liberty to have so many
different pieces of editing software on our desktop or our laptops,
and then some of it even for free. I downloaded
a version of Da Vinci Resolved not long ago. I
(31:17):
just wanted to compare the free version to the studio
version I got with my Black Magic Pocket scene in
the Camera four K. So what editing software did you use?
Speaker 4 (31:27):
So I edited the whole film in Da Vinci in Resolve,
which was the first feature or large film that I've
actually edited in Devinia and I've always worked in final cut.
But because I was doing because I've I've used Da
Vinci for for a long time, just color green, and
so I'm sitting here going, man, the last thing in
(31:48):
the world I want to do is be transferring back
and forth from Final Cut to Da Vinci. So I
just started editing in Da Vinci, which I've done before,
but I did a real deep dive and really became
familiar with the editing software and did all of the
edit and the color grade and resolve.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
I see, have you ever used Premiere Pro before?
Speaker 4 (32:09):
You know, I haven't. I've always been a Final Cut user.
I've seen it, and I have friends and colleagues that
work with it. I think for me, you know, I'm
fifty now and I love what I've seen it. But
then I'm also like, ough, do I really want to
learn a whole new you know? You know that you
know it's gonna be several months of just deep dive,
(32:31):
really learning. So no, I've never but I will say this,
I've spent my entire life working in photoshops. It's kind
of weird that I haven't delved in the Premiere Pro.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Okay, understandable. I mean, sometimes learning new editing software there
has to be a particular reason for it, I think,
and Da Vinci resolved what it's capable of doing right now.
And as you said, you don't want to jump around
with like hyper not hyperlink. So whatever links that may
be to get you from Da Vinci into Premiere pro
can be a bit of a It can slow down
(33:04):
your workflow potentially if you're editing that way. So partnerships
play a big part in film production and getting things
moving forward. Many people have partnerships in their films so
they can get funded or they can be seen. What
role do partnerships play in scaling, conservation storytelling? Can you
(33:27):
share an example of partnerships or a partnership that's been
especially meaningful for you.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
I've got quite a few, So in terms of funding,
I think I think the interesting thing about this film
is we're able to raise the funds in multiple ways.
One it all started with my partner Sean and his
nonprofit foundation really starting the project. But once it scaled
up and reached a point where it was much bigger
(33:55):
than they, you know, they were ready to take on,
they actually just hand it over all the IP and
gave us ownership and allowed us to pull it into
our own create our own nonprofit, So it became its
own nonprofit. And I do that. You know, anytime I
create a film or a documentary or something like that,
I'll turn it into its own LLC, just for you know,
for for protection liabilities. So in this case, it was
(34:19):
unique and new to me and that we weren't turning
it into an LLC. We were turning it into a nonprofit.
But with regards to partnerships, Sean is really good at
creating partnerships with all these other conservation organizations, just because
that's kind of what he does with his organization. So,
you know, when we first started doing that, I've got
(34:39):
a great story about how we got the main funding
for the live action part. We had hit a point where,
you know, the funding had kind of dried up. We
had all this footage of the live animals, we had
the screenplay, we had the entire things storyboarded, we had
I think we'd even started doing rough animatics of the animation,
(34:59):
and and we hit this point where we're like, man,
we're not sure how we're going to raise the funds
to do the live action part, to get this whole
crew out here from LA in Atlanta. And so just
in a moment of like Hail Mary, I guess crisis moment.
I went in and I started pulling shots. When I
was out there filming with the Black Bears. You know,
(35:20):
I might be out there fourteen sixteen hours a day,
so there's plenty of time to not only film but
also get pictures. So I went in and from the
two and a half years, I pulled the fourteen best
images that I had. They were just really stellar, beautiful
images of the Black Bears and the mother interacting with
the cub and all this kind of stuff, and we
decided to just I created an art show. I had
(35:43):
these fourteen you seeum quality prints made. And my wife
and I have a couple restaurants, and so next to
one of them, we had this giant tent put up
outside because they have this songwriters festival that comes in
every year, and so we asked them to set the
tent up a week before the festival week early, and
they did, and I got all this black fabric and
I completely blacked out the tent inside, so if you
(36:05):
walked in it at night, it was just pitch black.
And I put these lights in that I can control
with a dimmer switch, and then I hung all this
art on the outside walls of the tent, and then
I threw black fabric over. Now all the art was
black and white, So it was all these black and
white images of the bears, and they were anywhere from
two foot by four foot as big as six foot
by three foot. And so we just did this Hail
(36:28):
Mary where we invited all the people we knew, and
I just decided I was going to do this presentation
where I told the backstory of the film, like how
I'd gone out and spent you know, two and a
half years in the woods, and you know, basically spent
every day with this primarily a female bear, and how
she had you know, met her little mate and got
pregnant and had a cub during that time, and how
(36:48):
I spent all this time filming with her in the
cub for another year and a half.
Speaker 3 (36:52):
And anyway, we.
Speaker 4 (36:53):
Tell this whole story with a video rolling with some
of the back the backstory going on the video, And
when the video is done, the whole room goes black,
and I had people run around and uncover the art,
and then I take the dimmer switches and I slowly
raise the lights in the room. And so these two
hundred people are standing in the room, and as it
goes from pitch black, the entire outside of the tent
(37:14):
lights up with just these amazing pictures of bears looking
in at them.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
And so you have this gasp in this aha moment.
Speaker 4 (37:20):
But in that moment, we were just like, Okay, we've
got people now, money, money, money, We need you.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
To support this.
Speaker 4 (37:28):
And so we had a lot of support for people
that really didn't even know what the I mean, I
tell you that story, but if you knew that story
and then watch the film, you'd be like, oh, I
didn't know what the film was about at all. So
it's crazy how many people we got to support us
who were friends and people acquaintances who really knew nothing
about the movie but just loved the backstory so much.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
We had sold it basically.
Speaker 4 (37:51):
But the big funder here's the crazy part. The big
funder who funded the live action They weren't even invited
to that event. They happened to be walking down the
beach and bumped into a friend of theirs who said, Hey,
I'm going to this event up here, and they said, oh,
can we come? He said sure, sure, I'll sneak you
in and so they snuck them in and they ended
up supporting and funding the entire live action part. Because
(38:12):
the woman in particular, she grew up in New Mexico
and loved black bears. She always had black bears come
into your rs, So she had this immense love for
black Bear. So once those lights dimmed up and she
saw the black Bear art, she was like, come in whatever, Like, how.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
Can I help? How can I you know, how can
we make this happen?
Speaker 4 (38:30):
So I think part of it is, you know, I
know that's a long story to get to. I think
sometimes you just got to throw stuff against the wall.
And I think it's also I know you know this,
but in the film world sometimes it's just a leap
of faith, you know.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
Yeah, and funded is one of the hardest things to
get for some of us. Definitely, you've mentioned the lady
came along and helped fund the live action part of
the film. What our avenues did you have in mind
in case she didn't come along?
Speaker 3 (39:01):
We didn't?
Speaker 4 (39:03):
I mean, I think I think so I have been
doing this for so long, I can I can do
any aspect of filmmaking. I can run cameras, And part
of it is I own a construction company for ten years,
and as a contractor, you realize the best contractors in
terms of building are ones that can do everything. They
can do every aspect of building a house, because you know,
(39:26):
as a contractor, how can I know if the electrician
is doing it right if I don't understand electricity and
know how to actually wire a house myself. So I
don't think that's always the case in film. I think
there's some directors and people that do different aspects of
film that are amazing at what they do and have
no desire or no understanding of other aspects. I think
that's a reality in the arts. But I also think
(39:49):
for me personally, being the director I am, it's because
I can do any aspect of the process on a
film set.
Speaker 3 (39:58):
And have done it.
Speaker 4 (40:00):
And I think I got to that point partially just
because I love the art form so much and I'm
the kind of person that just wants to learn everything
and understand everything. So I say all that to just
say I was kind of the crazy one in the
whole project that was like, well, if we can't get this,
we'll just we'll do it ourselves, and you know, which
is unrealistic when you're looking at the live action, working
(40:21):
with actors and having craft and you.
Speaker 3 (40:23):
Know, lodging and all that stuff.
Speaker 4 (40:25):
But it was I think it was that kind of
crazy mindset that just kept everybody believing and saying, yeah, no,
let's do it. Yeah, absolutely, And Sean's the same way.
It's funny because we've gotten to be such close friends
and now our wives are like, okay, we got to
rain you guys in a little bit. You'r ARII dreamers
and you always believe you can make it happen, and
you do, but that doesn't mean there isn't some level
of pain that comes with, you know, getting.
Speaker 3 (40:47):
To the finish line.
Speaker 4 (40:50):
And I you know, you know, I would say this, Damian,
I think and I hope that this like resonates with you.
I think some of the best film out there is
stuff that was made because people believed.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
In it so much that they made it happen.
Speaker 4 (41:04):
And then when you get into films that are like
so formulaic and so like it's got to make money
and we got to get this, you start losing that
chaos and that I mean, I hate to use the
word hardship, but I mean, you know, like I look
at Apocalypse now and you hear the level of just
shit that he went through to make that movie, and
you're like, oh my god, it's one of the greatest
movies ever made. Because of that, you can feel it
(41:26):
in the film. You can feel the raw. It just
feels real. It feels like, yeah, no, I feel it.
We just watched something last night and I'm not going
to say the name of it, and it was fun,
it was entertaining, but it was like highly produced and
I'm like, this is just it's like it's.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
Like a sieve.
Speaker 4 (41:45):
It's just the storyline leaking all over the place. You know,
it's so unbelievable, and you can tell it's just this
formula that they were following to get something on and
make the money and move on to the next thing.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
Completely. I really really understand what you mean. What Jewels
And I'm an old film. This is about two or
three months had gone. It just blew my mind how
many of the things in the original episode, original Jaws
film that happened that wouldn't happen today. Great great filmmaking,
a great story, and os.
Speaker 3 (42:18):
Was filmed here too. I love that you brought that up.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
Was it?
Speaker 3 (42:21):
I had no idea?
Speaker 4 (42:22):
Yeah, it was fund right here, about fifteen miles from
where most of it was filmed in Destin, which is
about fifteen miles down the road from us.
Speaker 3 (42:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (42:32):
Yeah, we've had quite a few, quite a few films
made here that you know, you don't know that they
were made here. The Truman Show was filmed here, that classic,
horrible film, but it's a great classic. Frogs was filmed
right across the street from where I live. Actually, the
scene in the movie where Max is having the nightmare,
you know, and he's walking up to the cabin where
(42:54):
you have that reveal moment, that is where that is
the actual land where Frogs was filmed.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
Oh I see, now been something near every day. Yeah yeah,
and you yourself wear many hats. A very talented guy.
You edited the film. You've had such an involvement with
the film. You mentioned the kind of grade in as well.
Who done the sound design and who recorded the sound
and how was that process with your actives and in
(43:21):
post production?
Speaker 4 (43:24):
So so, one thing I learned a long time ago
in filmmaking, and with commercial films specifically, is there's just
about anything an audience will forgive except bad sound. You
can you can have a blurred image. You can say,
oh that's art, that's art, But if you don't have
good sound, it's it's you know, your toast. So when
we did the live action, I was just very it
(43:48):
was just very important that we get a really good
sound guy, and so we hired. So what's interesting about
the film is when we started working on it. For me,
if I pull, when I pull a producer on a
line producer, I immediately try and pick somebody who's local
so that they understand the area.
Speaker 3 (44:05):
They can make things happen, you know, things of this nature.
Speaker 4 (44:09):
So my producer that I pulled in he went to
film school at FSU and he had all these friends
that he grew up with who graduated and went off
and did their own film careers in Orlando and Atlanta
and LA. He's the one who you know, recommended the
DP out of LA and he's the one that recommended
our sound guy out of Orlando. And his name's Scott.
(44:32):
He'd been down in Orlando working with Disney for a
long time and so we really only had one field recorder.
Speaker 3 (44:36):
He came in.
Speaker 4 (44:37):
He used two lavelayers and a shotgun. But most of
the audio that's just amazing clean audio he captured with
just this incredible Lavelaer set that he had, and then
the sound design itself. The orchestra we decided because we
were going for that nineteen eighties nineteen nineties feel. I
(44:59):
was just like, I want to work with a live orchestra,
and I want to work with a real composer. And
so our animation team out of Bulgaria, Astani who runs
Chase a Cloud, he said, Hey, my friend's a composer.
I want to recommend him. So he sent me some
videos and at first I was like, you know, the
stuff I was seeing was good, but it didn't really
have the feel of.
Speaker 3 (45:16):
What we wanted. But we just took a leap and
went with him. His name is George Stresof.
Speaker 4 (45:20):
He's amazing, and so when we started working with him,
he pulled in his friend who's another composer, and they
composed all of it. You know, it's live composition. And
then we flew my wife and I flew to Bulgaria
and we recorded the entire film score over a four
day period with a sixty five person orchestra, so it's
all live orchestra.
Speaker 3 (45:40):
Music in the film.
Speaker 4 (45:41):
And then the sound design I worked with Silver Sound
out of Manhattan. Corey Choi runs it and he I'd
worked with him on a documentary probably close to eight
years previous, and I just really liked the work they
had done the documentary. I came onto the project late
and the sound was just horrible, like most of the
audio that it was captured was just so rough, and
(46:03):
I was thinking to myself, Man, I don't know if
we're gonna be able to pull this off. People aren't
gonna forgive this. And we gave it to Corey and
what he was able to do with it was so
impressive to me that I just knew that I wanted
to work with him again on this, and so, you know,
they did the initial sound design and then I flew
up to Manhattan and spent I think a week and
a half and we were just in the studio all day,
(46:24):
ten hours a day doing the final master and it
was it was so much fun. And I think that's
part of the process. You know, if you're if you
get out of the fun aspect of creating the art
and you're in that formulae, you got to be you
got to work and you got to do business. But
if you're in the room with artists and everybody's.
Speaker 3 (46:41):
Laughing and what about this? And try this? And that's
I think where a lot of the real magic happens.
And so I mean, I.
Speaker 4 (46:48):
Think you're I'm getting the feeling you're asking this question
because you realize how important the sound design is to
the success. Yeah, it's just like one hundred percent. Without
that sound design, you wouldn't have the film, just like
without the live act and the liberriers, you wouldn't have
the film.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
And lastly, what memory would you like anyone who's watched
the film to have when they leave the cinema, the theater,
or when they finish watching it online.
Speaker 4 (47:13):
Oh that's a big one. You mean memory from a
specific scene in the movie or just memory in.
Speaker 2 (47:18):
General, memory in general of the film.
Speaker 3 (47:22):
I think I would love.
Speaker 4 (47:26):
I feel like I think with conservation and nature and
the love of nature. Part of it is we have
a disconnect with nature. And you can probably speak to
this more living in a city. I live in a
state forest, so I'm in nature every day. But I
think the memory that I would want for people to
have coming away from it is that memory of like, oh,
(47:48):
I remember my parents taking me to that national park
or I remember my grandfather and I going camping that
one time, and I think, you know, I love cities
just as much as anybody, but I think there's those
times when you tie it to family and heritage of
that vacation or where you feel like you've stepped outside
(48:08):
of your life in the world, and it's almost like
doing a drug in a way, where you know if
you don't live in nature daily and it becomes that
once a year thing. I think those are the memories
that often shape people's feelings not only of nature and conservation,
but of their own heritage in many ways.
Speaker 2 (48:28):
Completely understand, I really do. Eric, Thanks so much for
coming on the podcast. I really appreciate you taking the
time to speak to me and tell us about your
brilliant work and your brilliant production, and I hope to
speak to you soon
You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more
amazing filmmaking and screenwriting podcasts, just go to IFH Podcastnetwork
dot com erics.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
How are you today, I'm good?
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Thank you? How are you?
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I'm good? I'm good. Thanks a lot for asking. I'm
having a good day and even better now that I
get to speak to you, which is an added bonus
for sure, especially since I've seen The Paper Beer, which
is a brilliant film that I was lucky enough to see.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
That you made. I appreciate that.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
And before we start speaking about that brilliant production of yours,
can you tell us about your journey and what led
you from production work to co founding The Paper Beer.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Yeah. So, as far as production work.
Speaker 4 (00:53):
I've owned a production company for over twelve years now
and most of the work, most of the work we
were doing with the product company was more short films
for businesses and corporate type entities. They were used internally,
so it was I enjoyed it because it was short projects.
We'd make a good amount of money, but they were
(01:14):
still feature film esque in the storytelling and the quality.
And then these companies would use them to train their
staff and really create emotional connection between the company and
the brand. So I've been doing that for a very
long time. Knew I was going to move into feature
film eventually, but feature films, as we all know, can
be very time consuming and very expensive when you start
(01:36):
getting into bigger and bigger projects. Oh yeah, the paper
Bear really started when COVID hit. My wife and I
live in the Panhandle of Florida, and in the last decade,
this county that we're in has been the fastest developing
county in the United States multiple years in a row.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
And so somebody being somebody who's grown up here for.
Speaker 4 (01:59):
Me most of my life and have a really strong
connection to the area, seeing it change so rapidly and
with such abandoned for any level of understanding of what
was here the history was just hard. And so one
day she just said, you know, stop complaining about and
do something, and so it was COVID. I met Sean Couchho,
with my writing partner in this, and he runs a foundation,
(02:22):
a family foundation, and I just gave me the idea.
I said, hey, man, I've been thinking about this project
for ten years, about telling the story of our home
here and how significant it is to the world.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
And he said, yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
So in the beginning it was supposed to be a documentary,
and then as we started, I was about six seven
months in. I was out in the woods every day
and we're from you know, fourteen to sixteen hours a
day filming, and when we started getting some of the
more incredible footage and dramatic footage, we realized we had
a much bigger story here and decided to take it
(02:53):
in the future film direction and it just kept evolving
from there.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Conservation so important to you, you.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
Know, that's a good question. It's just been something that's
been at my core since I was as long as
I can remember, since I was two years old. I
think a big part of it. It's interesting you asked
that question because when we do the when we were
doing the fundraising for the film, we would travel around
and I would do this presentation, and in the presentation,
(03:21):
I would show the behind the scenes of how we
captured a lot of the footage for the film, but
part of it was me telling my story. And I
have this footage when I'm two years old of the
house we lived in here in Florida, and it was
right on the edge of what's called a steep head ravine,
and it's a type of ecosystem that only exists here
in the Panhandle, where groundwater spring water just comes right
(03:44):
up out of the ground. And because it's all sand
in Florida, if you have this happen anywhere where there's elevation,
it just starts eating this sand away and so it
forms these really deep canyons, kind of like something you'd
see out west, and instead of being rock, it's all sand.
And then at the base these canyons, you have a
lot of different plants and animals that exist there and
nowhere else. And the temperature usually drops like five to
(04:06):
ten degrees when you get down into the base of
these canyons. So it's a really unique ecosystem. And our
house growing up was built right on the side of
one of these canyons, and so the front of our
house looked like a one story house, but when you
walked around the back, it was actually two stories because
the first floor was half underground in the front, and
then the back opened up. And so I spent my
(04:26):
childhood playing in one of these steep head ravines, and
it was it was like Indiana Jones or you know,
romancing the Stone. All these movies from the eighties where
they're running around in the jungles. It felt like that
as a kid, and I created all these movies in
my head, and I think, you know, if I had
(04:46):
to go back to one moment that I would say
really flued me into conservation and a real love for nature,
it was probably that. A big part of my childhood
being that. And then also all the sports I did
growing up were like surfing and things that were very
tied to nature. So just always had a strong connection
to it.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
And The Paper Bear is more than just a film,
It's a mission. How would you describe the heart of
the project and to someone a hearing about it for
the first time.
Speaker 4 (05:15):
Yeah, so again, I have to go back to where
we live. The Panhandle of Florida has a really crazy
history and story, and the Paper Bear the bigger mission
is to really open the eyes of the people that
not only live here, but vacation here, and then from
there the wider global community on what we have here
(05:36):
and why it's so important. You know, in the nineties,
a scientist in a large multinational conservation group went around
and started designating biodiversity hotspots around the globe. As we
started realizing the effects of climate change and the need
to start protecting different biodiversity. And these biodiversity hotspots are
(05:58):
defined by a list of definitions, but basically they make
up the spots on the planet that have the most
biodiversity and it's very concentrated, and I think it was
twenty sixteen they defined the thirty six biodiversity hot spot,
which was the North American coastal plane and the Florida
Panhandle is the epicenter of that. So to put all
(06:18):
that in context, if you took all thirty six of
these biodiversity hot spots and you combine them, they make
up only two point five percent of the at of
the Earth's land mass, and yet they contain more than
fifty percent of the planet's plants and animals the biodiversity.
So the paper Bear became a mission to really educate
(06:44):
about that because, like I said, our county is one
of the fastest growing counties in the country. Multiple years
in a row, our population the last ten years is
more than doubled. And still our year round population here
is like seventy thousand. But every season we have just
to our county, we have over seven eight million tourists
come down and visit. It's a very heavy human impact
(07:06):
yearly because we're a tourist economy.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
And yet nobody knew this story or this history, even
people that I knew that had, you know, spent.
Speaker 4 (07:14):
Their entire lives growing up here. So much of the
history of the area was lost after the Civil War,
and with a lot of the things that happened and
occurred during that time period, a lot of it was
like an oral tradition, you know, passed down, but as
many families dispersed or got broken up or separated, a
lot of that history was just lost. And so we really,
(07:36):
looking at the film, we decided we were doing a
future film. We're like, man, how do we tell this
in a way where someone who's four years old could
watch it and understand it, and then someone who's eighty
years old could watch it, understand it and want to
watch it.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
How do you capture you know, both of those groups.
So that became the big challenge.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Really, I can certainly imagine. And one of the things
I thought when I watched the film was wonder in
your words and your own words, not mine your words,
and more important today, how does a comment of age
adventure narrative help connect audiences emotionally to conservation.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
Yeah, I mean, I love that question. I'll tell you why.
Speaker 4 (08:16):
You know, I live in in a part of the
country that's I'm kind of in a bubble because we're
a tourist economy where we are, so we have people
from all religious spectrums and all political spectrums in our
little bubble. But then you drive five ten miles north
or you know, east or west, and it's far more conservative.
So it's an interesting place because as a filmmaker, one
(08:41):
thing I've learned, and I get a lot of this
from having done the more commercial work for ten twelve years,
like you don't have the luxury when you're in the
commercial world to just say I'm just going to create,
create art. If it doesn't connect, you know, that's fine,
because I need to get my message out there. You
have to connect because you're being paid to connect. And
(09:01):
so I brought that into the feature film world in
that when we started, you know, doing first edit, second
second edits, we were testing this the film with people
that we knew would love the film and then people
that we thought would just absolutely hate the film, And
so much of it was understanding how do you get
people to connect to that, you know, to something that
(09:25):
maybe they don't connect to, or something that they maybe
they don't really care about.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
And what we found was.
Speaker 4 (09:32):
The coming of age story and that connection between generations
of father and son is something that you can It
just taps into everybody. And we found that with our
test screenings that didn't matter what audience it was. You know,
people just connect to that. People connect to family, they
connect to heritage and lineage, and if you can tell
(09:53):
that story, well, I feel like you can really rope
anybody into any story that you want to get them involved.
And on a much bigger scale.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Is there any Father and Sun films that may have
helped influence this project or you yourself. Did you have
a particularly nice relationship with your own father growing up?
Speaker 5 (10:14):
Oh, we're getting with my father. No, it's wild Because
Sean and I my writing partner and partner in the
organization is named Sean Couch. He and I co wrote this,
and in many ways, I would say that, like a
(10:34):
lot of the live action, I wrote, So I wrote
all the live action first, he wrote all the animation.
We brought the two together and then we worked the
whole screenplay. So if you saw the screenplay today in
the movie today, it's very different than the two stories
that we brought together. But the bones of the two
stories came together in the beginning. And so he wrote
a lot of the animation.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
Aspect from his perspective as a father and from what
he had been learning from me about the history of
the area, and like, how do you get kids to
gravitate towards this story and understand it without overwhelming them
or scaring them. And then a lot of the live
action part that I wrote came from a real world
experience of me being out there, you know, living in
the woods and being with the bears for so long.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
And then also my idea of what a perfect.
Speaker 4 (11:22):
Father son relationship would look like. And you know, in fairness,
I don't think anybody can say they have a perfect
father son relationship, but my idea of what a good, fun, healthy,
you know, bonding relationship between a father and son.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
Is really what that story evolved into.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
That's very interesting that the writing was split in half
in that way, animation and real time. What was the
decision to go down that road in terms of the
writing process.
Speaker 4 (11:53):
Yeah, So, so the decision took for us to split
and write the script separately really came from a not
agreeing in the beginning. So, like I said, we had
planned to do this as a documentary film, and once
I got out there and started filming the wild bare footage,
we realized we had something much bigger and more profound.
(12:13):
So I had an idea of how the film would go,
and Sean had a separate idea of how the film
would go. And so we were sitting around one day
drinking coffee and we just couldn't agree. It's probably one
of the only times we couldn't agree, And so finally
we just agreed to go our separate ways, each write
our own screenplay and then come back and decide which
one we thought was the better one, and then both
(12:35):
work on that one and strengthen it. And so Sean
went and he, you know, he's got four kids, and
he was just very driven by this idea of doing
something just for kids, and so he went and wrote
this whole animated story, and I went and wrote my screenplay.
And my screenplay was really based on my experience having
lived in the woods with the you know, with the
(12:56):
bears for two and a half years and all the
things that had happened and the things I had learned,
and so mine was written from a.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
More real world perspective.
Speaker 4 (13:05):
So we came back the next day and I'm sorry,
we can't make the next week, we had sent each
other the screenplays, read them, and when we came back
together for coffee again, we both realized, Oh, my gosh,
these stories like actually blend together perfectly, and like, how
can we make these come together? And we both looked
at each other and just said, stories around the campfire
(13:26):
every night, That's the way we can make these come together.
So at that point we brought the two screenplays together
and then just started weaving them. And I would say
that the screenplay that you see in the film today
is very different from the original two screenplays we brought together.
But that was that was the process that really brought
that into being.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
And is that the type of process do you think
you'll go down on another film?
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Ooh, probably not.
Speaker 4 (13:52):
I you know, I think it works so well in
this film because you know, one thing I love about
Sean is he had just moved to the area right
before COVID and I've been here my entire life, so
you know, so much of this information is so ingrained
in me and who I am that you can sit
down with me and we can talk for hours and
I'm just like an encyclopedia and a lot of this information.
So he and I had spent a lot of time together,
(14:13):
and when I convinced him to even start the film project,
he was just like a sponge absorbing all this history
and information. And like I said, a lot of it's
oral history. So it's you know, it's really the telling
of stories which have been passed down over generations.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
So I don't know.
Speaker 4 (14:30):
I only say all that to say that while I
enjoyed it in this film, it was a very long process.
I mean, we spent five years working on the film.
I just don't I'm not sure how.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
It could happen like that. Again, I feel like it was.
Speaker 4 (14:46):
It wasn't a forced thing, and it wasn't something we planned,
and I think that that might be why it worked
so well.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
I think if we.
Speaker 4 (14:53):
Tried to plan it out and do it again, I
don't know that it would work as well.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
That makes sense completely understandable the film itself. One of
the things I took away from it is how little
we see animation and real life people in films together
and he's saying, I want to explore in the future.
I was really inspired by that. How much time does
it take to do that much animation in a film?
And were there any projects in particular that inspired you
(15:19):
to recurate such an amazing project.
Speaker 4 (15:23):
The animation took over two and a half years, and
one aspect of the animation that was took so much time,
and you know, our animation team there in Bulgaria, it
took us. We had to find the right animation team.
I had been reaching out to. I mean, we had
even started reaching out to Disney animators, but just budget wise,
(15:46):
we couldn't get any of these guys.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
And then when we found our friends Stanni in Bulgarian
he was just starting up his animation company and he said, oh,
I'd love to do this project. It's amazing. So if
you saw the animation that we started with what we
have in the end, it's like night and day different.
And I'm beyond proud of what we have in the end.
Speaker 4 (16:06):
And a big part of that was, you know, I'm
not trying to like pat myself on the back, but
part of that was as the director just getting everybody
so excited about the project and the mission that they
wanted to bring their best, and then just being there
every day all day. So it's like working with the
animators on Zoom for hours and just really keeping everybody
(16:28):
inspired so that they, I mean, they elevated their abilities
to what you've seen, which in my opinion is like
world class. It's just amazing.
Speaker 3 (16:38):
So as far.
Speaker 4 (16:40):
As what were some of my inspirations on that, you know,
I grew up as a young boy in the eighties
watching a lot of those classic films of the eighties
and then into the nineties, and so the thing we
really wanted to do with the paper Bear Sean and
I both we sat down and talked about it, and
we said, you know, we want to create a film
that is reminiscent of those nineteen eighties nineties films Goonies, Jones,
(17:02):
you know what I'm saying, or Roger Rabbit, Remember Roger
Rabbit where the anime, Yeah, interacting with the characters. And
so I'm so glad you said that, because it's like
a testament that we kind of were successful in what
we did, and then we created a film that really
harkens back to the films that we grew up on
and really shaped a lot of who we were as kids,
(17:24):
and you know how we viewed the world and interacted
in the world.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
And the audience reaction to your work. Have you been
pleased by that? Is it something you was that is
in line in the way of you're thinking?
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Absolutely.
Speaker 4 (17:39):
You know, you create art, and once you create it
and you put it out in the world, you you know,
if you're a good artist, you know you're going to
lose complete control over it.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Once it's out there.
Speaker 4 (17:48):
You might have an idea of where it's going to
go and what message it's going to say, and then
once you release it, you really don't control how it
lives in people's minds and psyches. Yeah, the you know,
the response, it's been overwhelming, and it has been just
very gratifying. I would say, I knew we had made it.
(18:08):
Let me put it this way, I knew we had
made it. When we came back. We'd started the film
festival circuit, and then we decided to come back to
our hometown and do a day of three screenings in
this theater, this local theater for all the people that
had supported us, And so we split it into three
different screenings. The one in the morning was for all
these people that work at these different conservation organizations. We
(18:30):
knew they would love it across the board, just because
of who they are. The second screening was for all
these families that had financially supported us, so it was
parents with kids. We were confident they were going to
love it because you know, it's kids animation, it's a
fun story, and they loved it. And then the third
screening was the screening of anything we've done that I
(18:51):
was most concerned about. It was a lot of people
who supported us, either financially or just supported us any
way they could. Most of them had no idea what
the was about, but some of them were developers and architects,
people that would you know, would find a message about
conservation and being conscious about development potentially a challenge. And
(19:14):
so that was the screening that I was most worried about.
And when the when the film finished, we left the
room dark and let all the credits run, just because
I love to, you know, give give everybody their time,
And as soon as the lights came on, we got
a five minute standing ovation, which is the only standing
ovation we've gotten, so for me, it was like, Wow,
the people that I was most worried about were the
(19:35):
people that gave us a standing ovation. And at that
point I said, you know, this film is touching nerves
in ways that we had hoped, but also in ways
that we just didn't even know. You know. It's people
coming up and saying, oh, this reminds me of my
great grandmother, who et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and
you just start seeing people in a new light, and
it really I think, you know, I think, Damien, the
(19:55):
big thing is with with conservation and climate change, we've
reached a point where we're at a crisis of reality.
So you can travel the country and you can travel
the world, and the crisis we're in right now is
that people have completely different realities. You know, some people
are like the sky is blue. Other people who are
saying the sky is red. And that's a kind of
(20:16):
a scary, dangerous time to be in if we're trying
to come together, either as nations or as the world
and find real world solutions to these real world problems.
And I think as artists, as conservationists, the more we
can find ways to tap back into that part of
the human psyche where we can communicate and not fight,
(20:38):
and we can communicate on some level that then allows
us to broaden that conversation and reach points of understanding
that wouldn't normally be there.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
I don't know. I just think that might be the
only chance we really have, which is kind of why we.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
So I go ahead, I'm just going to say, that's
kind of why we went down that avenue. You know,
for a conservation film, this is a very unusual film,
and I think that's why we went down that avenue.
It was like, how do we get the people that
normally wouldn't watch us to watch it?
Speaker 2 (21:10):
And one of the things I thought, and this may
be a city question saying that, you know, I'm very
much a city guy from London. But you picked a
black bear. There's different types of beers in the world.
Why did you pick the black bear?
Speaker 4 (21:24):
So, for the straightforward, honest answer, we only have black.
Speaker 3 (21:29):
Bears in Florida. So there's the Florida that's the only
type of bear that we have.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
In your ability to cast the right characters, tell us
about your casting process and who are the really talented
people involved on screen in the film.
Speaker 4 (21:43):
Yeah, Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up. So
when we did the casting, we actually did a national
casting and we had over one thousand men and over
a thousand boys auditioned for the pr And what's crazy
is we ended up choosing Jason Burkey for the Father
and Max Ivouten for the Sun, and both of them
were out of Atlanta, and they were both with the
(22:05):
same talent agency, which is hout and Talent.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
So it was crazy because we we live.
Speaker 4 (22:09):
About five hours south of Atlanta, which which is where
they're based, and yet we did this whole national search
and ended up finding our talent just you know, right
right right north.
Speaker 3 (22:21):
Of us by four or five hours.
Speaker 4 (22:24):
It was fascinating because when we did the when we
did the casting, we sent it to multiple casting agencies,
but also a talent scout who took it national and
got all these people to apply. But it was less
you know, there was an element of understanding the backstory
of the characters, which I sent you that right up on,
(22:46):
so you have a little bit of a better understanding,
which wasn't like one hundred percent critical in terms of
how they look, because I've met many many mixed people
might say mixed people I'm talking about the indigenous, yeah,
cultures from our area, mixed with Scott's Irish.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
And so you get people.
Speaker 4 (23:04):
That now that I know that have a lot of
these oral traditions and oral histories of the area, and
you might start talking to them and you would never
in a million years know that they have Muscogee in
their lineage, and yet you know they look like somebody
from Ireland or but as you talk to them more
and more and they start talking about their great grandmother
who is Muscogee or Appalachi or so part of the
(23:27):
scripting and part of the casting was less about I mean,
the looks important obviously always we're visual, we're visual creatures,
and so when we watch movies, we like to see
something that's believable, but also, you know, see something that
we want to watch.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
So the process was fascinating. I think. I think what
really happened was I knew that.
Speaker 4 (23:54):
I knew that the characters had to be able.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
To do what we needed them to do.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
So, for example, Max has this really intense scene in
the movie where he interacts with the with the black
Bear and he thinks he might die. And when you
watch that, you believe that you're right there with the
boy and the bear. But you know, the boy, the
actor was never around any wild animals or any animals
at all, and so we had to find a boy
who could we knew could really do that act in
(24:21):
a way that was believable. So for me, when we
did the the auditions and the casting, it's funny because
we're talking about eighties and nineties.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
When I did the.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
Character right ups for the father, I said, he's kind
of like an Indiana Jones character, and you know, he's
adventurous and yet he's a kind of this loving father
and et cetera, et cetera. And we get all these
taped auditions and all the guys come on with like
these leather jackets that are n't buttoned and their chest
is hanging out and they've got their Indiana Jones hat on.
I'm like, ugh, And they go and audition and you're like, Nope,
(24:54):
not the right person. And then Jason auditioned and he
comes on the camera and he literally's just got a
like a plaid shirt on, looks like he just you know,
finished maybe working in the yard with his wife or something,
and you know, just not he didn't put on a
whole wardrobe for the for the for the audition, and
(25:16):
then he just starts reading and acting and he just
nailed it. So from from the very beginning, I knew
Jason was our guy. Sean was a little bit he
was like, maybe he is, maybe he's not. And then
with Max, he was just such a lovable character in
his audition, but I was concerned about him being able
to pull off the drama, especially the drama of the
(25:37):
bear interaction scene, and so Sean was one hundred percent
sold on Max from the get go. But I actually
drove up to Atlanta and once we had chosen Jason,
I called him and I said, hey, I want you
to be in the room with me when we auditioned Max,
because I want to get your feeling in your opinion,
because if you don't feel like that chemistry is there,
it's not going to be believable that there's you know
(25:59):
that you guys are father and son. And so we
drove up and we did a live audition with Jason
and Max in the room and just really had to
I had to believe that he could not only pull
off the drama, but that when I got in the
room with the two that I could believe that they
were father and son and they had you know, we
brought three boys in because I wanted it. I didn't
want Max to show up and just immediately think, oh,
(26:21):
I've got this because I'm the only one here. So
we had two other boys that that actually had a
real shot at getting the part two. One was from
North Carolina and I think the other one was from
like Missouri. They came in and auditioned as well. But
immediately Jason, the father character, said yeah, no, I have
a real connection with Max, like instantly, and you could
(26:41):
feel it in the room. You could definitely feel that
they had this chemistry that was very believable as a father.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Son and they they you know, they joked with each
other like a father and son would and it was
it was almost instant.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
How many days would you say, this shoot took and
a lot of the time, you know, we finished films,
people finished filmed anything. Oh if I only had one
more day, two more days or or something like that,
I could have done this. So kind of done that.
Did you have that feeding when you finished your shooting days?
Speaker 4 (27:14):
Some days, yes, we had some craziness. So from start
to finish, I had it so planned out that once
the whole crew arrived, and I think our crew was
a total of twenty one people at the at the peak,
but most of the time it was around seventeen to
eighteen and I think we filmed all the live action
sixteen days, and it was all films on location in
(27:35):
every spot, so we didn't recreate any of these amazing spots.
It was very important to me that we actually filmed
these natural locations so that when people see the film
and we're saying, this is how amazing it is here,
you actually go, oh, that's actually real places. It's not
just some studio or you know, back lot. So, yeah,
(27:57):
sixteen days, and then we had one day of pickups.
And I would say, it's funny because when you know this,
when you're making a film, you have all these scenes
and you're filming everything, and you just think all of
it's going to be in the film, and then you
hit the editing room and so much of it is
cut and hits the floor. But there were certain scenes that,
you know, things didn't work out or we weren't able
to get exactly how I wanted it, and I was like,
(28:19):
I was really.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
Upset about that.
Speaker 4 (28:22):
But then once we got into the editing room, I'm like, oh,
that scene didn't even make it into the movie. So
on some levels, you a friend of mine, As a
friend of mine always says, the camera never lies. Once
you get in the editing room and actually see the footage,
it doesn't matter how how perfect you think something is
or how wrong you think something is. When you actually
see it, it'll let you know if it's perfect or wrong.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
And do you sit in with the editor or do
you allow him to have a few more days with
the footage? And then you come in what is your
process like with the editor? And is it something you enjoy?
Speaker 4 (28:55):
So I actually edited the whole film. Oh yeah, so
I've been because I've been doing this for so long.
I did all the editing and all the color grading,
and a big part of that, right, yeah, in the grade.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
And we wanted with the grade, I really, you know,
we wanted to go that nineteen eighties.
Speaker 4 (29:12):
So we did a Fujifilm. Started with a Fujifilm. I
think it was a fifty three sixty five lot. So
I took it back into that nineteen eighties kind of
a really rich film stock look, and it gave us
that that old nineteen eighties nineties film look. Yeah, you know,
with the edit, it was like I've been editing for
(29:33):
so long. I just I knew there was no way
because I was the only one that knew all the
wild animal footage as well as I did, because I
filmed it over you know, two and a half three years.
It's just been really difficult, I think to edit.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
It really nice. Sorry, that's what I had to tell
you that.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
What was that I was just saying, it was all
really nice.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
Oh, thank you, yeah, really nice, thank you, thank you. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (29:59):
So I think being able to you know, when we
filmed with the live actors, getting them to act like
they're right there with the wild animals. I knew that
footage like the back of my hand. I had filmed
that footage with you know, but the year and a
half prior, I knew I was gonna have the boy
come and climb around this bush here and look like this,
and so so much of it was because we're working
(30:19):
with wild animals, and we had this set of rules
that we put on ourselves. There was no coaching the
wild animals. There was no making them do something that
they weren't naturally going to do so, so much of
it was capturing the footage that we knew that we needed.
But you know, one five ten second shot with a
bear might take me a month and a half of
being out there sixteen hours a day to get that shot.
(30:41):
But because of that process, it was so seared into
my brain. Once you get to the editing process, to
try and download all that and pass it on to
another editor, I think would have been very difficult.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
And what was your editing process? Like, sorry, I'll rephrase
that question. What was your go to editing software for
the project? Now we're at liberty to have so many
different pieces of editing software on our desktop or our laptops,
and then some of it even for free. I downloaded
a version of Da Vinci Resolved not long ago. I
(31:17):
just wanted to compare the free version to the studio
version I got with my Black Magic Pocket scene in
the Camera four K. So what editing software did you use?
Speaker 4 (31:27):
So I edited the whole film in Da Vinci in Resolve,
which was the first feature or large film that I've
actually edited in Devinia and I've always worked in final cut.
But because I was doing because I've I've used Da
Vinci for for a long time, just color green, and
so I'm sitting here going, man, the last thing in
(31:48):
the world I want to do is be transferring back
and forth from Final Cut to Da Vinci. So I
just started editing in Da Vinci, which I've done before,
but I did a real deep dive and really became
familiar with the editing software and did all of the
edit and the color grade and resolve.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
I see, have you ever used Premiere Pro before?
Speaker 4 (32:09):
You know, I haven't. I've always been a Final Cut user.
I've seen it, and I have friends and colleagues that
work with it. I think for me, you know, I'm
fifty now and I love what I've seen it. But
then I'm also like, ough, do I really want to
learn a whole new you know? You know that you
know it's gonna be several months of just deep dive,
(32:31):
really learning. So no, I've never but I will say this,
I've spent my entire life working in photoshops. It's kind
of weird that I haven't delved in the Premiere Pro.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Okay, understandable. I mean, sometimes learning new editing software there
has to be a particular reason for it, I think,
and Da Vinci resolved what it's capable of doing right now.
And as you said, you don't want to jump around
with like hyper not hyperlink. So whatever links that may
be to get you from Da Vinci into Premiere pro
can be a bit of a It can slow down
(33:04):
your workflow potentially if you're editing that way. So partnerships
play a big part in film production and getting things
moving forward. Many people have partnerships in their films so
they can get funded or they can be seen. What
role do partnerships play in scaling, conservation storytelling? Can you
(33:27):
share an example of partnerships or a partnership that's been
especially meaningful for you.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
I've got quite a few, So in terms of funding,
I think I think the interesting thing about this film
is we're able to raise the funds in multiple ways.
One it all started with my partner Sean and his
nonprofit foundation really starting the project. But once it scaled
up and reached a point where it was much bigger
(33:55):
than they, you know, they were ready to take on,
they actually just hand it over all the IP and
gave us ownership and allowed us to pull it into
our own create our own nonprofit, So it became its
own nonprofit. And I do that. You know, anytime I
create a film or a documentary or something like that,
I'll turn it into its own LLC, just for you know,
for for protection liabilities. So in this case, it was
(34:19):
unique and new to me and that we weren't turning
it into an LLC. We were turning it into a nonprofit.
But with regards to partnerships, Sean is really good at
creating partnerships with all these other conservation organizations, just because
that's kind of what he does with his organization. So,
you know, when we first started doing that, I've got
(34:39):
a great story about how we got the main funding
for the live action part. We had hit a point where,
you know, the funding had kind of dried up. We
had all this footage of the live animals, we had
the screenplay, we had the entire things storyboarded, we had
I think we'd even started doing rough animatics of the animation,
(34:59):
and and we hit this point where we're like, man,
we're not sure how we're going to raise the funds
to do the live action part, to get this whole
crew out here from LA in Atlanta. And so just
in a moment of like Hail Mary, I guess crisis moment.
I went in and I started pulling shots. When I
was out there filming with the Black Bears. You know,
(35:20):
I might be out there fourteen sixteen hours a day,
so there's plenty of time to not only film but
also get pictures. So I went in and from the
two and a half years, I pulled the fourteen best
images that I had. They were just really stellar, beautiful
images of the Black Bears and the mother interacting with
the cub and all this kind of stuff, and we
decided to just I created an art show. I had
(35:43):
these fourteen you seeum quality prints made. And my wife
and I have a couple restaurants, and so next to
one of them, we had this giant tent put up
outside because they have this songwriters festival that comes in
every year, and so we asked them to set the
tent up a week before the festival week early, and
they did, and I got all this black fabric and
I completely blacked out the tent inside, so if you
(36:05):
walked in it at night, it was just pitch black.
And I put these lights in that I can control
with a dimmer switch, and then I hung all this
art on the outside walls of the tent, and then
I threw black fabric over. Now all the art was
black and white, So it was all these black and
white images of the bears, and they were anywhere from
two foot by four foot as big as six foot
by three foot. And so we just did this Hail
(36:28):
Mary where we invited all the people we knew, and
I just decided I was going to do this presentation
where I told the backstory of the film, like how
I'd gone out and spent you know, two and a
half years in the woods, and you know, basically spent
every day with this primarily a female bear, and how
she had you know, met her little mate and got
pregnant and had a cub during that time, and how
(36:48):
I spent all this time filming with her in the
cub for another year and a half.
Speaker 3 (36:52):
And anyway, we.
Speaker 4 (36:53):
Tell this whole story with a video rolling with some
of the back the backstory going on the video, And
when the video is done, the whole room goes black,
and I had people run around and uncover the art,
and then I take the dimmer switches and I slowly
raise the lights in the room. And so these two
hundred people are standing in the room, and as it
goes from pitch black, the entire outside of the tent
(37:14):
lights up with just these amazing pictures of bears looking
in at them.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
And so you have this gasp in this aha moment.
Speaker 4 (37:20):
But in that moment, we were just like, Okay, we've
got people now, money, money, money, We need you.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
To support this.
Speaker 4 (37:28):
And so we had a lot of support for people
that really didn't even know what the I mean, I
tell you that story, but if you knew that story
and then watch the film, you'd be like, oh, I
didn't know what the film was about at all. So
it's crazy how many people we got to support us
who were friends and people acquaintances who really knew nothing
about the movie but just loved the backstory so much.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
We had sold it basically.
Speaker 4 (37:51):
But the big funder here's the crazy part. The big
funder who funded the live action They weren't even invited
to that event. They happened to be walking down the
beach and bumped into a friend of theirs who said, Hey,
I'm going to this event up here, and they said, oh,
can we come? He said sure, sure, I'll sneak you
in and so they snuck them in and they ended
up supporting and funding the entire live action part. Because
(38:12):
the woman in particular, she grew up in New Mexico
and loved black bears. She always had black bears come
into your rs, So she had this immense love for
black Bear. So once those lights dimmed up and she
saw the black Bear art, she was like, come in whatever, Like, how.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
Can I help? How can I you know, how can
we make this happen?
Speaker 4 (38:30):
So I think part of it is, you know, I
know that's a long story to get to. I think
sometimes you just got to throw stuff against the wall.
And I think it's also I know you know this,
but in the film world sometimes it's just a leap
of faith, you know.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
Yeah, and funded is one of the hardest things to
get for some of us. Definitely, you've mentioned the lady
came along and helped fund the live action part of
the film. What our avenues did you have in mind
in case she didn't come along?
Speaker 3 (39:01):
We didn't?
Speaker 4 (39:03):
I mean, I think I think so I have been
doing this for so long, I can I can do
any aspect of filmmaking. I can run cameras, And part
of it is I own a construction company for ten years,
and as a contractor, you realize the best contractors in
terms of building are ones that can do everything. They
can do every aspect of building a house, because you know,
(39:26):
as a contractor, how can I know if the electrician
is doing it right if I don't understand electricity and
know how to actually wire a house myself. So I
don't think that's always the case in film. I think
there's some directors and people that do different aspects of
film that are amazing at what they do and have
no desire or no understanding of other aspects. I think
that's a reality in the arts. But I also think
(39:49):
for me personally, being the director I am, it's because
I can do any aspect of the process on a
film set.
Speaker 3 (39:58):
And have done it.
Speaker 4 (40:00):
And I think I got to that point partially just
because I love the art form so much and I'm
the kind of person that just wants to learn everything
and understand everything. So I say all that to just
say I was kind of the crazy one in the
whole project that was like, well, if we can't get this,
we'll just we'll do it ourselves, and you know, which
is unrealistic when you're looking at the live action, working
(40:21):
with actors and having craft and you.
Speaker 3 (40:23):
Know, lodging and all that stuff.
Speaker 4 (40:25):
But it was I think it was that kind of
crazy mindset that just kept everybody believing and saying, yeah, no,
let's do it. Yeah, absolutely, And Sean's the same way.
It's funny because we've gotten to be such close friends
and now our wives are like, okay, we got to
rain you guys in a little bit. You'r ARII dreamers
and you always believe you can make it happen, and
you do, but that doesn't mean there isn't some level
of pain that comes with, you know, getting.
Speaker 3 (40:47):
To the finish line.
Speaker 4 (40:50):
And I you know, you know, I would say this, Damian,
I think and I hope that this like resonates with you.
I think some of the best film out there is
stuff that was made because people believed.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
In it so much that they made it happen.
Speaker 4 (41:04):
And then when you get into films that are like
so formulaic and so like it's got to make money
and we got to get this, you start losing that
chaos and that I mean, I hate to use the
word hardship, but I mean, you know, like I look
at Apocalypse now and you hear the level of just
shit that he went through to make that movie, and
you're like, oh my god, it's one of the greatest
movies ever made. Because of that, you can feel it
(41:26):
in the film. You can feel the raw. It just
feels real. It feels like, yeah, no, I feel it.
We just watched something last night and I'm not going
to say the name of it, and it was fun,
it was entertaining, but it was like highly produced and
I'm like, this is just it's like it's.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
Like a sieve.
Speaker 4 (41:45):
It's just the storyline leaking all over the place. You know,
it's so unbelievable, and you can tell it's just this
formula that they were following to get something on and
make the money and move on to the next thing.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
Completely. I really really understand what you mean. What Jewels
And I'm an old film. This is about two or
three months had gone. It just blew my mind how
many of the things in the original episode, original Jaws
film that happened that wouldn't happen today. Great great filmmaking,
a great story, and os.
Speaker 3 (42:18):
Was filmed here too. I love that you brought that up.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
Was it?
Speaker 3 (42:21):
I had no idea?
Speaker 4 (42:22):
Yeah, it was fund right here, about fifteen miles from
where most of it was filmed in Destin, which is
about fifteen miles down the road from us.
Speaker 3 (42:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (42:32):
Yeah, we've had quite a few, quite a few films
made here that you know, you don't know that they
were made here. The Truman Show was filmed here, that classic,
horrible film, but it's a great classic. Frogs was filmed
right across the street from where I live. Actually, the
scene in the movie where Max is having the nightmare,
you know, and he's walking up to the cabin where
(42:54):
you have that reveal moment, that is where that is
the actual land where Frogs was filmed.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
Oh I see, now been something near every day. Yeah yeah,
and you yourself wear many hats. A very talented guy.
You edited the film. You've had such an involvement with
the film. You mentioned the kind of grade in as well.
Who done the sound design and who recorded the sound
and how was that process with your actives and in
(43:21):
post production?
Speaker 4 (43:24):
So so, one thing I learned a long time ago
in filmmaking, and with commercial films specifically, is there's just
about anything an audience will forgive except bad sound. You
can you can have a blurred image. You can say,
oh that's art, that's art, But if you don't have
good sound, it's it's you know, your toast. So when
we did the live action, I was just very it
(43:48):
was just very important that we get a really good
sound guy, and so we hired. So what's interesting about
the film is when we started working on it. For me,
if I pull, when I pull a producer on a
line producer, I immediately try and pick somebody who's local
so that they understand the area.
Speaker 3 (44:05):
They can make things happen, you know, things of this nature.
Speaker 4 (44:09):
So my producer that I pulled in he went to
film school at FSU and he had all these friends
that he grew up with who graduated and went off
and did their own film careers in Orlando and Atlanta
and LA. He's the one who you know, recommended the
DP out of LA and he's the one that recommended
our sound guy out of Orlando. And his name's Scott.
(44:32):
He'd been down in Orlando working with Disney for a
long time and so we really only had one field recorder.
Speaker 3 (44:36):
He came in.
Speaker 4 (44:37):
He used two lavelayers and a shotgun. But most of
the audio that's just amazing clean audio he captured with
just this incredible Lavelaer set that he had, and then
the sound design itself. The orchestra we decided because we
were going for that nineteen eighties nineteen nineties feel. I
(44:59):
was just like, I want to work with a live orchestra,
and I want to work with a real composer. And
so our animation team out of Bulgaria, Astani who runs
Chase a Cloud, he said, Hey, my friend's a composer.
I want to recommend him. So he sent me some
videos and at first I was like, you know, the
stuff I was seeing was good, but it didn't really
have the feel of.
Speaker 3 (45:16):
What we wanted. But we just took a leap and
went with him. His name is George Stresof.
Speaker 4 (45:20):
He's amazing, and so when we started working with him,
he pulled in his friend who's another composer, and they
composed all of it. You know, it's live composition. And
then we flew my wife and I flew to Bulgaria
and we recorded the entire film score over a four
day period with a sixty five person orchestra, so it's
all live orchestra.
Speaker 3 (45:40):
Music in the film.
Speaker 4 (45:41):
And then the sound design I worked with Silver Sound
out of Manhattan. Corey Choi runs it and he I'd
worked with him on a documentary probably close to eight
years previous, and I just really liked the work they
had done the documentary. I came onto the project late
and the sound was just horrible, like most of the
audio that it was captured was just so rough, and
(46:03):
I was thinking to myself, Man, I don't know if
we're gonna be able to pull this off. People aren't
gonna forgive this. And we gave it to Corey and
what he was able to do with it was so
impressive to me that I just knew that I wanted
to work with him again on this, and so, you know,
they did the initial sound design and then I flew
up to Manhattan and spent I think a week and
a half and we were just in the studio all day,
(46:24):
ten hours a day doing the final master and it
was it was so much fun. And I think that's
part of the process. You know, if you're if you
get out of the fun aspect of creating the art
and you're in that formulae, you got to be you
got to work and you got to do business. But
if you're in the room with artists and everybody's.
Speaker 3 (46:41):
Laughing and what about this? And try this? And that's
I think where a lot of the real magic happens.
And so I mean, I.
Speaker 4 (46:48):
Think you're I'm getting the feeling you're asking this question
because you realize how important the sound design is to
the success. Yeah, it's just like one hundred percent. Without
that sound design, you wouldn't have the film, just like
without the live act and the liberriers, you wouldn't have
the film.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
And lastly, what memory would you like anyone who's watched
the film to have when they leave the cinema, the theater,
or when they finish watching it online.
Speaker 4 (47:13):
Oh that's a big one. You mean memory from a
specific scene in the movie or just memory in.
Speaker 2 (47:18):
General, memory in general of the film.
Speaker 3 (47:22):
I think I would love.
Speaker 4 (47:26):
I feel like I think with conservation and nature and
the love of nature. Part of it is we have
a disconnect with nature. And you can probably speak to
this more living in a city. I live in a
state forest, so I'm in nature every day. But I
think the memory that I would want for people to
have coming away from it is that memory of like, oh,
(47:48):
I remember my parents taking me to that national park
or I remember my grandfather and I going camping that
one time, and I think, you know, I love cities
just as much as anybody, but I think there's those
times when you tie it to family and heritage of
that vacation or where you feel like you've stepped outside
(48:08):
of your life in the world, and it's almost like
doing a drug in a way, where you know if
you don't live in nature daily and it becomes that
once a year thing. I think those are the memories
that often shape people's feelings not only of nature and conservation,
but of their own heritage in many ways.
Speaker 2 (48:28):
Completely understand, I really do. Eric, Thanks so much for
coming on the podcast. I really appreciate you taking the
time to speak to me and tell us about your
brilliant work and your brilliant production, and I hope to
speak to you soon
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