Half academic assignment and half fever-pitch passion project, Hundred-Year mirage is a documentary that explores the causes of and potential solutions to water scarcity in the Colorado River Basin. It required an obscene amount of travel and hundreds of hours of labor but it is still one of my proudest accomplishments.

When COVID struck the physical version of the newspaper I worked for became impossible. But after the COVID restrictions ended, the paper remained digital. I knew I had to document the excitement of the news staff when they were able to arrange the production and distribution of their first physical edition in two years.

I had never been very interested in sports but that changed the moment I first filmed football for this project. The fast pace, high energy, and raw emotion lend themselves perfectly to video. The speed, constant obstacles, and difficult angles provide a challenge that, as a photographer and videographer, is hard to resist.

When I decided to do a piece on sound meditation, it was tempting to follow the normal documentary format of talking heads with b-roll and clips of audio from the night of recording. I decided against this and produced what I believe is a more experimental participatory piece that places the viewer within the sound meditation session as directly as possible.

… just not… you know, THE President. But all kidding aside, it was great to get the opportunity to work on this project filming an interview between the editorial staff of The Lumberjack and NAU President, Jose Luis Cruz Rivera.

Spending a couple of hours in a lavender field filming has got to be one of the best and most relaxing ways to start your day. The rising of the sun slowly eases up your available light and expands the color pallet from cool pastels to vibrant green, blue and… well, lavender. All this, surrounded by butterflies and bees, feels like something straight out of a fairy tale.

When my colleague from the news department approached my with a story she felt would make for a good video piece, I was excited for a chance to get someone from the rest of the newsroom to collaborate on a project with me. When she told me it was a story on Glen Canyon I just about dropped everything to drive the two hours it takes to get there that very second.