One By One

This past spring and summer I had the opportunity to shoot and edit a music video project with my friend Micah Wolf, who is a songwriter and musician based on Maui. Micah wrote a song called 'One by One' after reading an article on the immense amount of plastic trash collecting in the worlds oceans, most notably the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" located hundreds of miles southwest of the western United States in the Pacific Ocean. This area where the four prevailing currents converge is known as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, and there are estimates that 3.5 million tons of garbage has collected here from North America, Asia and, Hawaii, 80 percent of which is plastic. Sunlight causes the plastic to break down into smaller and smaller pieces, and seabirds and other wildlife mistake it for plankton or other foodsources. Tens of thousands of dead birds have washed ashore, many of their stomachs packed with these plastic reminders of our throwaway society.

Captain Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation was the first to bring this issue to the public's attention and has revisted the site many times to gather further research. Many articles have been written and Bill MacDonald filmed a documentary called the Synthetic Sea.

As a father of three himself, Micah felt that producing a music video of his song could raise greater awareness among the younger generations. Algalita was excited about this opportunity to further spread the message about their work and were generous enough to let us use some of the footage of garbage and the raw plastic "nurdles" that they had in their archives. I filmed Micah recording the song on Maui at Grace Recording Studio while making his latest record called "Beyond the Shores" that will be released this fall, and gathered additional footage around Oregon and while on a couple of surf trips with Belinda Baggs-Peterson and Gerry Lopez, and shot a lot of video portraits along the way.

I gained a lot of respect for video production while editing the footage and learning how to use Final Cut! Rick Tyner is Micah's partner in Blockplane Records as well as his bass player. He also just moved down the street from me in Bend, Oregon and put in many long days with me on the production. Carol Feinga over at the Kokua Foundation was invaluable with her insights and advice. The final result can be seen below.

Many thanks to everyone who helped out with this project!



Here are a few images of Micah while he was in the studio recording One By One: