Wild Winds was one of those unforgettable experiences that shapes your life in a way you really just never imagined.
My team and I were paired in the Fall of 2020 for our documentary filmmaking class at Taylor University. We first stumbled upon Wild Winds Bison Preserve when our editor Jack Kersey expressed how he has always wanted to make a nature documentary and heard from a friend that there is a bison preserve in Indiana but couldn't remember the name of it. Seeing that we didn't have any better ideas we proceeded to look into bison preserves in Indiana and stumbled on Wild Winds.
It seemed like a perfect fit so we decided to pursue the opportunity and asked if we could come out and do a few interviews. It was tricky trying to get the team at wild winds to respond at first but we finally were able to manage to get a phone call and drive out there to get our first shots. While the owner of the preserve wasn't there when we went we still were able to get a lot of good content and felt pretty good leaving our first shoot. That's when the problems started to hit.
The day after our first shoot I came down with Covid-19 and our whole production was put on hold for two weeks while we all quarantined. Thankfully everyone recovered quickly and we were able to move on, except Wild Winds didn't want us back. After the close contact, they didn't trust us. For good reason. We needed a different in.
So we contacted the owner who lived out of state. He was more than excited to learn we had begun shooting a documentary at his preserve and invited us down to do an interview and get a personalized look at where they work.
This was a fantastic experience and really solidified the content we needed to make it a documentary. He then invited us for one last shoot in October for their round-up and we couldn't resist.
After many many late nights and countless hours in the edit suite, we were able to premiere Wild Winds at Taylor University. This was a huge accomplishment for the team and wild winds went on to get into 15 festivals, win a few, and establish a spot in the United Nations Climate Change Conference.