
Interview


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How a hero should look! Must have a majestic personality, muscular physique, and some exceptional powers, who can save the world anytime. When people think of heroes, they envision comic book charicatures with superpowers. In reality everyday heroes are real people who do extraordinary things to support their communities, the environment, and better the world.A hero is not who has some random power, a hero is someone who dares to make unbelieving things happen. It is their courage that makes them heroic.
Albert Crane’s “Your Everyday Heroes of Costa Rica” celebrates the work of Jeremy, Tracey, Vernon, and Che, who are trying to become the voice of the voiceless.
Jeremy Levine is the founder of Wild Sun Rescue, which not only rescues and rehabilitates Costa Rica’s injured animals, it is dedicated to repopulating the howler monkey species, which has been threatened by humans encroaching on their habitats.
Biologist Vernon Arias is trying to save the endangered Scarlet Macaw, which is the flagship bird of the Nicoya Peninsula. Vernon and his team are breeding pairs of Scarlet Macaws and releasing them into the wild through their work with the non-profit ASOPROLAPA.
Tracey Lemon is spending her retirement years saving endangered sea turtles, a keystone species, from extinction through her work at Tambor Bay Turtles.
Albert’ Crane’s “Your Everyday Heroes of Costa Rica” is a documentary that highlights the work of real heroes. As we got the chance to have a conversation with the Your Everyday Heroes creator, we tried to get to know more about his movie.
Qs. One: Hi Albert, hope you are doing well. Your documentary has celebrated the hard work of Jeremy, Tracey, Vernon, and Che. Would you like to share how you got the idea to narrate their journey through your movie?
Hi Thanks, we first started with filming them individually for our platform www.youreverydayheroes.com, and had been not having much success within the documentary short category. I then while driving (where I do most of my thinking) called our director Hernan out of the blue, asking what he thought about if we added all of the Costa Rican ‘Everyday Heroes’ into a longer documentary style, starting from scratch. He loved the idea, and began editing it with his team at Pangea.tv right away.
Qs. Two: As your story has several people, please share your experience of working with them and with whom you have the best memories of working.
I can only imagine what it was like shooting this gorgeous country. I have spoken with in detail all of the heroes featured in this piece, and from what they have said, there is no shortage of beauty coming out of this region of Costa Rica, they are just doing their part in protecting and revitalizing the wildlife there.
Qs. Three: your documentary narrates the real heroes, how did you decide the idea to make a movie on such a topic?
As Tracey Lemon talks to us about keystone species, this documentary is built off the hard work of the team at Your Everyday Heroes. As Season Two comes to an end, and we prepare to launch Season Three, we try to include a larger production piece in each of our seasons. Your Everyday Heroes of Costa Rica was built off of the individual episodes of these three (four) hero stories.
The idea of Your Everday Heroes though came from a collaboration of Rocko Productions, John Snyder and my team at J. Fac Associates, where John and Jim showed me that everyone’s story deserves to be told. So, then we found Pangea.tv with Hernan and his team, and have been opened up to a huge new source of international stories that need to be told.
Qs. Four: How long did it take to gather all the thoughts of these people and shape it as a documentary?
Months, if not years putting it in motion, however it comes down to minutes.
Putting something together like this has little shooting time to prepare for (a few days), in order to capture all of the releases of the animals into the wild, we were just in the right spot at the right time.
Qs. Five: “Your Everyday Heroes of Costa Rica” – how did choose the title for your movie?
Oh, this one was a struggle, we went back and forth on Pura Vida which is a phrase encapsulating the culture of Costa Rica and what we landed on, “Your Everyday Heroes of Costa Rica.” It came down to thinking a bit more long term, if we’re to do this again (which we are), we wanted to make sure it was set up as a series.
Qs. Six: As it is a documentary movie, how did you decide the run-time for your movie? Did it put extra pressure while making a short movie?
We wanted to keep it under 30 minutes to qualify for the shorts category and we need to re-engage the watcher every 90 seconds, otherwise in a talking head documentary, you tend to lose focus. We did a lot of testing around this with family and friends, who have screen edits with before finalizing a cut. So a lot of learning and trial and error has happened with our docu-series episodes.
Qs. Seven: A documentary movie is a completely different genre from other movies. So according to you, as a producer, what necessary steps need to be taken to make a documentary movie look more appealing?
Re-engaging the audience. This took me a long time to understand. There needs to be high and low points often in order to re-capture interest. My business partner in J. Fac told me today, that we cover delicate topics, but put a positive spin on it to be an inspiration to those who view the films. Not everyone can do that, and it’s very difficult to find positive attirtibutes, but somehow Pangea and the rest of our film crews and editors have been able to do it.
Qs. Eight: As several wild animals are becoming extinct, your movie is somehow giving the same message, do you think we as humans need to be more concerned about it?
I mentioned it earlier. Tracey hit it on the head, if we remove the keystone species, everything below it collapses. Everything happens for a reason, and it’s up to us as a community to make sure that we do whatever we can in order to preserve what can be saved.
The work that these non-profits organizations are doing, like Wild Sun Rescue and Tambor Turtle Resue are certainly doing what they can to ensure the survival of these species. The team here at www.YourEverydayHeroes.com just adopted a turtle nest I urge anyone reading this to do the same. We have a link to how on our site.
Qs. Nine: we would like to end our conversation, by asking you about your upcoming project and when we gonna see them.
We have around 20 new stories coming out in the next few months, but there is one, which we’re starting with, that we’ll be releasing the trailer for in the next week or so.
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