I made a documentary, it took 4 years. Here's why.

After many years in the can, it's finally out for the world to see.

During the quiet period after the first lockdown of 2020, my team and I were hungry to get back to work but didn’t have quite enough client work to satiate that hunger. Like many in the early stages of the pandemic, I had turned to binge-watching documentary series’ and feature docos to tide the time.

It was a really tough period as a small business owner and creative, but documentaries became a bit of a safe space for me to go to - and one documentary completely changed my outlook on life, the future of the planet and how great storytelling can change the world. 2040 by Damon Gameau. It’s a documentary filled with so much hope, with such a beautiful premise and message - it blew me away. It still does.

With 2040 still playing in my mind as we ventured back into the office, I knew I wanted to search for some positive stories to tell too - to use my teams collective skills and our resources to inject a bit of light and hope back into the world. And so - we started a little series called ‘Stories of Resilience’, with two episodes - one about Young Henry’s and how they’re growing algae alongside beer and another about Stage Kings and their pivot to making WFH desks and fundraising for Support Act.

After the mild success of the first two episodes, we reached out to Stone & Wood to see what they were up to. It turned out they were up to A LOT! But as we got chatting more, they asked if we knew anything about “regenerative agriculture” - and while it might have seemed odd for a city slicker like me to have not only heard of it but also have a burning passion for - I did. Why? Because of the doco 2040. There’s a theme here you see?

They explained to me a plan they had to experiment with regenerative ingredients to make a beer. Regenerative agriculture - put simply (because it’s explained in the doco) has the potential to literally reverse the effects of climate change by sucking carbon from the atmosphere (amongst a great many other benefits) and so the question was could they make a beer that reversed climate change?

That was the question at least, I couldn’t possibly make such sweeping claims in case ABAC is reading this. It’s just a question! The answer is…probably…?

I was really excited by this prospect as a lover of documentaries, the planet AND beer - it seemed like too good a story to pass up. The catch? The hops farm was a long way south from Sydney in Bemboka. The sout south coast. The malting facility was a long way south-west in Whitton in The Riverina and of course, Stone & Wood’s breweries were up the north coast in the Northern Rivers.

That’s a lot more travel than visiting the depths of Newtown or Botany as we had for our first episodes. It was clear this was going to be bigger and more expensive, but the idea was in my head now, and it wouldn’t leave and so we began to plan.

We needed to wait for the best times to shoot the crops, which meant waiting a few months and into 2021 before we could film. That was okay, it gave us more time to plan and find a host for the doco. *plot twist* the second COVID lockdown… fell right as we were planning to embark on the journey. That’s okay, we still technically hadn’t found a host. More time to plan.

It wasn’t until March 2022 that we ended up hitting the road, and as you probably have guessed we still hadn’t found a host (they’re expensive and it’s hard to slot in the time), we needed a beer drinker - a beer drinker I was. So I somewhat reluctantly stepped up to the plate. I was a drama kid at heart but I had spent most of my career behind the camera, so that was a learning curve and a shock to the system. Another shock to the system was that it turned out that the days we filmed the first scenes in Bemboka — I had covid… See if you can see it in my face (I sure can).

Anyway, off we went filming—up and down and around New South Wales with our young and plucky crew. I will cherish these memories for a lifetime.

We had great interviews at the hops farm, the malting facility, and even the brewery, but something was missing—we needed someone to provide a broader context for why this was also so important. Enter Damon Gameau!

That’s right, the very man who inspired so much of this made himself available for an interview. One of the most nerve-wracking and rewarding moments of my life. A full circle moment.

Many many weeks and hours of editing later, we exported what we *thought* was the final version for the official premiere in Sydney in November 2022, before heading up to Byron Bay for a premiere at Stone & Wood brewery too - oh and Brisbane!

The plan from there was to enter some film festivals and see how it went before we released it to the general public. There was no rush.

2023 came and went, and a few months into it, I made a decision that would change my life drastically—I decided to step down from my role as Director, Founder, and owner of Sure Studios, a business I’d been running for over seven years for a huge chunk of my adult life. It’s a story for another day but it basically meant the doco faded from the front of my brain for a while as I figured out what the hell I was actually going to do with my life.

I planned to take 6 months off and travel to the bush, completely unplug, not create, not look for work, just get back to nature and figure it all out. But obviously, that didn’t happen. I couldn’t help myself but make some reels, reels that went crazy viral pretty much straight away and so my life underwent another seismic shift. I still went to the bush, though, just for 6 weeks rather than 6 months.

Little did I know at the time, Stone & Wood were getting closer to actually having a beer that used the ingredients the doco speaks about - and so in the late months of last year we started chatting again about how we could incorporate the actual regenerative beer into the doco (before, it was still just an experiment). It meant, filming ooooonnnneee more interview to get it up to date - I was going to be up in the Norther Rivers to produce my brand film for Summerland Bank in… February 2024 - so we agreed we’d film it then.

Wow, this retelling of the story is way longer than I meant for it to be. It’s April now, and we finally, having filmed the new interview and cut it into the doco, it’s OUT, and so is the beer. How bloody good. Almost exactly 4 years later from the initial idea, you finally get to see what it was all about.

I hope you like it, and if you do please tell your friends and family about it. (Especially because I have DEFINITELY been Zucked)

Cheers to the re_generation,
JT