My name is Brandon Gaesser.  I am a non-fiction videographer/editor with a collaborative spirit.  Most of all, I feel fortunate to be able to work with, listen to, and learn from diverse communities to help bring their stories to the world.  With training in cinema cameras, producing, and editing, combined with backgrounds in photography and music, I love wearing many hats across a wide range of projects from concept to delivery.  This often helps when working with limited budgets on tight deadlines.  

 

With an MFA in Documentary Film, I welcome the opportunity to share what I’ve learned in the field with students in the classroom.  During my studies, it was a rewarding experience to serve as a teaching assistant for courses in cinematography and sound, advanced cinematography, and environmental journalism, and to have helped students collaboratively engage with their surrounding communities on project-based assignments.  

 

 

How did I get into documentary/non-fiction filmmaking?

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I grew up exploring the creek and woods behind my childhood home in Virginia.  Eventually, my wilderness world expanded into national parks where I camped out for days on end just to capture that perfect photograph of a lone moose.  

 

These experiences taught me to appreciate the environment and ecosystems around us.  As a young adult, I became an avid reader of High Country News and Earthjustice quarterlies, learning just how strained the human relationship with nature has become.  I asked myself how to turn my appreciation into advocacy in both an informative and compassionate way. The answer was documentary film.  

     

I am a recent graduate of the Wake Forest University Documentary Film Program.  Because I believe that meaningful change is often grassroots, my focus leans toward featuring compelling stories in our surroundings:  local people, organizations, and communities working as advocates and guardians in the journey to changing our anthropocentric footprint, one step at a time.   These are stories we never learn about in the 24-hour news “recycle.” 

 

Viewing myself more as a listener and participants as the storytellers, I continuously strive to film and edit with a code of ethics that is not intrusive, but inclusive.  When you grow up in a family of talkers, as I did, your default option is to listen, observe, and learn.  And that’s what I did. As an emerging doc filmmaker, I’ve discovered that listening and observing are the most important tools of the trade.  A camera helps too.   

      

Chicken Soup for the Soil is my first film.  It will air beginning in 2023 on The Weather Channel's Pattrn.