Makani aimed to harness wind energy with kites to create renewable electricity.
For Makani, I completed almost fourteen years of documentation of an ambitious engineering project, and learned to complement and augment the work of engineers with creativity from behind and beside the lens.
In 2007 almost the very first footage I captured at Makani has
Saul Griffith, one of Makani’s founders, introducing me as the person who will, “make a cutting-edge, semi-satirical, light-hearted docu-comedy about the creation of an X-men and -women team of people who take on a really hard project and make it all work due to their ninja X-women and -men skills and approach.” That worked pretty well as a mission statement for many years.
In 2013, still at Makani, I revised it slightly for myself:
“I am making an honest, useful, hilarious, beautiful, surprising record of the work of an incredible team of people working on hard problems.”
In the middle of the chaos of 2020 Makani closed its doors. In spite of everything, in partnership with my close collaborator, Kate, we found (as Michelangelo spoke about seeing sculpture in stone) a feature length documentary using 14 yeaers of footage.
We hope it will remind people now and in the future—that there were people trying to combat climate change all along. And by god, we gave it all we had, and it was fun, funny, exhilarating and beautiful. Absolutely it was (as I get to say in the film), “As good as it gets.”
Many thanks
to the film partners we worked with, who had experience and expertise we relied upon greatly. Thank you Betsy Pfeiffer for being our unflagging backbone as we created and then churned through all this material.
Thank you to David Schankula, who dug through our script and raw materials and wikipedia articles and fell in love with our project, and helped us see what others would want to see, too.
Thank you to our sound experts, Shani Aviram and Eric Carbonara, without whose help this would have sounded a lot rougher and less interesting.
Thank you Doug Garth Williams for the most excellent explainer videos we have ever had to show people how our technology was meant to work.
Thank you to our colorist, David Santamaria, who saved some footage that was badly in need of love and gave us the very final film.
Always thank you to our team, the Makani family, who we will continue to love forever. You have allowed us many liberties with the cameras and the microphones. We feel a huge gratitude for the extra hands, minds, hearts and all the time some of you spent driving aerial lifts for gopros positioned all over the kite, tether and ground station… all in pursuit of knowledge. And glory—maybe too, for just a little bit of glory.