Deadwind Documentary Trailer Is Live

For the past year and a half I’ve been zipping around the east coast of the USA filming for a documentary about off-shore wind development — you know, the infrastructural mega-projects flanking the entire east coast where foreign oil and gas companies take huge US government subsidies to build giant wind farms out in the ocean that don’t work so well, do nothing to move the needle on global warming, and are extremely destructive to marine life, the livelihoods of fishermen, and tourism.

My take on things — especially when it comes to making films — tends to be a little more nuanced, a little more balanced, slightly contrarian, but sometimes you need to call a racket a racket.

The trailer for this film is now out. Watch it here:

One thing that caught my attention was that YouTube flagged this video as being somehow anti-climate change … They put up a little knowledge graph saying, “Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. Human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas” and linking to a UN webpage.

What’s interesting is that there is literally nothing about climate change in this video.

In this trailer we touch on the origin of off-shore wind, the dimensions of the hardware, the gargantuan sizes of the project areas, how they seem to be killing marine life, how they are impacting fishermen, and how they are falling apart and littering the ocean. Nothing about climate change.

Now, I have to admit that there was actually a part in the first version of this trailer about how off-shore wind farms do nothing — according to a BOEM study — to impact climate change and actually increase surface temperatures in their proximity, but this got cut when I chopped the trailer down to two and a half minutes.

It’s very curious to me how YouTube simply gauged sentiment in this video and took it to the next step without anything in the video or audio that could be directly interpreted as leading to such.

Anyway, that’s just the way of our world. It doesn’t really bother me too much, I just thought it was interesting.

Back to the film:

We decided to put out Deadwind as a web series rather than a full-length feature for reasons that I outlined on the Real Life Cinema blog: Deadwind Offshore Wind Documentary Becomes A Web Series

The road of any documentary is more like a winding and pothole strewn donkey trail up the side of a mountain that repeatedly peters out into nothingness before becoming discernible again up around the bend.