The path of any documentary is rarely straight … but we have made it to a nice basecamp: a trailer.
Published on May 12, 2025
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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.
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Filed under:
Documentaries
About the Author: VBJ
I am the founder and editor of Vagabond Journey. I’ve been traveling the world since 1999, through 93 countries. I am the author of the book, Ghost Cities of China and have written for The Guardian, Forbes, Bloomberg, The Diplomat, the South China Morning Post, and other publications. VBJ has written 3731 posts on Vagabond Journey. Contact the author.
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VBJ is currently in: New York City
4 comments… add one
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September 4, 2025, 5:19 am
LinkNo comments on this? I watched this when you released it and really enjoyed it. I’m frankly a solar guy. On my ranchstead (that I have since left), solar made sense. I used used panels and put together a system with batteries that just worked and was affordable. Over my 3 years there, it paid itself back in just about a year…of course there were no other power options available.
i studied wind power and it just didn’t make sense. The promise it could make power at night of a few hundred watts for a couple thousand seemed hollow when I could just add a panel or two and a battery and outdo any possible power production gains from wind . A local Youtuber said it best when he said that it was foolish to get wind power when more panels would be cheaper and produce more power reliably.
Looking forward to the whole documentary, Wade. And yes I’m outside of the US now.
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September 22, 2025, 9:38 am
LinkI agree. Wind power is a crock — especially when we look at who’s actually building the farms. It really wouldn’t surprise me if it was all a hoax by fossil fuel companies to prolong reliance on fossil fuels 🤣 I say this joking, but it may actually not be that far from the truth. There are non-fossil fuel power generating methods that are faaaarrrrrrr more effective — as you point out, solar. But everyone knows the real answer to this riddle is nuclear, in my opinion. Otherwise, you can’t have your green energy and iPhones and EVs too.
Where are you based now?
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Right now I’m in the Philippines. Trying to get healthy here after too long in the US. It’s a daily struggle but I am making it work. Not sure where we will go after this. I’ll get my health going in the right direction and then decide from there.
Looking forward to the full documentary coming out!
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That sounds like it was a good move! Yes, get that health in order first and then you have the entire world in front of you again. The US (or I imagine anyone’s home country) can be a real trap. Good to hear that you got out of it.
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