Tell us about your organization. How big is your team? Where are you based? What is your organization’s specialty in the film and video space?

Caymanite Productions is a small documentary and branded film company based in Chicago. We work with a tight core team and scale up with a trusted roster of collaborators depending on what a project needs, which for Brac meant everything from a one-person crew on a cliff edge to a full post team across editorial, color, score, VFX, and sound.

Our specialty is people and place. We make films about the relationship between the two, whether that is a conservation documentary or a brand story. The through line is restraint. We favor patient observation over spectacle, and we tend to trust an audience to sit with something rather than be told how to feel about it.

Why do you do what you do? Was there a transformative moment that solidified your career choice, your org’s success, or your commitment to storytelling?

I was born in the Cayman Islands. I have not lived there in a long time, but the islands never really left, and they shaped how I think about place and what gets lost when change goes unwatched.

The turn came when I started learning what was happening on Cayman Brac. The Brown Booby, a bird woven into the island’s own identity, was disappearing, and not because of anything as abstract as climate change. It was disappearing because of cats. Animals people brought over generations ago, now doing damage nobody planned for and nobody quite knows how to undo.

That was the moment. Not a dramatic one, just a quiet realization that this was a human story wearing an environmental one, and that if I did not go make it, it was unlikely anyone else would.

Tell us about your Telly Award winning piece. What’s the story behind it?

Brac is a conservation documentary set on Cayman Brac, a small Caribbean island where environmental change is unfolding quietly but irreversibly. Development pressure is increasing, public land is growing more vulnerable, and the island’s native Brown Booby population is in steep decline because of invasive feral cats introduced over generations.

Protecting the birds requires interventions that divide the community, and that tension is the actual subject of the film. Brac sits in the uncomfortable space between action and inaction and asks when it becomes our responsibility to intervene, particularly when the problem is one we created.

It took three years. It was self-directed and self-funded, made because the story deserved to exist rather than because anyone commissioned it. It ends without a clean resolution, on purpose. The film widens out to a global fact instead: one in every three seabirds worldwide has already gone extinct or is on the brink. What is happening on Brac is not isolated. It is a preview.

Can you share a behind the scenes story or fun fact about the making of your piece?

On my last trip, making small talk with passengers on the flight over and again at baggage claim, I kept asking who I should talk to on the island. Everyone gave me the same name: Tennyson Scott, a Bracker approaching ninety. Nobody could give me an address.

Cayman Brac is twelve miles long. I was driving through Spot Bay when I saw two older men sitting outside a house. One of them was Tennyson.

I introduced myself, explained the film, and he was ready to talk immediately. He turned out to be a wonderful talker, which meant the hard part of the interview was steering him back on topic. We went over ninety minutes. Afterward he offered me dinner and showed me around his house.

On an island that small, the difference between having that interview and not having it was driving down one road at one particular hour.

What was your biggest challenge during production and how did you solve it?

Cayman Brac is remote, expensive to reach, and everything depended on people whose time I could not schedule in advance. I was filming solo across three trips, and by the third one the fear was specific: what if I missed the one sentence that ties the narrative together, and I do not find out until I am back in Chicago and the island is a plane ride away?

On that third trip, with a day left, I called Adriana, my now fiancée, in a full panic. She is not a filmmaker, but she has an unusually great ability to find the root of a problem and see a story from outside it. She walked me through what I actually had against what I still needed, and that one conversation reorganized my last day on the island.

The lesson stuck. Review your footage every night. Read the transcripts. Know exactly what you have and exactly what is missing, especially when going back is not an option. And if you are filming alone, find the person you can think out loud with. That relationship is production infrastructure, not a nice-to-have.

What are you most proud of about this piece? What is the most memorable response you got from this work?

This was the first time we filmed an endangered species, and it became the part of the production I loved most. Finding the Brown Boobies took asking researchers, scientists, and locals where they nest and when the fledglings come, then filming across November, December, and February to catch them building nests, flying the coastline, mating, and raising young.

You can control the time of day and where you set up. That is all. Beyond that you are entering their world, and the challenge I loved was capturing them without ever interrupting it. The setup let me stay far enough back that the birds behaved exactly as they would have if I had never been there. That restraint is the whole job.

I am also proud of what the film refuses to do. It does not resolve. There was pressure, mostly my own, to end on progress and let the audience off the hook. We held the line and let it sit in the tension, because that is honest to where the island actually is.

What I am most looking forward to is doing it again. Going off the grid to chase a story about animals that cannot speak for themselves, and giving them the voice they deserve.

You won a Telly Award for this piece. Why is recognition important for you, your team or your work?

Honestly, the recognition matters less for us than for the story.

Brac is about a small island most people will never visit, and a bird most people have never heard of. Films like that do not get attention by default. An award is one of the few things that reliably gets a film like this into rooms it would otherwise never reach, in front of people who can act on what they see.

For a self-funded film, it also functions as proof. It tells conservation organizations, festivals, and future partners that the work meets a standard, before they have watched a frame. That makes the next conversation shorter and the next film easier to make.

And there is a version of this that is simply about the people who gave us their time. They spent three years letting us into a complicated thing they care about. Recognition is the clearest way to tell them it was worth it.

Tell us what you’re up to! If there’s a new project, launch, or milestone you’d like us to celebrate with you, let us know, and we might share it with our community.

We have a feature documentary in production following an endurance cyclist chasing a Guinness World Record around the Great Lakes. It started as a story about a bike ride and became a story about why he is doing it, which is the two friends of his living with MS.

I also run Filmmaker Friday, a Chicago screening and conversation series for working filmmakers. It started small and has turned into one of the best rooms in the city.