Filmmaker

Matthew Briggs

Director / Producer / Writer

Matt Briggs makes his directorial debut with “Deep Green.” Shot in nine countries during the last three years, the film is based on six years of intensive environmental research in which Briggs spoke to leading authorities, attended scores of conferences, and studied hundreds of books and thousands of articles. He previously helped pioneer the wild mushroom industry in the U.S., beginning in 1981, by co-founding what quickly became the largest commercial operation in North America to collect and deliver fresh wild fungi to restaurants, specialty stores and such other clients as the White House. The son of a college professor who later became Dean of Students for Portland State University, Briggs obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Oregon, where he majored in both the arts and premed. He spent another six years studying at the New England College of Chinese Medicine and San Francisco College of Oriental Medicine before obtaining his license to practice in Oregon and California. In between, Briggs embarked on two separate global treks that gave him a traveler’s perspective on different cultures in 50 countries.

 Cinematography

Andrew Clark

Director of Photgraphy

Heading up principal photography in both China and Europe was Andrew Clark, one of the most accomplished cinematographers outside the U.S. The Beijing bureau chief for AsiaWorks Television, Clark travels extensively for the National Geographic Channel, BBC, CNN, and other network news organizations. After breaking into the news business at two local TV stations in his native Scotland, he moved to Singapore in the late 1990s, and subsequently covered Suharto’s fall and the aftermath in Indonesia for CNBC. In 2001, he set up CNN’s Manila bureau, then shot in-depth coverage of the “War on Terror in SE Asia.” Following 9/11, Clark spent months on assignment with Christiane Amanpour, reporting on the situation in Pakistan. After returning to Singapore, he was assigned to cover Timor and other hot spots with CNN’s Madria Ressa for several years. The BBC subsequently sent him into the tsunami disaster zone of SE Asia, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the Michael Jackson trial. In 2008, he set up AsiaWorks Television Beijing, the first and only licensed foreign media corporation in China.

Jeff Streich

Director of Photography

 Jeff Streich was the Director of Photography on “The Final Inch,” which received an Academy Award nomination for best short documentary. He had previously won an Emmy Award for his filming of the acclaimed National Geographic documentary, “Into the Volcano” – a particularly daring shoot in which he literally descended with his cameras deep into the earth on the island nation of Vanuatu. Streich began his career in the mid-1980s, as a staff cameraman for National Geographic until 1992. To date, he has shot ten specials for National Geographic Explorer, eight for the Discovery Channel, four for PBS, and four for the BBC’s Natural History Unit, among others. His work in reality television includes the first season of “Survivor” in Borneo; the Discovery Channel’s “Eco-Challenge: Borneo” and “British Columbia”; such corporate commissions as The Natural Conservancy’s “Last Great Places”’; and comedy, such as HBO’s “The Ali G Show.”

Carey Weatherford

Director of Photography

The recipient of the prestigious George Foster Peabody and Dupont Columbia Awards, Carey Weatherford is a former staff cameraman for CBS News, “60 Minutes” and other network shows. His work has taken him to every major city in North America, and thirty eight countries abroad.

 Animation

Bent Image Lab

A specialist in wildly creative spots and videos that range from the frenetic to the deeply moving, BENT has developed a world class reputation for its exquisite mastery of stop-motion, mixed-media animation, mesmerizing storytelling, visual effects, CG character animation, motion graphics, and live-action production. At the heart of Bent’s success is a roster of award-winning artists with expertise covering a wide range of classic and new media creative disciplines. The studio’s unique “creative lab” approach makes the most of this diversity by uniting specialists into custom production teams where artists are free to collaborate, learn from each other and experiment.

This ethos has resulted in stunning work for such notable clients as “Saturday Night Live,” Verizon, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, TV on the Radio, Budweiser, Tetra Pak, Modest Mouse, Fox, Diet Dr Pepper, They Might Be Giants, Live Earth, Lux Soap, Aflac, PBS, and film directors Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant. BENT is also one of the most innovative studios today. Among other technological breakthroughs, BENT developed a way to endow stop-motion puppets with real human emotions, first applied to their award-winning Lux “Provocateur” spot.

“Anyone who keeps up with the work of Bent… knows they’re always traipsing off into the unexplored wilds of animation territory, taming some new technique, hauling it back to civilization and making it dance for the masses,” praised Steven Price, executive editor of Stash Magazine.

Ray Di Carlo

Executive Producer

BENT co-founder Ray Di Carlo’s love of visual art and storytelling drew him to filmmaking early in life. He began focusing on moving images in high school, and got his start with “Avatar” director James Cameron on “The Abyss.” In 2002, he relocated to Portland, Ore., where BENT is based. Known for his innovative approach to filmmaking and special effects, Di Carlo helped develop a groundbreaking technique for endowing stop-motion puppets with real human emotions, called “Live Expression Synthesis.” With the BENT team, he also invented the techniques “SmallGantics,” which premiered in Thom Yorke’s music video “Harrowdown Hill,” and “Bigatures” for the award-winning “Hidden Formula” spot for Coca-Cola. Both techniques challenge a viewer’s perception of scale and physical environmental relationships. 

Chel White

Director / Animator

Co-founder of Bent Image Lab, director Chel White’s work has been seen around the world. His festival screenings include the Tribeca Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival and three films in the Sundance Film Festival. His work has collected dozens of major awards, including the coveted Best Music Video at the SXSW Festival twice, two Gold Plagues from the Chicago International Film Festival, and Best Short Film at the Stockholm Film Festival. White is the recipient of a media arts fellowship from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and has had screenings at the Smithsonian, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Two of his television commercials are in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Upon starting Bent, White co-directed the Clio Award-winning Reese’s ‘Center of Attention’ spot with partner Daniels. White has directed parody shorts for “Saturday Night Live” and a short film on climate change for Live Earth and Al Gore. Since the mid-1990s, White has worked with filmmaker Gus Van Sant, creating visual effects for many of his films, including “Milk.”

Pascal Campion

Director / Animator

 Raised in Marseilles, France, Pascal Campion graduated with honors from the prestigious French academy, Arts Decoratifs de Strasbourg. He moved to the U.S. in 2000, at the age of 26. While searching for illustration jobs, Campion joined Flying Rhinoceros in Portland, Oregon, where he was given the opportunity to apply his passion for illustration to some of the company’s Flash animation projects. Two years later, BENT invited him to join their newly-founded company, and gave him the job of designing storyboards for such clients as Reese’s, Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. Less than a year later, Campion was promoted to director and has since been responsible for spots, music videos and network promos for PBS, Disney, Ritz, Simon and Schuster, and They Might Be Giants. Campion has also served as lead animator on video games for Leap Frog, which develops licensed, interactive games based on the animated features, such as “Cars,” “SpongeBob,” and “Ratatouille.” And he has illustrated several children’s books.

David Daniels

Director / Animator

 David Daniels’ passion for unique moving images led him to invent a stop-motion animation technique known as Strata Cut, which became a key element in his thesis project, a short film called “Buzz Box.” At the time, he was completing his M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts. Daniels’ 16-minute film not only premiered in the elite American Film Institute Video Festival, but became an integral part of his one man show at the prestigious Kitchen Gallery in New York City. Not long after, Daniels collected the first of many awards over the years, a Clio for his work as the Director of Photography and Animator on the groundbreaking kids’ television series, “Pee Wee’s Playhouse. He next served as the Lead Animation Director on Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time,” which won the MTV music award for the 50 best videos of all time. Daniels would later also direct the ‘ABC’ video for Michael Jackson’s “Moonwalker” retrospective compilation, and create the animated opening title sequence for the feature film, “Freaked,” starring Randy Quaid and Brooke Shields.

In the early 1990s, he joined the Will Vinton Studios as a Lead Director and Creative Visionary in Mixed Media. During his tenure, Daniels would direct one of the most successful animation-based advertising campaigns ever – the original TV spots featuring the colorful M & M’s, whose popular characters have remained unchanged for almost two decades. Daniels went on to direct an award-winning series of ‘promotionals’ for Fox NFL, featuring Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long, James Brown and Chris Collingsworth. Since co-founding BENT in 2002, he helped direct another highly-successful series of spots – this time featuring a clay animation version of sports legend John Madden for Tinactin. Among the cutting-edge projects BENT has become known for is the award-winning 60-second Coke spot called “Hidden Formula,” co-directed by Daniels, that challenges the viewer’s perception of scale and physical relationships through two other animation techniques that Daniels helped to develop: “Smallgantics” and “Bigatures.”

Jeffrey Bost

Director / Animator

 For two decades, Jeffrey Bost has been animating, designing, and directing a variety of moving image projects at top animation studios in the Pacific Northwest. The University of Oregon graduate, with degrees in both Fine Art and Art Education, Bost began his career at the Will Vinton Studios, working his way up to animation director on Sony PlayStation’s “Old Lady” spot, after working as a member on the creative team on the Emmy-winning CBS special, “A Claymation Easter.” In 2000, he joined the Flying Rhinoceros animation studio, and spent the next several years directing short films for clients like the U.S. Olympic Committee, AOL, U.S. Bancorp/Piper Jaffrey, Orkin, and Magraw Hill. Since joining BENT in 2003, Bost has been instrumentally involved in the design and execution of projects commissioned by such clients as “Saturday Night Live,” Apple Jacks, Reese’s, Airwick, Office Max, Tinactin, and Aflac.

Randall D. Wakerlin

Director / Animator

Randy Wakerlin, who joined BENT in 2004, began exploring animation as a youngster using his father’s super 8 camera. While finishing up his undergraduate thesis at Hampshire College (MA), he stepped up to a 16mm camera to shoot “figure 1:Scar (detail).” The short animation became a regional finalist for the Student Academy Awards in 2000, and was screened extensively at film festivals – taking first place at two of them. For Wakerlin’s master thesis project – “In Good Spirits,” completed while studying in the notable Experimental Animation department at the California Institute of the Arts – he travelled to Northern Thailand. Among the others, “Twenty-Six,” which uses photo self-portraits, taken every day for a year, was screened on every continent in the world, including Antarctica. Wakerlin has also studied at the Queensland College of Art in Brisbane, Australia.

Tom Kenny

Voice Artist

The production is grateful to famed voice artist Tom Kenny for his generous contribution of creating the engaging characters in “Deep Green’s” companion short films, “Trees” and “Krill.” Known worldwide as the iconic voice of SpongeBob SquarePants on the hit animated children’s television series and 2004 motion picture, Kenny has voiced countless characters in over 60 films and videos and more than 130 television series, many of them in recurring and multiple roles. On the big screen, he will next be heard as Lenny in “Toy Story 3,” and previously starred in such blockbusters as “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” (Wheelie / Skids), “Space Chimps” (Newsreel), “Meet the Robinsons” (Mr. Willerstein), “The Ant Bully” (various), and “Sky High” (Mr. Timmerman). Kenny began his career as a stand-up comedian, appearing on such shows as “Late Night with Conan O’Brian” and ”Late Night with David Letterman” (1982).

Original Music

Randy Porter

Composer

At the age of eight Randy Porter taught himself to play on a Magnus Toy Organ, and by the age of ten was teaching himself Bach inventions. He heard jazz for the first time in the sixth grade and started improvising in jazz forms. His first formal lesson came, as a junior in high school, when Porter approached Sarah Vaughan’s piano accompanist, Butch Lacy, for lessons. Lacy offered to teach him for free. Porter later studied at The New England Conservatory of Music with jazz piano greats Fred Hersch and Jaki Byard, then went on to play professionally in California. His career was effectively launched when iconic pianist Mike Wofford began recommending Porter as his substitute at the famed jazz club Elario’s in San Diego. It wasn’t long before the gifted 23-year-old was backing up such legends as Anita O’Day, Art Farmer, Freddie Hubbard, Diane Schuur, and even pop-jazz star Hollis Gentry. Beginning in the 1990s, Porter toured intermittently with Charles McPherson, Gino Vannelli, and David Friesen, while teaching jazz and operating his own recording studio. He currently serves as Schuur’s musical director and arranger, conducting the band from behind the piano. “Deep Green” marks Porter’s debut as a film composer.

Producers

Frankie Fathers

Producer (Asia)

Based in Asia for a decade, British film and television producer Frankie Fathers spent five months overseeing filming on “Deep Green” in China. She is currently involved in editing a Chinese-language version of the film for simultaneous release with the American cut. Few English-speaking producers know that part of the world as well as Fathers, who holds a Master’s degree in Chinese Studies from Edinburgh University and speaks fluent Mandarin. She most recently served as the Shooting Producer on the BBC2 observational documentary series, “Welcome to Lagos,” which explores life in the world’s fastest growing city. She also spent a year producing and directing the BBC4 documentary, “Chinese Schools,” which was nominated for the 2009 Broadcast Awards’ Best Series. Fathers began her career in 1999 as a news producer, camera operator and editor for Reuters TV, covering breaking stories in Iraq, Afghanistan and other parts of Asia, as well as China.

Jasmine Dick

Producer (Europe)

Jasmine studied Spanish and Portuguese at Edinburgh University, including stints in Madrid and Brazil. Since then she has since worked in Factual and Documentary Television for a variety of networks and independent production companies, including the BBC, Channel 4, PBS, Discovery and NGS. Credits include the award winning history series Twenties in Color and Thirties in Color for the BBC, and Nova Special, The Storm That Drowned a City. Jasmine lives in London, UK.