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| A scene from Hayes’ Reason TV spot |
When some 30,000 people gather
in Miller Park next week for the premiere of a documentary on World War 2
veterans, it will be more than just a bullet point on the filmmakers’ résumés or
a feel-good moment for the grizzled men who are subjects in his film.
It will be another marker in the
media revolution that has been overturning our entire system of mass
communication over the last two decades.
The movie is called Honor Flight, and it’s about the charter flights that
take the vets to Washington, D.C., to visit the World War 2 Memorial there.
How Wauwatosa’s Dan Hayes, 29, came to make the film is
a combination of pluck, skill, and happenstance. But it also wouldn’t have been
possible without the microchip; inexpensive, high-quality digital photographic
gear; and Facebook.
Hayes grew up in Wauwatosa,
graduating from Wauwatosa East High School. A high school actor, he grew
interested in documentary filmmaking at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, after
seeing some of the films by Errol Morris.
“His work really inspired me to
start messing around with cameras in my college years,” Hayes says.
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| Dan Hayes |
Morris is perhaps best known for The Thin Blue Line about a man wrongly
put on death row (and later, exonerated in part because of Morris’s film) for
the killing of a police officer. Hayes singles out another Morris work, though:
The Fog of War, a long interview with
former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara about America’s involvement in the
1960s in the Vietnam War.
Hayes graduated from Miami with a
Mass Communications degree. But the substance of his education, he says,
focused on the abstract and the theoretical. “I never felt like I learned how
to make films,” he says.
So Hayes stuck around the university for another year, bought a
$3,000 digital video camera, and made a documentary about Miami University’s
men’s glee club (he’d been a member). He supported himself with part-time jobs
as a dishwasher and delivering pizza.
“I made enough money to pay my rent
and invested all my time and energy into making a film,” he says. The result
was a 50-minute work that premiered at the club’s 100-year-anniversary
celebration.
Hayes sent the finished movie to
Reason TV – a video-production offshoot of the Reason Foundation, a libertarian
think tank and advocacy group. The start-up hired him, and he spent the next
three years in Washington, D.C., creating short-form documentaries for the web –
“video journalism advancing libertarian political ideals,” Hayes says. “That
was really helpful in honing my interview skills and learning about narrative
and storytelling.”
One Saturday in November 2009,
Hayes got a call from his father Stephen
Hayes back in Milwaukee, who mentioned an acquaintance on an Honor Flight
that day. “He said, ‘Hey, maybe you could go down there with your camera and
ask him a couple of questions.’”
(If the names are a bit familiar,
it should be no surprise; Hayes’ older brother, also named Stephen, is a well-known writer for the conservative Weekly Standard and author of a
favorable biography of former Vice President Dick Cheney.)
After “the typical eye-rolling
thing that kids do when their parents suggested they do something,” Dan Hayes
decided to check out the Honor Flight events at the World War 2 Memorial.
With the first vet he interviewed, Theodore Gurzynski, Hayes says, “I
started with a softball question: ‘Theodore – how’s the day going for you?’ He
looked at me, just square in the camera, but with complete sincerity and said ‘I
can die a happy man now that I’ve made this trip.’”
It was, Hayes says, an emotionally
gripping moment – and a refreshing change from his daily environment: “D.C. is
a political town. People aren’t known for their honesty and directness out
there.”
He ended up spending the day tagging along with the Honor Flight
events, filming all the while. He cut seven hours of video into a 5-minute film,
commissioned a quickie soundtrack from a musician friend and posted it on the
Reason TV website, where it rapidly notched some 30,000 views and more email
from viewers than anything he’d done previously.
The experience helped him solidify an already emerging
plan to go out and open his own video production operation. With partners he
raised funding for a feature-length documentary from various sources, which
helped pay for initial equipment and other costs. He created Freethink Media
and began producing videos for clients – mainly nonprofit groups on the
libertarian end of the political spectrum, but one of them a video advancing
Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget
proposals. (“That’s the only work we’ve done with a politician – we’re trying
to steer clear of that,” Hayes says.)
The operation has grown to a full-time staff of 11 people.
As work proceeded on the Honor Flight doc, Hayes and his business partner Clay Broga last year posted a
2-minute trailer on the Facebook Causes platform. “Our goal was to get
50,000 views by Memorial Day,” Hayes says. Within months, it had been seen 4.5
million times.
Hayes says the entire experience has been personally
transforming and inspirational. But it was in many ways made possible by the
same media revolution that has threatened old, established channels, from
newspapers to TV to traditional filmmaking.
“We use the word ‘disruptive’ a lot in our shop,” Hayes
says. “We’ve been able to learn how to make films on a shoestring budget at a
very high level, and we’ve used new media in so many ways to leverage our
content.”
It’s not just on the production side – digital cameras and
editing techniques – or even the promotional send, like the use of social
media. It also extends to distribution, with resources like Netflix, Hulu,
YouTube and iTunes making work rapidly available to audiences around the
country and the world.
There’s still a place for old channels, though, however
limited – hence, next week’s big premiere and an upcoming plan for a limited
theatrical run in November – and a likely Oscar campaign.
The headlines these days are filled with stories about
media organizations shrinking, folding or laying people off. But the same
disruptive forces wreaking that havoc have helped Hayes parley his talent and
drive into rapid success.
“The world is ours to shape right now,” he says.
*
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