EP10 – Spring Is In The Air

The flowers are blooming, Ben’s chasing squirrels while Keith eyes the skies over Hyde Park for hawks… oh, and we’re talkin’ docs. Spring brings up new thoughts about New Media and the docmakers role vs the “influencer’s paradise” of Youtube and social media. This episode steps into Ben & Keith’s perspectives on storytelling approaches and the future of media consumption — and we even stop to smell the flowers. Plenty to consider here, and next week look forward to a conversation with Academy Award nominee Kahane Corn Cooperman, feeling good after the SXSW premiere of her new doc, CREEDE, USA.

***Note that Ben got the numbers wrong for YouTube’s net worth. They are projected to make $22 billion in 2025. The $8 billion he quoted was for the 1st quarter of 2025.

Here we are.

Keith.

We are.

Hey, how you doing?

Oh look, we're behind a fire station here.

This is kind of cool.

There we go.

Engine nine.

Engine engine number nine.

Number nine.

Coming down the Austin line.

So today we are in a new walk zone for the podcast, but this is kind of my.

Daily walk zone.

This is Hyde Park in Austin, Texas.

Yeah, we're here on a walking out.

Beautiful morning

an alley.

Check this alley out.

I love an alley.

This is a particularly good one with the flowers growing off of the side here.

Lots of shade from the trees.

Got birds chirping at us, which you will appreciate.

No doubt.

I like how Ben acts like he doesn't like birds.

I'm the only person who likes birds.

Well, I'm just not trying to make our podcast about birding.

I'm not the one that keeps bringing it up.

Okay, fair.

So what are we talking about today, Keith?

What are we

talking

about?

You know, I guess one thing we could talk about is that we at this point

have gone audio to video to audio to video in our podcasting, and we

could explain that to our listeners.

Explain yourself.

We are embracing this new video technology, but we are

not embracing it every time.

So, uh, we are going to.

Eventually shift over to where everything is on video.

But for now, we are going back and forth to test the quality

and see which one we prefer.

Um, but I think so far I'm liking the video.

I know you like the video.

Uh, I enjoy, uh, elements of the video for sure.

And I think it's fun putting it together.

You know, as a filmmaker it's image and sound go together, but it does add a

little bit of pressure in my mind of.

Wanting it to be as good as it can be and knowing that this is kind of just like a

little side action, it's hard to feel like we can fully commit to the kind of layered

multimedia approach I would like to take if this were, you know, one of my films.

So I have that in the back of my mind.

I need to get over it.

So what you're saying, this is an issue of control.

You, if we're shooting video, you want it to be.

You want to, you want every frame to be precise, is that what you mean?

Uh, I think it's in an issue of expression.

Um, but control is always at play, um, in every, everything I do.

Yeah.

Is a navigation, a negotiation with control internally and externally.

Yeah.

You've said that before and I like that because that is, it's

not only whoa on the squirrels.

Run the squirrel

on your left.

You're listening to Dock Walk with Ben and Keith.

Spring is in the air

here.

Should we stay?

Let me stay on your right.

So we, there we go.

So on your

left, spring is in the air.

Here in Austin, we are walking in the alleys of Hyde Park,

which is a great neighborhood north of the University of Texas.

It's kind of a classic old neighborhood filled with little

bungalows and craftsmen houses built in the forties through sixties.

Yep.

And when I, uh.

Started in grad school.

I, uh, lived just right around the corner from here.

Spent a lot of time up here and I always associate this very

strongly with, uh, the film school.

So it's apropos that we're walking here.

So what does springtime and documentary filmmaking mean to you?

I think about South by Southwest.

Right, honestly.

And, uh, af s's Doc days, the Austin Film Society hosts something called

Doc Days where they bring in films that usually premiered at Sundance, have yet

to be released, and they bring in the directors to come and talk about them.

So I'm excited for that.

That's coming up.

What about you?

What does springtime mean for you, Keith Springtime?

Well, I think about new beginnings and I think about kind of.

And opening up the flowers, open up the trees, have new buds, and we're

all coming out of our winter dormancy, uh, in development terms, it's a

great time to get to pitching Before, you know, the black hole of summer.

It drops down and nobody wants to hear your dumb ideas.

The black hole of summer in pitch terms, it's a real dead spot.

It's true.

Um, but yeah, spring to me is like an opportunity to express new ideas.

Um, so anyway, that's where my head is right now on springtime in doc filmmaking.

I have a bunch of projects that I'd like to get some traction on.

And so I'm balancing my time between focusing on production and edit

on this murder mystery, while also developing, um, kind of a, uh,

philosophical environmental film developing, uh, a scripted animated

series that I've been on for a few years with some great producers that

feels like it's inching forward in, in kind of exciting ways, um, of another.

Uh, all archival doc that focuses on international cinema.

That's great.

So that's kind of like, I've got a development slate.

There's,

yeah.

It sounds like you have many projects, which is enviable.

That's really cool.

My head's been kind of in thinking about new media, you know, doing this

podcast in particular and talking with somebody about doing a cooking show

that will be in small segments that will be distributed mainly on YouTube.

And then I've been trying for a long time now to make a documentary

about The Onion, which we've talked about on other episodes.

Which, which state

is that in at this point,

we are talking to the new owners and they, uh, are in a, because they've

just bought the Onion, they're in a period of growth and they don't

want to document this period yet.

Okay.

So they keep saying it's going to happen, but not yet, and not

giving us an indication of when.

So that one is kind of just indefinitely on hold, but we keep

making inroads and, uh, meeting a lot of the alumni writers, the founders

that created the voice of the Onion.

So is this film, you said it's about the history of the Onion?

Well, history and present day.

I mean, it's basically what's happening right now with The Onion is.

Such an exciting story.

And also just politically the onion is more and more invaluable it feels like.

And they're doing really interesting things like trying to buy

Infowars from Alex Jones and, um.

It's just a, in my opinion, the perfect time to be following a

modern day storyline while also telling the history of the onion.

So that's where we're at and it's a little frustrating, um, but it's one of those

projects that feels like it's gonna happen at just the right time when it's meant to.

And I just have to keep, keep pushing.

So that's where I'm at.

Okay.

And do you see that as a feature or a series where, to where, what?

What's the ideal home for that?

Like what's your vision for it?

My vision for it has changed over time because for a while

I thought it could be a series.

Based on the 35 year history, um, and like I said, you could really do a deep

dive and spend time with the founders and go back and really dissect the articles.

But now I think that a 90 minute or less feature that is just fast and

furious and hilarious at every moment is probably more the way to go.

I like the sound of that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I do too.

Do you have, uh, $2 million?

I mean, I'm good for 1% of that.

I'm, I'm going to hold you to that, Keith.

I'm a little worried about that.

All right, so you're talking about, you started out talking about new media.

Look, there's a hawk up there.

Oh,

here.

Let's get a shot of that.

There we go.

You got it?

Yeah.

You got it.

Um, you started out by talking about new media.

Mm-hmm.

Which is a phrase I feel like you've, we've heard thrown around for a long time

now, but the media is constantly changing.

Like, what else constitutes new media?

Basically everybody is watching things on their phone, and

that's only continuing to.

Uh, to grow.

I mean, I think there's, put your phones down, people.

There's definitely a place for going to the movies and for watching TV

shows, but I think that it's a smaller and smaller place, whereas, you

know, social media is just crowding out all the other competitors.

And a statistic about that is that.

YouTube is on track right now to be worth $8 billion at the end of this year, which

would be double what Disney is worth.

So I'm thinking more and more about how do I take this love of documentary

and translate that into some type of content that will be interesting to

people who are consuming media that way.

Making something for

YouTube.

I mean, this what we are doing right now.

Yep.

Somebody is watching this on YouTube right now.

Exactly.

And, and so we are contributing to those billions of dollars.

Yep.

At what point do some of those dollars come back to us?

Great question.

And uh, any advertisers out there who want to sponsor doc

walks, you know where to find us.

And that's, you know, that's sort of the culture that we're in right

now where if I were 20 years old.

If I were in film school right now, I would be ecstatic about

the state of the industry because it is a creator's marketplace.

As lame as that sounds, um, if you can basically have a, some type of,

of following that you develop on your own, then you are in the driver's seat.

That is a provocative statement.

You would be ecstatic with the state of the industry right

now because it is a creator's.

Yeah.

Paradise.

Well, remember I said if I was 20, oh, you are 20.

I'm not 20.

I'm 47.

And so what I mean by that is if I was a young person with the enthusiasm and

the energy and the focus that I had in my twenties for making documentaries,

I would be ecstatic because I could shoot on my phone, I could edit on my

phone, I could distribute on my phone, and all I had to do was have the idea.

And the focus to just pump out content basically.

But why can't you do that as a 47-year-old?

Well, I could, uh, but I feel like social media by and large is

kind of a young person's language.

Okay.

And I haven't kept up with it very well.

Right.

So it's a creator's paradise, but the reward in paradise isn't necessarily

the same rewards we set out to, to, to gain access to when we started.

Low those many years ago?

Well, I don't know.

I mean, that's interesting to debate because I think it is the same.

I think it's eyeballs.

I think it's wanting, uh, to communicate something.

I think it's the same artistic drive to create.

Is there, I think just the, the format is different.

Well, and the language and the grammar, right?

Yeah.

Like the palette, the tools, and maybe I'm wrong, but when I started out.

I was emulating and inspired by work that had been created generations before me.

Yep.

And I wasn't, I didn't feel like, and I still don't feel like I'm on the

cutting edge of what's next necessarily.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

But that I can take the inspiration and the, the language of the past and

recontextualize it with some currency that, uh, that allows me to have some.

Some place within the conversation allows me to be expressive.

Mm-hmm.

Um, so what you're saying is, like you wanted, you were in inspired by movies

and you wanted to go make movies.

Exactly.

And so to be a 20-year-old today in this paradise that you're talking about, I

don't feel like I would feel that way.

I feel like I would be even more frustrated than I am now that I,

I was born too late, um, for, for something, but that's probably

a sucker's argument because.

You are right in that it comes down to artistic expression, the need to express

something and the need to explore, you know, kind of a maker's life.

Yeah, and I, and I, I mean, that's a really interesting point that, that we

were inspired by a preexisting thing that we wanted to then emulate, and I think.

You are onto something there, because while we were using new technology to

do it, like I, I loved Les Blank movies.

He was going out and shooting on a 16 millimeter camera.

I was shooting on a DV camera that had just come out, but to me

they were still like very similar.

Those are, you know, that's just a sort of change in the technological capabilities

of the camera rather than the.

Me going out and starting a new genre, let's say.

Right?

Whereas like social media has really only been widely available for, what, 10 years.

And so the idea of what a successful influencer is is not really set yet.

So I think probably a lot of these people are emulating, uh,

celebrities or, you know, other.

I, I don't know if they're emulating filmmakers.

I actually don't think they are.

Well, that's, I don't think they're,

that's my point.

Yeah.

Is like, when you say, if, I think if I were to transport myself

Body Switch style into the body of a 20 year, 20-year-old Yeah.

I'd wanna be making movies and I'm not interested in being an influencer.

Like even this, what we're doing walking around a neighborhood Yeah.

With two cameras up in the air Right.

Chitchatting about stuff.

Yeah.

It, it feels off, uh, it does not feel like this is not scratching the itch.

Of creativity for me.

Mm-hmm.

And if anything, that's what, like we, we, we've talked about this before.

Some of my reticence to put a video framing on this is that

that visual language is the place that I express myself and play.

Right.

Versus this, which feels kind of like a, like an opportunity for just like kicking

it with a friend Uhhuh, it's like a mixture between a snapshot slice of life.

Yep.

And like a. A sharing, a passing along of things that have, that have

started before me and are passing through me to whoever's next.

Right.

And I don't equate that as cinema.

Yeah.

And I wouldn't say this is cinema by any means.

Yeah.

I mean, I think this is, this is in the tradition of where we are right now,

which is like everybody's expected to broadcast their lives and you know, I

am taking this thing from my life that I enjoy, which are walks with you.

Yeah.

And choosing to figure out a way to broadcast that and thinking that that

might have some value for people in the same way that other podcasts do.

That um, or influencers do that online.

And I think really more the, the desire to like be a broadcaster is maybe

the overwhelming sentiment behind a lot of social media, rather than be a

filmmaker, you know, like people are.

Are more interested in like, telling you their thoughts than they are

like shaping and crafting and, um, delivering like an artistic narrative.

Yeah.

If that makes sense.

Well, that, that does make sense.

And I, I like to equate it to some real old media, like if we were writers,

this is like a weekly column, right?

Where we, we complain about what's wrong and, and point people towards.

You know what we like and, you know, kind of make some dumb jokes along the way.

Yeah.

Versus like writing like a great short story or a novella.

Um, and so to me that's why like the, this conversation about what 20-year-old

version of you would, would make of this moment is, uh, is interesting to me.

It's exciting because I haven't really thought about it, um, in those terms.

I mean, there's a part of me.

That thinks about like my, my high school and college friends.

Mm-hmm.

And we made kind of like silly videos together that nobody ever saw that

we would show in my friend's living room, you know, that I would edit

by hooking two VCRs up together.

Right.

But mostly we are in camera edits.

Right.

And, uh, and were really, insubstantial had no pressure on them to be any

good and they weren't any good.

Right.

Um, but they scratched.

A creative itch and urge for our entire group.

But if I was 20 years old today and I had the full production capabilities and the

distribution capabilities, I don't think I would be looking to be an influencer.

But I wonder what those funny little videos we made, I. Would be like,

mm-hmm.

Yeah.

And uh, that's a, that's a good point.

The, the sort of pressure to make something substantial is an interesting

point about that, because similarly, when I was first playing in bands, for

example, I played drums in a lot of really bad rock bands that nobody's heard of.

And I had a blast and it was me and my friends, and we were being creative,

and we would make our own logos and merch and songs and record covers and

play these like house party shows.

And it was so much fun and I pine like I think back so fondly about

those days because there was never the expectation that we were gonna get

signed or be like an important band.

Yeah.

And it was very freeing in that way.

And I think that the idea of, um, needing to have followers and wanting to have like

the most amount of social media presence.

Uh, robs people of that, you know, and especially young people making stupid

videos like you're talking about, or being in bad bands like I'm talking about.

Um, I, I wonder if they have that same freedom.

I. But then on the flip side of that, when I started making documentaries and music

videos from my friend's bands, I wanted as many people as possible to see them.

Okay.

And I would take the VHS tapes of like a band in Lawrence,

Kansas, where I went to undergrad.

I would take them to like the PBS station.

And I was desperate for anybody anywhere to show my work.

And so, um.

And, and same thing with the, you know, the first short documentaries

that I made, like getting into any film festival was humongous because

it was a chance to watch it with an audience and to, um, feel validated.

And that is basically lifted at this point because you can put it online

and you're validated by the number of people who watch something that you make.

Right.

So, so I think in that way when I say like, I would be ecstatic, that's what

I mean is that you don't have those same barriers to an audience that, uh,

we had when we were first coming up.

Um, but I

don't think people, or at least I don't think I have understood

until very recently, the domination of the entertainment

industry that YouTube represents.

Like it is a complete and utter.

Paradigm shift.

Well let from anything that we grew up with.

Right?

Yeah.

Lemme

drop something into the conversation that, that's, I think, speaks to

that from an inside the industry.

Um, little bit of intel, which is that there's an exec I

was working with last fall.

We had a development deal with a pretty great company and that great company.

Surprising to me, I guess probably not surprising to

people who pay closer attention.

Um.

I tightened their belts right before Christmas and laid

off most of their execs.

Yeah.

Including the one I was working with.

And I called him and I asked him what he had planned, you know, next, what

he thought he would do in, in response.

And that's when he let me know.

He saw the industry changing in one very significant way and that major studios

were reacting to YouTube in a whole new way, in a way that I don't think has

been made that public in a way that I hadn't heard elsewhere, but Makes sense.

Which is that, um, YouTube is gonna be rolling out an all

new interface for television.

Mm-hmm.

So I, I, I access YouTube via Roku.

Yep.

And, uh, and sometimes I, I play it from my phone Yeah.

To the tv, but I watch a lot of YouTube on tv and primarily what I'm watching is

you're watching it through the app.

So through the app it kind of looks like, like a desktop

or something.

It's very similar to the desktop setting.

Yeah.

And I'm mostly watching live music.

Mm-hmm.

Um, a little bit of, uh, clips and trailers for movies.

Lately with my 9-year-old son, we've been watching a lot of magic tricks.

Awesome.

Um, but anyway, my friend, the exec was telling me YouTube is gonna be

rolling out this whole new interface.

Which doesn't feel like the desktop app.

Yeah.

Which feels much more in line with TV that we grew up with.

Right.

And so they're encouraging content providers to make

more TV like fair, right.

Serialized, ongoing, dramatic additions to the YouTube lineup.

And to that end, my friend, the exec was telling me that major studios are

formulating whole new departments.

Just to create Yeah.

Material for this new, you know, user marketplace.

Yeah.

Uh,

and, and I, it, I'm sure somebody smarter than me could make the argument that,

you know, this is how media always works and like, you know, the advent of radio,

you know, was like this, where there was a lot of people who had their own radio

stations and then suddenly, you know.

Towers and stations came along and sort of standardized the approach,

and then that became radio as we know it, and then TV came along, or

the movies came along and then they.

You know, surpassed radio.

And this is talkies?

Talkie, yeah.

Silence and then talkies, and then into color.

And Richard Linkletter, one of Austin's patron Saints of Filmmaking, whose house

we just walked past, whose house we just walked past made this really interesting

point That film has basically been dying.

Since it was born, like it's always going through rebirths and

periods of extreme transition.

You know, VHS was supposed to come along and kill the, the Theatergoing

experience, and that didn't happen.

And then TV was supposed to do the same thing.

It did kill Beta Max.

That's true.

But um, but the point being that like, this is just another iteration Sure.

Of people's need for stories, which I do agree with.

I think that the idea that people learn from narrative and understand themselves

in the world through interpreting stories.

Is true.

That's just how humans work.

We are sort of pattern making story machines and we need those,

uh, in our lives in all different forms, and I think this is just

another way of delivering that.

The big wrinkle to that is that.

Most of the way that young people are using social media does not

necessarily fit with that idea.

You know, like Mr. Beast, who is arguably the most influential YouTube

creator right now, does these really high profile stunts in what are

essentially like these host driven kind of, you know, 10 minute or less.

Videos and they get watched by hundreds of millions of people, like more

people than live in the United States.

Like, you know, he gets 500 million views or something like that, which

is just mind breaking to consider.

Uh, but it's, people aren't necessarily, it doesn't have the same like

narrative arc that we're talking about.

Well,

that's what I'm, that's what I want to get back to in, in my

assessment of this next chapter.

Which may be right.

I feel like figuring out narrative nonfiction in this new media

landscape is the challenge.

Yeah.

That's before us.

Absolutely.

Uh, because neither of us are a 20-year-old entering

the influencer paradise.

Right.

I don't wanna be, but I do want to continue to work and I do want to engage

with audiences because even though.

Finding audiences wasn't important to me for my high school films,

my high school band, to a degree, even this podcast, right?

Finding and connecting with audiences on my creative storytelling and on

the ability to relate narratively to an audience, to bring a humanistic

approach to storytelling into, if it has to be YouTube, it can be

YouTube, if it has to be, you know.

Floating holograms.

I'm game for that in 10 years or less.

Funny

you mentioned that.

Uh, oh, somebody, uh, what do we, here, I have something to say about holograms,

but let's, what are we doing here?

First, I just wanted

to pause for one second and say I would like us and I feel bad.

I was doing it kind of, you were making a good point and I was

stupidly like couldn't, I couldn't stop the embrace of those flowers.

Uhhuh, I want us to capture a little bit of springtime beauty 'cause it's

only gonna list exist for five minutes.

Yeah.

When we say spring is in the air, it'd be nice to cut to

a little montage of Totally.

So I was just gonna say on the, if we're, I figured we're heading back now.

Yeah.

Let's head back.

And so as long as one of us is doing a good job on faces, like we can each

take turns getting some more POVs.

Yeah.

And getting some spring, um, montage pieces.

Great.

And I also just wanted to hang here in the shade for one second

and catch our breath.

Yeah.

Well, I definitely wanna get these flowers right here, these red flowers.

Okay.

But

oh.

Floating holograms.

Floating holograms.

You said floating.

I said floating holograms.

You said speaking of that, I said Uhoh.

Uhoh.

Yeah.

So I was on a call, uh, with a casting director who I've worked with over the

years, and he has a new venture where, uh, brands can go to him and they can access

a database of actors all over the world.

Who they can then write scripts for, to, uh, perform essentially

a commercial, but to their phones.

And it's a lot like remote casting.

Um, but it gives the agency the ability and a director to direct

these folks very specifically.

Um, and it looks like user generated content, like something that would be

like an Instagram reel or a TikTok video.

Um, but it's being used by PepsiCo or whoever.

And so he was sort of giving me a demonstration of this new

technology and he said that for many years, studios have been.

Taking their content and developing holograms of actors and basically banking

them to be used down the road in some way.

Oof.

So AI is going to sort of birth holograms and we are suddenly going to like be

living in this kind of wild world where we are seeing more and more of those.

Okay.

Progress.

Uh, not for the faint of heart.

Right.

Um, so with that in mind, you know, doing, doing things like making a 90 minute

feature documentary that people have to go sit in a movie theater to see Yeah.

Feels very.

Um, not current.

Um, and I'm somebody, look, I, I read books all the time.

I'm an avid reader.

I love to sit and, and read, but I realize that most people don't,

and that that's not a way that.

People access information much anymore.

And so I don't think that it's not valid to make feature films.

I mean, that's what I fell in love with.

That's why I wanted to do this in the first place.

Um, but I do think that finding financing for them is only going

to be harder, and that the budgets are only going to keep shrinking.

Right.

Well.

So besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, what do you think of the play?

Um, you know, you're an avid reader.

We started our walk this morning in front of first Light books.

A brand new bookstore here in Austin opened just over a year.

Yep.

A friend of yours opened the place.

Yep.

Your first thought was

Taylor Bruce, and how are you

gonna survive?

And I said, why would you open a bookstore?

And yet that place was bustling.

Yep.

Hustling and bustling.

And I will also say, you know, my PAL works at Waterloo Records.

There has been such a growth in the world of vinyl.

Yep.

That's obvious over the last couple years.

Right.

Vinyl sold as many.

Yeah, units two years ago as it did in 1988 or some, there's

some language around that.

But what, what happened to vinyl?

It got replaced by CDs the other day.

I overheard a couple, 22 year olds say, I'm getting into CDs.

Oh man.

And then it's like, oh

yeah, CDs are great.

Um, so we may be dinosaurs who want us like hold onto

the theater experience, but.

Um,

there are other dinosaurs out there.

Is there's, I

think there's just enough dinosaurs out there to, uh, to keep our new

media concerns at, at, at bay.

Yep.

For you at, at.

The Well, and that's true old age of 47 and me at the young age of 49

and, and people, you know, being an author is still a career and people

still get paid to write books.

It's just fewer people than, you know, 20 years ago, less money and less money.

And so, you know, it's, I'm not saying that it's gonna go away entirely, but the.

You know, it being part of like the national conversation is shifting

away and I'm, you know, I'm not even saying that I need to be

part of a national conversation.

I'm just more interested in, you know, if people, if you start with

this premise of people need stories.

And the way that people are consuming media is on their phones.

How can you tell those stories on phones?

And I think something like Quibi, which was the um, the short form

content producer, the short-lived content, very short-lived.

Uh, it launched basically the same month as COVID, unfortunately.

And I think that is going to look in 10 years, like something that, like an

idea that was just ahead of its time.

Just a little too early.

Yeah.

I'll tell you what, I met with Quibi when they first came down the pipe.

Yeah.

They have a piece of interface technology that blew me away.

Oh yeah.

You were telling me about this.

Yeah.

Changed the way that I saw.

Um, looking at, looking at, uh, it could and TV on your phone.

It could go vertical to horizontal.

Was that

the Yeah.

The way

it worked is

you were, um, you were, you're holding the phone in your hand, and what they

did is they commissioned a little study to say, do people prefer to hold

their phone horizontal or vertical?

And what they discovered is that people like both your wrist gets tired.

If you're holding up horizontal for a while, you're gonna switch to vertical.

If you're holding up vertical a while, eventually you go horizontal.

Interesting,

right?

And so.

What they created, and I would say perfected was a system that as you

turned your phone from horizontal to vertical, the image switched.

And what was a horizontal image became two stacked vertical images filling the frame.

No letter box, no pillar box, just full frame imagery.

And what was kind of amazing about it was you were becoming a defacto editor.

So as you turned your hand, right, you got to choose from a single

perspective shot to a double perspective shot, not, not that different

than what we're doing here, right?

Um, for people watching the video where sometimes it's, it's a single

shot and sometimes you're getting both of us at the same time.

Um, but with Quibi, you got to become the storyteller through that narrow window.

And, and I have to tell you like.

It was a really powerful experience seeing that.

I mean, it's easy to be cynical about that as a, as a creator and someone

who is interested in control, right?

Like giving up and seeding control to the audience in that moment, right.

Seems like it would kind of cut against the grain for me, but it didn't, it

really kind of inspired a different view and made me know, like if I'm

shooting verite, having Multicam up and running, knowing that you're gonna

want to make use of that other camera.

Through this portal.

And if you are, uh, and if you're shooting narrative where you're

taking a more creative approach to nonfiction, you can offer secret other

worlds through that second window.

Mm-hmm.

You could be on a character and in their mind at the same time, and

it's up to the user in a choose your own adventure kind of approach.

Yeah.

And so I have to tell you, when Quibi went under.

So quickly and dramatically, I really thought we are gonna see

them license this technology.

Yeah.

To Hulu, to Amazon.

Maybe it'll become ubiquitous, right?

Like, uh, like Kleenex and we'll still call it, you know, the Quibi effect.

Yeah.

And like the Ken Burns effect.

Right.

Um.

But I haven't seen it anywhere else.

And so I don't know if they're holding that, uh, that, that piece of code,

um, close hold or if I'm just not engaged in the, in the marketplace

of distribution ideas enough.

But, but I have to say, like, I think you're right.

They were ahead of their time.

You know, they, they burned a bunch of money on some high dollar

creatives and a lot of material that was created for, it went unseen.

And I, you know, I don't have an opinion or, or much insight into that.

I. But, but I was excited about that interface and, and I'd love to,

to, to explore playing with that.

Yeah.

A

little bit.

Absolutely.

And I think, I mean, it sounds like you're a new media enthusiast.

I'm enthused, Keith.

I am caffeinated, which translates

into enthusiasm.

Oh my gosh.

All right.

Well, we're nearing the end of our walk.

We're back in the alley.

We're back in the alley.

Buy first light books.

What did you think about this Hyde Park Walk?

I, I do this walk.

Without cameras, without you, several days a week.

This is the neighborhood I walk.

Wait, you walk without me?

I walk with Amy Bench, I walk with

Sally O'Grady.

Ah, I walk with Andrew Bki.

I love all those people, but I hate you for walking without me.

I feel so cheated upon.

But I have to say, I also walk and talk with other people.

You talk,

how dare you.

Um, keep it quiet over there, Steinberg.

Um, all right, so, uh.

What'd you think about Hyde Park?

I love it.

I, this is, this has been a blast.

I think we should do this more.

I love getting coffee at first light, walking down the alleyways, and, uh,

just seeing sort of the, the beauty and the sort of, uh, mystery of Hyde Park.

I, I, I'm a fan.

There we go.

Next time on dog walks, who will it be?

We are gonna talk to Kahani Korn Cooperman.

That's right.

Khanani Korn Cooperman with her world Premier documentary Creed,

USA here at South by Southwest,

which I for one, cannot wait to see.

Uh, she's been involved in two of my all time favorite projects.

She, uh, shot the behind the scenes film of Dazed and Confused.

We're gonna talk all about that.

And she was the executive producer of The Daily Show with John Stewart.

We're gonna talk about that too, but we're also gonna talk about Creed, USA

and I think you guys are gonna love her.

She's, she's just a blast to talk to and, and to walk with,

so stay

tuned for that, everybody.

See you there.

Doc Walks is created, produced, and edited by my friend Ben Steiner of the Bear.

Hello, and my friend Keith Maitland of Go Valley.

Thanks for

tuning

in.

Follow us at Doc Walks pod on Instagram X and YouTube.