Hemp Already Video Series

I’m very excited to announce my new show is up and online! The Hemp Already video series is an episodic docuseries about all things hemp.

It features the innovators disrupting the status quo and helping to save the planet by making products with sustainable and environmentally friendly hemp rather than resource depleting and often toxic traditional materials.

Hemp materials can be used to make tens of thousands of products. Construction materials, paper, plastics, clothing, textiles, biofuels, food, health products and more can all be made from hemp.

The series features the companies and people behind them that are leading the hemp movement.

Watch the first episode and subscribe to the Hemp Already youtube channel.

two people inspect a hemp plant on a farm in the video series Hemp Already — Erica Halverson of TINY e PAPER CO & Jonathan Payne inspect a hemp plant.

Why a hemp video series?

Everyone needs to know about hemp.

Hemp is a sleeping giant and there’s a ton of excitement around the plant. Its renaissance has begun and people are using this miracle plant again to build all kinds of things. I want to bring the stories of these hemp innovators to the world to see!

Hemp is the most versatile, sustainable, renewable, carbon negative, deforestation saving, eco-friendly plant in the world.

It grows in 3-4 months, can grow almost anywhere – wild hemp grows in all 50 states, it uses less water than other crops such as corn or cotton, produces more fiber than cotton and more biomass than corn, doesn’t need herbicides or pesticides (or very little), regenerates the soil and has numerous other benefits. It truly is a miracle plant.

I want people to see there are alternatives to fossil fuels and resource depleting materials that can be used today. We’re not talking about far off, future technologies that may or may not ever come to fruition. Using the hemp plant can help save the environment and create new jobs and change industries right now.

Related: using natural light for video

hemp hurds for making hempcrete in episodic series Hemp Already — Hemp hurds, from the woody core of the plant.

Why did the hemp industry die out?

The first use of hemp dates back about 8,000 years ago. Hemp has been used for thousands of years for many products and was one of the largest agricultural crops up until the late 1800’s. Until then, most paper was made from hemp.

With the signing of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, lumping hemp together along with cannabis, it effectively killed the industrial hemp industry.

It’s such an efficient source material for so many things including timber and petroleum based products that it posed a major threat to those industries which played a part in the plants demise – hey, it’s competition so we need to squash it!

Related: No Words, a video poem about nature and our destruction of it.

What can be made from hemp?

There are tens of thousands of products that can be made from the plant instead of the unsustainable, greenhouse gas emitting, toxic and fossil fuel based materials that are being used now.

hemp plant with wood frame house — Hemp plant at a hempcrete build site.

The list of things that can be made from the hemp plant seem endless: negative carbon construction materials like hempcrete used in residential houses and commercial buildings for walls, ceilings and flooring, hemp insulation, hemp wood, fiberboard, carpets, paints, varnishes, inks. Any paper product can be made from hemp instead of trees.

Supercapacitor batteries (yes batteries!), plastics and bio composites (nearly all European car makers already use it for car parts), biofuel, diapers, mulch, animal bedding, all kinds of clothing (much more environmentally friendly than cotton), rope, canvas, beauty products like soaps, lotions, makeup, nail polish, shampoo and it can feed people and animals with a whole bunch of food products and can help us with our health and wellness with cannabinoid extracts.

This is just a short list of things that can be made from hemp. The Ministry of Hemp lists 82 products being made today from hemp. That’s just the beginning. Some estimate that there are 25,000 products that can be made from it while others estimate 50,000! Whatever the actual number is, its large.

Can you make paper from hemp?

Yes, you most certainly can. There are many benefits of hemp paper over tree paper. Episode 1 features hemp paper company TINY e PAPER CO of Long Beach, California and founder Erica Halverson.

a close up of a coffee cup holder made out of hemp paper in the video series Hemp Already — A coffee cup sleeve made out of hemp paper

TINY e PAPER CO is a startup that makes hemp paper out of hemp fiber and the left over plant materials or biowaste from CBD extractors.

Their mission is to get the world to switch over from tree to hemp paper, thereby putting a stop to world deforestation. We love people that think big and think you will too.

Be sure to check out episode one of the Hemp Already video series to see what a tiny company that thinks big can do!

No Words, a video poem

What do you do when your filming options are still very limited because of the restrictions on working and gatherings of people due to the Coronavirus pandemic? You make a new video out of existing footage and other assets you have available to you. I made No Words, a video poem out stuff we had laying around, a poem and footage I had already shot.

No Words is a 1.5 minute short film about nature and our neglect of it. The poem was written and voice by Lorraine DuRocher. I supplemented previously shot footage with a couple shots filmed by cinematographer Roberto Correa.

Related: using natural light for video

Get creative with your existing assets

Even though small media shoots have been deemed essential businesses and have been allowed since the beginning of the shut down as long as safety and CDC guidelines are followed, many companies are still apprehensive to schedule video shoots. Big budget filming, which was not deemed essential and was shut down is starting to come back with extensive new safety guidelines.

With the current environment, making new videos and repurposing your existing assets like footage and graphics is still a great way to keep your content flowing and to save money on production costs.

a man on a bike and two other people look frozen in time at a city street intersection while they wait for the light to change — Scene from the video, No Words

The poem No Words really spoke to me. Nature takes care of itself instinctually without words and without thinking about it. Nothing in nature instigates its own self-destruction. Why do we?

When I re-read the poem recently (I read it years ago when Lorraine wrote it), I thought what it says is very ‘right now’ and thought it could make for a nice little cinematic piece. So we dusted it off, recorded the voice over and I went through old footage to go with the narrative.

Fun fact: the idea was to make all the footage of the insects, bees and of our parrot, Fast Eddie to look like it was shot in a forest but it was all shot on our porch and front yard.

Read about my short films about aliens and selfie addiction on Amazon Prime Video. Watch me introduce The Selfie That Changed The world at the La Jolla Int’l Fashion Film Festival.

The time to pay attention is now

In a macro sense, No Words speaks to what we have been and are currently doing to our environment. Now that we’ve destroyed it and have brought it to the possible point of no return with climate change, we’ve become aware of it.

The time to pay attention is always right now. You can’t eat the hamburger today and pay for it on Tuesday. Wimpy’s old saying from the Popeye comic strip, “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today” is where we are as a country and as a global community.

Come Tuesday you know Wimpy is not going to be able to pay, Well, environmentally speaking today is Tuesday. It’s time for us to pay up for our past consumption but the problem is we ain’t got no money.

Related: read about my video series, Hemp Already about helping to save the planet by using sustainable and ecofriendly hemp.

On a personal level, No Words speaks to how we treat our bodies. We get caught up with the hustle of the today and our day-to-day business and we ignore our bodies until it’s too late. My intention with No Words, a video poem was to use the human body as an allegory of the environment.

Let’s learn from nature and from animals. Stay in tune with your body and environment which is an extension of our body and let’s take care of both of them today.

Tag: environment