Light & Shadows & Adaptability

power cuts, production schedules and priorities, oh my

2024 has been a wildly exciting year both personally and for my baby, Light & Shadows. It’s been equally as challenging as it’s been rewarding, though. Challenge and reward growing in lockstep seems to be a feature of reality rather than a “bug.” Much like the dance between self-love and self-awareness, the tests and fruitions represent two sides of one coin. Reality has flipped that coin relentlessly in this year of Light & Shadows’s growth.

Our team started coming together in the year’s first few months, and in March I had the first dream I’d ever had in which I was a father. My son had a gaping hole in his throat and was in desperate need of care. After carefully guiding him in the dream, and after carefully guiding eight individuals together in the waking dream that is life, we all met as the first iteration of our team on April 8. It just so happened that the eclipse day was the best day for that meeting, and it just so happened that countless pieces of our work came together seamlessly through April, as adrenaline fueled me through three weeks of sleeping 4-5 hours per night leading up to our first big shoot in the jungle.

As seamless as it all was on one hand, extremely inconvenient seams sprung up on the other. The week before our jungle trip was the first week of major electricity cuts in southern Ecuador, making our preparation for the jungle very challenging.

Now again, and to a greater extreme than before, southern Ecuador is cutting power. The light is being cut for 14-18 hours per day, on an ever-changing and not-always-reliable schedule, which makes editing and producing a docureality series immensely challenging. We’re lucky to have Tamar, who’s been burning midday oil and putting in a heroic effort, but with Edu on a vision quest, the team still finding its feet and Vilcabamba devastated by these power cuts, we’re realizing that our production schedule needs adapting.

Our next video is about introducing the team for real, and we want to make it great, so we’ll take at least one more week to get it done. We’ll likely release our pilot epic after the December 20 date we mentioned four weeks ago. As always, we’ll do our best.

On the bright side, I’m now four weeks smoke-free and leaving the U.S. to return south today. I’ll soon be home, and able to guide Light & Shadows forward much more directly.

With love for all of you invested in our creation, we thank you for bearing with us on this journey.