Today we’d like to introduce you to Ben Masters.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Ben. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I’m a filmmaker currently based in Austin. I studied Wildlife Biology at Texas A&M University where I developed a love of telling wildlife and adventure stories through film, photography, and writing. A few years ago a few friends and I rode wild mustangs from Mexico to Canada through the American West to inspire wild horse adoptions. We filmed the journey and made a documentary called Unbranded that turned out a lot better than any of us expected. Unbranded launched my career in filmmaking and I’m currently directing a feature-length documentary of a 2.5-month horse, bike, and canoe expedition down the Rio Grande river from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico to document the borderlands before further construction of a border wall. The purpose of the documentary is to show people the landscapes along the Rio Grande and how a border wall would impact wildlife, public lands, landowners, immigration, and international relations. We’re calling the film, “The River and The Wall.”
Has it been a smooth road?
Most Texans don’t realize it but the Rio Grande River, the river that is our border with Mexico, is incredibly wild for much of the border. Out in West Texas, there’s huge cliffs and mountain ranges that butt up against the Rio Grande. They’re beautiful to photograph but make travel really difficult. We encountered some really snowy and cold conditions in West Texas that got a bunch of mud in our mountain bikes’ gears. The mud froze in the gears and we ended up having to carry muddy bicycles through the forgotten reach, a super desolate portion of the border West of Big Bend. Physically, that was the toughest part of the trip for me.
After the bike portion of the journey, we switched over to riding my mustangs. We rode them through Big Bend National Park and State Park and met with a lot of the wildlife biologists in the desert to learn about some really amazing conservation work being done on both sides of the Rio Grande. In Boquillas, we switched the horses out for canoes to paddle through the Wild & Scenic River portion of the Rio Grande, across Lake Amistad, and all the way down to Laredo. We got wrecked in rapids in the night, faced some pretty gnar headwinds crossing Amistad, and got to see some landscapes that simply blew our minds. It looked more like the Grand Canyon than Texas for much of the journey.
When we got to Laredo, we switched canoes for mountain bikes to ride next to the border wall that was erected during the Bush administration and to see the priority areas for where Trump wants to do further construction. While the Rio Grande in South Texas doesn’t have the vast mountain Vistas of West Texas, it made up for in diversity. I’m not really a birdwatcher but I was blown away by the thousands of waterfowl and the abundance of birds that I associate with the Tropics, not Texas. We met with landowners, border patrol, farmers, immigrants, congressman, and average Joes to learn how further construction of a border wall would impact them. There’s a lot of things that I simply didn’t think about beforehand like how water would be pumped out of a river on the other side of the wall, how a person on the other side could get an ambulance or firetruck, and the nuances of the reality of the wall. It was really intriguing hearing everyone’s perspective on the border wall.
Now, that we’ve finished the journey, we’re about to start the editing of the film. That’s a massive challenge in itself because we have hundreds of hours of footage that needs to be condensed to under 100 minutes. It’s also a really tough topic to tell and to get right. Our goal is to make it an entertaining film with real-life stories and visuals that’ll allow viewers to get a good sense of what the border is like and what the impacts of a wall could be.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Fin & Fur Films creates wildlife, adventure, and conservation films. We create content from 30 seconds to feature length movies and have had films shown in theaters, on Netflix, on National Geographic, and a variety of outlets worldwide. We also launched the Wild Film Tour last fall which takes short films across the state of Texas along with the filmmakers and speakers. Last year’s tour had films about Texas Mountain Lions, bison reintroductions, ranch restoration, and other topics. We’re doing another film tour this fall featuring some films on Texas Desert Bighorn, the Rio Grande, Ocelot, and a few other topics I can’t announce yet. Check it out wildfilmtour.com.
How do you, personally, define success? What’s your criteria, the markers you’re looking out for, etc.?
My passion in life is wildlife and habitat conservation. If the films I make inspire people to appreciate, conserve, or protect wildlife or open spaces, then I consider that film, time, and money a success. Quantifying that success is difficult. Sometimes getting the right person to see a film could have more impact than 100,000 facebook views of people seeing the same film but that can’t influence the topic.
Image Credit:
Heather Mackey riding mustang Dinosaur in Big Bend National Park, Filipe DeAndrade and Heather Mackey in the Lower Canyons, the crew canoeing through the Lower Canyons, crew canoeing through the Lower Canyons. Austin Alvarado in front canoe, Filipe DeAndrade and Heather Mackey in back canoe, Ben Masters riding past Castalon Rock in Big Bend National Park, Jay Kleberg on a mustang in the Rio Grande River in Big Bend National Park, The crew riding bikes along the border wall outside El Paso. From left to right: Filipe DeAndrade, Austin Alvarado, Ben Masters, Heather Mackey, Jay Kleberg, BCM_Aerials_BBNP: aerial shot of Mariscal Canyon in Big Bend National Park, Filipe DeAndrade carrying a muddy bike through the Forgotten Reach, Austin Alvarado on a bike in the Forgotten Reach
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