What We’re Up To: Spring 2026
We’ve been a little quiet updating our Journal blog here for the past month, but that doesn’t mean we’ve been putting up our feet and relaxing. Spring, the annual arrival of field season for many biologists, is off to a very busy start for us too.
With five conservation documentaries at various stages of production, it’s going be a busy year.
So we thought we’d give you a little behind-the-scenes insight into what has been happening, and what’s involved in doing what we do:
Film festival submissions
We submitted our feature film Destiny Wild | Disappearance Isn’t The End Of The Story to several A-list film festivals in Canada. We’re very excited and hopeful about this feature film and how it resonates with audiences and provides hope that humans can reverse historical loss of species from landscapes.
Funding applications
Like most folks in the conservation filmmaking business, we’ve been busy finishing up funding applications to meet submission deadlines. We just received some exciting news a few weeks ago about a successful funding application for cross-border funding for a documentary currently in production. Funding is how we’re able to film and produce the documentaries that we create. It’s usually not a single funding source that covers the cost of production. So we’re always seeking out sponsors and funding avenues to see documentaries through to completion and release.
We’re also wrapping up agreements this month for a major feature conservation documentary that will take three years to film and produce. It’s our largest production to date for WorkCabin Films and represents an exciting evolution of our work into major productions aimed at broadcast, furthering our achievement of our broadcast agreement with PBS earlier this year for ur film Saving The Night Caller.
Zoom meetings. Lots of Zoom meetings
Zoom, Teams, Google Meet. You name it, we’ve been on it, meeting and chatting with wildlife biologists and outdoor educators. Meetings like these are how we line up interviews for filming our documentaries. This process is a great way to get to know experts, explain our work and documentary projects, and get filming segments on our 2026 calendar.
Filming in the field
We started our 2026 filming work at a research lab at the University of Toronto. Then we went in search of filming Canada’s rarest fish. And we’ll soon be back again looking for Canada’s rarest fishes. Truth bomb: You can’t find Canada’s rarest fish in a single trip! We’ve also started filming a video for a multi-million dollar conservation campaign that will be announced later this year. Work will continue on this project throughout the spring and summer, as well as other productions. And this week we’re off to Toronto to film some groundbreaking conservation research. It’s a big scheduling effort this spring and it won’t let up through summer and autumn.
The stuff you don’t hear about
The behind-the-scenes stuff you rarely hear about are the tag-along hikes with biologists that aren’t necessarily “work” but more relationship building. There are always discoveries and conversations that can lay the foundation for future documentary ideas.
We hope this gives you an idea in what’s involved in what we do. Social media often makes filmmaking look like it’s a grab-the-camera-and-go job. But there’s so many other non-camera hours spent creating the foundation for work and relationship-building.
- What We’re Up To: Spring 2026 - June 13, 2026
- The Real Cost of Being a Conservation Documentary Filmmaker - May 23, 2026
- Why Self-Distribution and Rights Ownership Are Essential for Independent Documentary Filmmakers - April 15, 2026
