We recently connected with Will Freund and have shared our conversation below.

Will, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

My most meaningful project is also my biggest one, Connected by Water. A 1000-mile narrative documentary that explores how coastal communities feel about climate change. It started back in 2018, I was working as a Manatee Research Intern with the Mote Marine Laboratory where I would spend every week out on the Intracoastal Waterway of Sarasota, Florida looking for manatees to photograph for our research database. During that time I became interested in the national network of the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) and learned that it stretched from Brownsville, Texas to Norfolk, Virginia, over 3000 miles. I’m not sure what initially sparked the idea, but I decided that I wanted to travel to the ICW to see what it was all about.

Over the next year, when I was not at my day job doing wildlife education programs, I was hunched over my laptop planning out a grand adventure from Miami, Florida to Norfolk, Virginia along the ICW. Fairly early in this planning process, I was trying to answer the question of “why?” why was I doing this? What was going to keep me moving forward even on the days I would want to give up and go home? The more I thought about it, the more I began to connect the dots.

Through my background in environmental education, I have had thousands of conversations with thousands of people about the diversity of the natural world and the magic held within it. However, there was always one topic that never sat quite right with me, climate change. I never felt like I could encapsulate or articulate it to make people understand the gravity of the situation. It was often the topic I got the most pushback or dismissal on. In the general public discourse, climate change was being viewed as a black-and-white issue, you either believed that it was happening, or you didn’t. Obviously, we as humans are nuanced creatures and there was more to the story. How did people really feel about climate change and what are we going to do about it? I had found my driving question.

Now we come to the project itself. 1,000 miles in a solo sailing kayak, 100 days to finish, over a dozen interviews, countless friends made, and a documentary to tell the story. This is Connected by Water.

Will, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Generally, I consider myself a jack of all trades, master of none. First and foremost I am a storyteller and how that manifests itself depends on the situation. For most of my life, I have been fascinated by the natural world and have had some amazing opportunities to explore it by land, sea, and air. I obtained a degree in biology from the College of Charleston which is where I also picked up a camera for the first time, a Nikon D60. Science and education were always the main focus of my day job, but I was always finding ways to bring photography into my work. I used what I knew about nature to help me be a better photographer.

I got into videography and filmmaking as a way to tell larger stories than what could be captured in a photograph. Especially when it came to environmental storytelling and climate narratives, filmmaking felt like the next step in combining all of the skills I had gained up until that point. Now after producing and directing two independent documentaries, I have learned what it takes to tell a good story, what positive collaboration can look like, and the power of just putting yourself out there. Put all of this together and you’ve got Will Freund Media, the banner under which I share my stories and work to uplift others.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Humans are natural storytellers. We do it every day. My mission is to reduce the threshold to entry for storytelling. Making sure everyone has the confidence, knowledge, access, and ability to tell their own story to show that we are not as divided as we think we are.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

When I began filming Connected by Water, it was March 2020, the year the world went into lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I had made it less than 200 of the over 1,000 miles I needed to travel for this project and everywhere was shutting down and I had nowhere to go. I could not move forward and I could not stay where I was, so I had to put the whole project on hold like so many others in the creative world. I was lucky to have the support network I did and in April of 2021, I was able to relaunch from where I left off over a year before and complete the rest of my journey up the Intracoastal Waterway. There were serious moments when I thought I would never finish this project, but I knew that I would never forgive myself if I gave up and left these stories untold.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://willthefourth.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fourthphotography
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FourthFreund/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-freund/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/FourthFreund
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ClimateKayakandConversation

Image Credits
All image credits are my own (Will Freund Media)