A Word from the Founder
Trapper Creek Media is named for the small town in Alaska where I grew up—at the foothills of Denali, in a cabin surrounded by wilderness and stories. It’s also where I first learned about documentary film. A filmmaker traveling across the country to film in the national parks met my father while filming mountaineers on the slopes of Denali. When I was young, I always wondered why he felt our mundane life was worth filming. Looking back, of course I get it. After I left Trapper Creek and found my way to journalism and documentary film, that realization continues to guide me and our team at Trapper Creek Media: a realization that sometimes the best person to tell your story is a curious outsider who understands that everyone — no matter who they are or where they live — has a story worth telling.
PBS Frontline: Bootcamp for Award-Winning Docs
I still remember Marcela’s instructions: take the transcripts from twenty multi-hour interviews about the war in Afghanistan, identify every distinct idea, and assign each meaningful sound bite to the right category. This time-honored technique of creating selects remains one of the most essential steps in the documentary filmmaking process, and one of the many lessons I learned at Rain Media, founded by legendary Frontline correspondent Martin Smith and inimitable Frontline producer Marcela Gaviria. There, producer Will Cohen took me under his wing and taught me that to tell a story simply and powerfully, you have to know it completely. You have to select the right characters and use archival with intention. Above all, you have to fact-check every line of the script and every shot in the film — because credibility is the foundation of trust.
Trust us with your Story
At Trapper Creek Media, we carry that same spirit forward: the belief that everyone has a story worth telling—and that when it’s told with care, craft, and clarity, it can move people to feel, think, and act. Today, we apply that approach across documentary, brand, and educational work—always with the same focus: real people, human connection, and visual storytelling that resonates.