This page is about my longer projects like:

 

documentary Serials and films personal travelogues and writing

 

 

Now, if you've not already Googled my name then you might not know that I have a fairly hefty footprint in California's Cannabis industry and a good chunk of my best work is in that space. 

 

When I got started a decade ago my cannabis clients were the first to recognize my storytelling abilities and trust me to help their businesses and many generously backed my shift into making documentaries.

 

Hopefully that doesn't bother you - but in case it does the first two in the list below have nothing to do with cannabis and although I am a supporter the cannabis industry doesn't define what I do. 

 

a TASTE of the PLACE: COAST to COAST across COSTA RICA

and

the OTHER end of the BRIDGE - The Paradise on Picnic Avenue

 

I must confess that as an immigrant to these shores: TRAVEL is my first obsession and I have three series currently in production; a TASTE of the PLACE which follows the travels of my lifemate and I wherever we go. The SEEWEED Chronicles which is the worlds first cannabis country travelogue and a third series about travelling in wine country that's just finished filming and will be released soon.

 

 

The SEEWEED Chronicles

(2023 - onwards)

 

California's legendary cannabis region known to the world as the 'Emerald Triangle' is famous for many things, but being welcoming of stangers is certainly not one of them, or so you've been led to believe.

 

Whilst making one of the films in my "TAKE THE HIGH ROAD" trilogy (see below "The fight to stay small") I made friends with lots of farmers at a craft farmers market and they invited me up to stay and even let me bring cameras. 

 

The result is the Emerald Triangle's first ever travelogue series and I'm slowly making my way through at least over 20 Episodes worth of footage, interviews and journeys.

 

So follow along and see the world of weed & craft cannabis farming through my eyes as I take you deep into the breathtaking mountains and valleys of lands filled with legend and history, before it's all taken and rewritten by the Corporations taking over cannabis.

 

WATCH HERE

 

 

 

TAKE THE HIGH ROAD

(2022)

 

When I first started working in California's cannabis industry I was pretty nervous about getting involved. Like almost everyone in the world my view of cannabis was heavily infulenced by half a century of propaganda generated by the decades long "war on drugs" but when I met people from the industry I discovered something quite profound: They were just regular people like you & me, there were no "Spicoli's" falling out of a van. There was no "WHOA dude" or any of the 'stoner' stereotypes I'd expected, in fact the closest metaphor I've found is obsessive wine fans & farmers...

 

After I'd made my first documentary series (VETSGROW 2018-19) and my first full length documentary film (From Outlaws to In-laws 2020-21) I'd made enough contacts and had discovered many interesting stories that blew these sterotypes clean out of the water. So I put together a plan to make a trilogy of short films aimed squarely at changing the way people look at cannabis:

 

"The fight to stay small" took me behind the scenes of a craft cannabis farmers market deep in the heart of the Emerald Triangle to film legacy producers struggle against the Corporate take over of cannabis.

 

"Farming for knowledge" tours the first Federally legal cannabis farm in over a half century producing raw materials for the research community and meeting the former Navy SEAL that founded it.

 

"Uncle Sam meets Mary Jane" features the first education & consumption event on a Veterans of Foreign Wars post, the only problem is it was in Phoenix AZ some 800 miles away and I had no flight cases.

 

WATCH HERE

 

 

 

VETSGROW Too

(2021)

 

When I made my first documentary series VETSGROW (2018) I'd planned a sequel that would take the concept of teaching vets to grow their own cannabis national in 2019 - I called the idea 'Take the high road?' 

 

That was where I learned that not every company that 'says' they want to help, means it. I spent NINE months researching and planning a 48 state, 20,000 mile tour of the lower states made veteran friends across the country and was all ready to press the go button when all the sponsors pulled out and I was left with nothing but broken dreams and promises.

 

It was a hard lesson, but even worse, I felt I'd let my vet friends down. 

 

When I came back to work with Monster Gardens again after the pandemic I decided to make a different sequel about veterans helping veterans called VETSGROW TOO and I ended up using the title I was planning for the original sequel - TAKE THE HIGH ROAD - for my short film montage instead. 

 

WATCH HERE

 

 

 

 

The Grow Stuff INSIDER

(2021-23)

 

In 2021 after the pandemic had begun to receed, I started working with the Monster Gardens Channel again and discovered that the first person I filmed, and MG's first employee; Steven Silva, had returned at the same time, but the in interviening four years since I'd seen him he'd become a fully fledged cannabis greenhouse and facilities designer with a contacts list that was a who's who of vendors across the spectrum.

 

I had an idea to build a show around his new talents which became a series called the 'GROW STUFF Insider'. He arranged the visits to everything from greenhouses to nutrient companies and I did the rest.

 

We traveled all over the West Coast and I made 20 Episodes of the series before an unmissable opportunity came up and Steve moved on, eventually to the East coast to design & build several HUGE facilities. 

 

WATCH HERE

 

 

 

From Outlaws to In-Laws:

The HEROES HARVEST story

(2020-21)

 

In late 2020 at the height of the first wave of the COVID19 pandemic I'd lost all my clients and work to the financial realities of lockdown as nobody needed a content creator when they were too busy fighting to stay in business. I nearly quit my dreams of making it to the big screen and making my own films and even considered a career change until one day the phone rang. It was my veteran friends who wanted me to come up to Fort Bragg in the Emerald Triangle to meet another veteran group called MEDVETS and it's founder "Big Jake" Lawrence who had a proposition to make: Follow him around weed country restarting a donation program.

 

MEDVETS had been running a free cannabis donation program for local veterans until like almost every other compassion program, it was taxed out of existence by the new 'tax a regulate' law: Prop 64 in 2018. The new law didn't differentiate between retail cannabis and free donations, taxing them at the same eye-watering rate of over 35% causing the vast majority of the free donation programs close. 

 

In October 2019 a new law, Senate Bill 34, allowed for tax free donations to resume but programs still needed to adhere to the new packaging, testing and compliance laws, meaning free weed still wasn't "free"it just wouldn't be taxed. MEDVETS together with their sponsor; Boveda, had put together a coalition of companies looking to help, but could it be restarted during a national pandemic the likes of which had not been seen in a century?

 

To find out, I moved 120 miles north to stay an old hotel in Fort Bragg that MEDVETS were refirbishing for six weeks and followed "Big Jake" all over the Emerald Triangle meeting donors, partners and even one veteran that agreed to be a part of the film.

 

Originally released in it's film format on YouTube, I quickly discovered that few are willing to watch full length films on that platform so I reedited it into a 4 episode limited series and re-released it on the Monster Gardens channel when I started working with them again. 

 

WATCH HERE

 

 

 

VETSGROW

(2018-19)

 

This was the project that started my solo documentary career an dit began in 2017 when I decided that after 14 years living in California I should face the fact that I wasn't going to be moving back to London. I thought of myself as an American and so I learnt about America and it's history; the good, bad and ugly of it, to become a US Citizen in September 2017. 

 

It was during that history lesson that I discovered the truth about veteran suicide which is sadly a daily occurance across the country. The numbers of reported veteran suicides range from 22 a day to as many as 60 depending on the source, but the truth is; no-one REALLY knows how bad it is because many veterans simply disappear once they fall out of the system, invisable to all but their fellows. 

 

Soon after I discovered these facts, I also tripped over another issue that's been ignored for decades: Many veterans suffering from service related conditions ranging from PTSD & mental health issues to chronic pain chose to self medicate with cannabis over the pharmaceutical options they are offered though their Veterans Administration Doctors.

 

The problem is that doing so costs them a fortune in states where it's legal and could cost them their liberty in states where it isn't.

 

In 2017 cannabis was about to be legalized in California and as fate would have it I'd pitched my biggest cleint, the Monster Gardens channel, on making a show about teaching a complete rookie (me) how to build & run an indoor garden when it became legal the following year. They'd agreed and I was set to begin...

 

...but what if instead of teaching me, we taught a veteran to grow their own medicine instead? Could that help show the world that cannabis wasn't what the drug war had claimed it to be?

 

The touble with the idea was (and still is) that cannabis remains illegal at the Federal level and with veterans benefits being tied to the Federally funded VA, should they be caught using cannabis their benefits could go up in smoke - pun fully intended. 

 

To make this crazy idea work, I needed a veteran that wasn't reliant on the VA to survivem but back then even finding a veteran to talk too wasn't easy with my accent. Thankfully I found a local organization called "The Veterans Cannabis Group" right here in Marin and it's Founder Aaron Augustis was open to helping me see if any of this could work.

 

What happened next was a deep dive down the rabbithole of veterans, PTSD and cannabis that filled up the next 14 months of my life making my first documentary series: A 9 Episode EPIC of huge preportions with each episode 30-40 mins in length...so if you're looking for something to binge watch, brace yourself for an emotional rollercoaster because I STILL can't believe the way the local veteran community opened up to me and I'm not kidding when I say, it changed my life forever.

 

WATCH HERE

 

 

 

 writing

 

If you haven't guessed by the sheer volume of text on this website I've always written stuff for fun, for work and sometimes just because I'm bored. One day I'm sure I'll write a book but currently I'm far to obsessed with my documentary work to commit to something like that.

 

However, I do write articles fairly often, bios, website copy and of course all the descriptions to any of my work that features on social media platforms. I've even written a couple of instruction manuals.

 

Here's just a sample of that work that can be found on the web & print.

 

Facing the Dirty Truths of Cannabis Packaging

(Cannabis & Tech Today 2024)

 

In late 2023 I began working with an impressive company on a project that had got me very excited, compostable packaging. The project which I named "Mission: COMPOSTABLE" was to take up the whole of 2024 but sadly fell through at the end of '23 due to financial difficulties faced by the whole cannabis industry and this article written that year is the only completed part of the project. 

 

READ HERE

 

 

The Long Road to Researching Cannabis

(Cannabis & Tech Today 2021)

 

This article is about the same topic as my TAKE THE HIGH ROAD film: "Farming for knowledge" and takes a look at the first federally legal research farm to open in over 50 years founded by my Navy SEAL friend who I met on social media; George Hodgin. Originally published in the December 2020 print edition of the magazine it also got republished on the website the next year at the link below.

 

READ HERE

 

 

An Accidental Activist:

From SNAFU to VETSGROW

(HIGHTIMES 2019)

 

After VETSGROW was released across 2018 and into 2019 I noticed it was very slow to gain traction. This was my first introduction to what's commonly termed "shadow-banning" whereby social media sites slow down the spread of topics they either don't approve, or can't make any money with, such as cannabis. Up until legalization I'd avoided showing any cannabis on the Monster Gardens channel for this very reason. 

 

But the series needed publicity and so I reached out to various cannabis media outlets and offered to write about my experiences. The legendary weed publication HIGHTIMES agreed and so I shared the story of how VETSGROW came to be and they published it across their website where it remained up until June 2024 when they put up a paywall.

 

Thankfully the web archive still has a link to the original but be patient with it loading, it takes a while to pull up the graphics.

 

READ HERE

 

 

If You Want Cannabis Legalized:

Help Vets Grow

(BENZINGA/YAHOO! 2019)

 

This piece came out shortly after the HIGHTIMES article but actually made it into the mainstream as the publisher, BENZINGA, is affiliated with YAHOO!'s popular newservice. It followed the HIGHTIMES article theme but was much shorter.

 

READ HERE

 

 

The Ongoing Quest for the "Brain-chip"

(TechCrunch 2015)

 

This was a ghostwritten piece for the CEO (Philipe Lambinet) of a company I almost worked for in 2014/15 that was going to be an offshoot of the crowdfunding campaign that was the very first video I produced where I discovered my passion for video/film so I wasn't all that bummed when the campaign crashed and burned because those in charge decided to launch it in the CES window - WITHOUT going to CES.

 

I researched, wrote and placed this piece in support of the project. 

 

READ HERE