Samuel Orr

What do we really see when we watch the natural world on film and television? All too often the presentation emphasizes death, danger, and drama (imaginary or exaggerated) in such a way that the real world is diminished or misunderstood. However, even un-sensationalized portrayals are manipulations: time is sped-up, mundane “performances” are discarded, and the swelling music pushes our emotions around. Can any portrait of nature be accurate and honest in a way that doesn’t dilute or misrepresent the real world?

Samuel Orr is a filmmaker with a background in forest ecology. He specializes in time-lapse photography and natural history documentaries. His award-winning work has been viewed by millions of people online as well as on broadcast television in North America, Japan, and Germany, and exhibited at venues such as the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. For the past 8 years he has been working on a full-length documentary film that looks at the Periodical Cicadas of the United States: a unique group of insects that appear in the billions once every 17 years. In 2014 he spent 3 months in Australia and New Zealand filming cicadas down under to add to the cicada documentary, which is due to be completed in 2016.