Wow, we just got done watching Mecca In the Making.

We have Garrett Henderson-Black here, our filmmaker.

Garrett tell us, what drew you to this story?

Im an And so is the production company that I work with.

And we were out riding one day and just were curious abou how all these trails got here.

Who built these?

Who funded them?

So we started doing some research and we found out that basically all the trails in Chattanooga are made by volunteers.

There was no real organization at first that created these.

It was just a bunch of guys who wanted new places to ride and singletrack in their city, and they sa they had the landscape to do it.

So they decided to get out, started building trails themselves.

And, yeah, that's kind of wha interested us to tell the story about this group of volunteers that decided to just go out on their own and build all this.

So why did you want to tell this story through film?

Well, that's just kind of the medium that I work in.

I'm a filmmaker, and, I thought that it would translate well you know, it's a visual sport.

Our landscapes are extremely pretty.

So you get to see the mountains and the rivers and the trails that wind between them.

And it just seemed like it would translate well to the screen.

So you're an experienced filmmaker.

What was your biggest challenge making this film?

The biggest challenge was probably tracking down all of the different peopl that helped create these trails.

Since it was, for lack of a better word, unorganized at first.

They eventually got organized and came up with a group, but it was just a bunch of kind of renegade out there building these trails on their own and finding out who all these guys were and what they were doing now was.

It was tough, but we tracked him down and convinced him to get on camera and talk about it.

Why would you say the outdoors are such a great subject for filmmaking?

To really connect wit the subject like the outdoors.

I thin seeing it is much more impactful than just hearing about it or reading about it, especially when it's something that's such a, you know, visual feast, like the outdoors.

And in Chattanooga, we have the mountains and the rivers, and it is a very striking visual landscape.

And to be able to actually see it really drives home the message we're trying to tell about why it's so important to have these trail and preserve these green spaces.

It just is a much more impactful way to tell the story through film than it would be in any other medium.

So tell us, Garrett, what do you have coming next?

So next.

The the production compan I worked on this with, Sunflower Films, is working on a feature length documentary about industrial hem and all of its different uses.

It's a plant we've known about for a very long time and has a rich part, in American history.

And it's just become legal again.

So we're trying to tell a story about all its different uses and, construction and fiber and medicine and food.

So we're, trying to get that out next year.

We were working on it for two and a half years.

That's super exciting.

Well thank you for speaking with me.

Thank you.

Great film.

Thank you.