The Amazon rainforest plays a huge part in regulating the world’s oxygen and carbon cycle, but it’s been under attack by those cutting down trees in an effort to develop the area for farming, ranching and more. The Amazon Aid Foundation was founded to educate and activate global citizens to protect the Amazon through art, science, multimedia and film. Its latest project is a music video called Mother Earth, which highlights the need to protect the Amazon rainforest for the good of the planet.

Jon Fine

This 1.5-minute piece takes viewers on a journey into the world’s largest rainforest, one that is at the tipping point of no return.

Director/editor Jon Fine — in collaboration with the video’s producer and founder of Amazon Aid, Sarah duPont — combines images of Amazon’s beauty and on-going destruction with drummer Cindy Blackman Santana’s haunting score. Natural sounds from the jungle are also woven throughout the piece, which features images from Amazon Aid’s video library, National Geographic videographer Bertie Gregory and stock libraries Getty, Shutterstock and Pond 5.

Fine’s experience is diverse, having worked on documentaries, commercials, live performances and more. We recently caught up with him following the release of Mother Earth to go behind the scenes on the project and find out more about his creative process.

How did you get involved with this project, and how early were you brought on?
Sarah DuPont at Amazon Aid Foundation Director/editor Jon Fine — in collaboration with the video’s producer and founder of Amazon Aid, Sarah duPont — combines images of Amazon’s beauty and on-going destruction with drummer Cindy Blackman Santana’s haunting score sent me the song and I felt like it was a call to action.  Cindy Blackman Santana had named the song “Mother Earth” and it was serendipitously connected to so much of the work Sarah and I have done together to raise awareness to protect rainforests.  And, of course, I jumped at the opportunity to collaborate with Cindy who is a brilliant artist who I’ve listened to for years.

How would you describe Mother Earth to someone who hasn’t seen it yet? How would you describe the music?
The video is a celebration of the beauty of the rainforest and a warning of the escalating man-made threat to its existence.  At the current rate of destruction, scientists say that the Amazon could be gone in 40 years… this is urgent. To me, Cindy’s drumming feels like it’s an alarm call — it has a warrior spirit. The song evolves in a beautiful way growing in complexity and thickening to a crescendo.

You are a director, editor and a musician.  How did these three talents play a part in Mother Earth?
I’m always intrigued by projects that bridge music and film. As an editor I intuitively draw on music — rhythm and feel are key as you’re working with footage. The impulse is to just cut to a beat, but there are so many ways to explore syncopation and rhythm visually: movement, scale, speed, screen direction, how your eye follows an image. It’s fun to play with all of that and not only cut on beat. In Mother Earth, Cindy’s drumming was telling a story so primarily I wanted to find a way to express that.

Where did you find the footage for the video, and what informed your selection and editing choices?
The footage is a real mix from rainforests around the world. It includes material filmed by wildlife photographer Bertie Gregory, original footage from the Amazon Aid Foundation Archives, some NASA footage, and a variety of stock footage of deforestation and recent fires in a variety of rainforests.

Much of the material is from Sarah DuPont’s film River of Gold, which I worked on as executive producer and editor. Over the past 10 years, Amazon Aid has amassed a library of footage illustrating the diverse ecosystem of the Amazon and the destruction of rampant deforestation.

What were the challenges editing footage from a variety of cameras and formats?
Adobe Premiere has gotten really good at doing internal conversions, so it lets you play with so many different codecs and frame rates in one timeline seamlessly. So, thankfully technical challenges didn’t get in the way. Although the footage came from a variety of formats (and locations), we wanted to express this as a story of one interconnected world… the fires in the Peruvian Amazon will ultimately affect us here in New York. For years, scientists have warned us that deforestation in the Amazon could reduce rainfall as far away as the Pacific Northwest.

You edited on Premiere, but what about the color grade?
We cut in Adobe Premiere and graded using Lumetri Color.

What was Cindy’s feedback on the initial edit and the project overall?
Cindy was very positive and supportive throughout. We talked about what we hoped the video could express and our desire that the video would illustrate both the beauty and the dangers. We wanted it to celebrate the colors and the incredible interconnected ecosystem and show how everything is related. If one tree falls, there is a whole ripple effect.

What are some of your career highlights to date?
There are so many. Filming a documentary with two of my oldest friends about Bill Withers, traveling from Addis Ababa to Arkansas working on a film about children and adoption, and directing a live TV broadcast from the Teatro de Habana in Cuba.

Also, my continually evolving work with Herbie Hancock, first documenting his creative process in Possibilities and now working with his Institute and UNESCO to celebrate jazz around the world. Getting to watch firsthand how Herbie pushes himself outside his comfort zone and interacts in such a fluid, collaborative, non-judgmental way is a master class in life.

Do you have a philosophy when it comes to the kind of work you take on?
Filmmaking is such a collaborative art form. To me, a big part of jumping into something is based on the relationships — do I want to spend months emailing, Zooming, challenging, building, working with this person or team? It’s really important that I feel like there is an openness to communication — can we express ourselves honestly? Can we laugh, disagree, create and push ourselves to work rigorously?  And, ultimately, are we contributing something meaningful to the conversation with the stories we tell and the characters we focus on.  Somehow, I do seem to keep gravitating to the music.