Emmy-Nominated Documentary

Holy Poop! Amber’s Halfway Home got nominated for an Emmy! I can’t tell you how much this means to Farnival Films. When we first started this project, I asked Mason and Pidge on multiple occasions, what the f**k am I doing? I’m a storyteller not a filmmaker. Sure, I had produced shorts in the past, but never anything this big. This important. Or this cheap, so cheap we packed our lunches on shoot days. And the stakes were high. Our subject matter was about saving lives. Saving DOGS’ lives.

But, after meeting Amber, I knew two things. One, her story needed to be heard. And two, Amber was so charismatic that all I had to do was NOT screw it up. So, the three of us, Mason, Pidge, and I, armed ourselves with cell phones, gimbals, used audio equipment, and every charger we owned. We jumped in Amber’s van and recorded her saving dog after dog. Nineteen in 10 hours and 216 miles to be exact.

We recorded everything. We weren’t thinking about how it was framed or lit, we just shot. It’s hard to think about those things when a sixty-pound feral dog is growling at your heels. Or when dozens of dogs on death row are screaming for help from inside a dark concrete room. We shot stuff that we will never share because it’s too difficult to see. The only time we stopped recording was when the vet Dr. Neal asked us to turn off the cameras. We did, and he talked about Amber’s selflessness with tears rolling down his face.

That’s the other thing about making Amber’s Halfway Home. For animal lovers, like all of us at Farnival Films, it was emotionally exhausting. It took weeks to process everything we saw. Actually, I’m still processing it a year later. And Amber does rescue work on a daily basis. She sees dogs who are beat, shot, starved, and abandoned. She sees sick dogs living in deplorable conditions at government-funded shelters.

Yet, every day Amber gets back in her van, travels hundreds of miles across rural Tennessee, and saves more dogs. She once told me it’s all about having thick skin and a soft heart. Without a doubt, Amber’s a special person. A warrior on the front lines of the animal overpopulation problem who is actually making a difference in her Southern community.

This Emmy nomination makes all of us at Farnival Films feel like we might have done justice to her story. A win would cement that. Let’s do this.