Indie Profiles
Alan De Herrera
Since his youth, Mr. De Herrera has been interested in the "expressive power of film as an art form." As a writer, he was "intrigued by the intimacy of focusing the two types of expression. Each has its own unique challenges and rewards." Alan’s production company, Rio Films, is based in Orange County. Awards: Q: How long did it take to make Seal Island? It was about a three year process. We thought it was going to be a 9 or 10 month shoot but grew into a two year shoot followed by nine months of editing and finishing up the film. Q: How did you go about shooting scenes? It was difficult to get near sea lions on land because they are skittish creatures. We would have to shoot with long lenses. And to not disturb them we wore camouflage and hid behind rocks especially during the intimate moments of a birth. However, underwater it was a completely different situation because the sea lions would interact with us because they are playful animals. Q: Are their central seal characters in this film? The story is more about the mothers and pups. It generalizes more on the group which is about 250,000 seals. However, in certain scenes we’ll focus on an individual mother and her pup or we’ll focus on an individual pup and the struggles that little baby goes through and if it survives. Q: What did you learn through out this experience? Well this is my first theatrical type story. I worked on a lot of short documentaries. It was quite different from a traditional documentary. It was a journey for us as filmmakers to put ourselves into that environment and try and tell a story that would captivate an audience and carry the interest of the audience for what will be 72 minutes when the film is finished. Q: What difficulties or dangers did the crew face during shooting? Did anyone get hurt? No. Nobody got hurt luckily. We had a few crazy incidences. A lot of times under water the conditions out in the eight Channel Islands will change quite a bit. But there were a few incidences were the surf would get very rough and us as divers we’d kind of have quickly get out of the water. It did get a little dangerous filming underwater. Q: Any funny stories or interesting moments? The playfulness of sea lions underwater is unmatched by any other animal in the sea. With that I feel the audience will grow attached to the film and have an interest for what these animals go through.
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Alan De Herrera is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who has written, directed and edited the feature-length documentary Seal Island (