Moe Taylor

I was near the end of my rope with various mental diagnoses incurred from military service and had tried all the medications and treatments available through traditional medicine and the Veteran’s Affairs healthcare system. I was extremely desperate to find any way to get just a little bit of happiness out of life so I went to Costa Rica and began studying psychedelic plant medicine for the film in hopes I could find something that could fix myself outside the realm of big pharma and mainstream medicine as those drugs had done more harm over the years than anything beneficial.

This is episode two of a larger series called “BrainDagger Films Presents: Knowledge is Good”. Each episode teaches about different, cultures, nature, science, and the world around us in hopes the viewers can gain a tolerance for the unexplained, misunderstood, and other people from different backgrounds across the globe. The purpose is to combat the insane flow of hateful misinformation that is tearing the human race apart as we speak. One of its Mantras is STOP HATING PEOPLE BEFORE YOU MEET THEM! Also, MISINFORMATION COULD BE SAID TO HAVE CAUSED MORE DEATH AND DESTRUCTION THAN ANYTHING ELSE IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND.

I was pretty much the whole team as this was overall a one-man project. I had a few assistants along the way but all the important work was done pretty much by me alone. It was interesting while shooting an Ayahuasca ceremony I found a cameraman from Chile to help me shoot for a few days. He barely spoke English and I barely spoke Spanish but we managed to get things done over the five-day shoot with very few issues and are now very good friends.

The biggest challenge I faced during the production was fatigue. When you are the only one shooting, writing, editing, animating, etc. an hour-long documentary you end up watching it thousands of times before completion. By the time it’s done, it’s impossible to watch and tell if it’s any good or not. It’s like repeating a word hundreds of times until it is meaningless or listening to the same song thousands of times until it is no longer enjoyable and instead extremely awful and terribly annoying lol. I could not watch it for a month after the final cut.

I really enjoyed the mid-movie interview with Jeanae White where I managed to keep a single uninterrupted shot of her telling her story for a few minutes yet it still felt exciting and new the whole way through with the editing techniques I used. I was also very proud that I added my own story to the film as a prologue and epilogue. I didn’t plan on doing that because I didn’t think my family would understand but I did it anyway cause it felt right and was an integral part of the story. I was right, they didn’t really understand but they still love me lol. I was not disowned.

Nothing stands out that I would have done differently with the non-existent budget I had. I think it’s a miracle this project got completed at all, I found a way to fix myself and had a lot of fun along the way.

AS ORGANISM is the first episode of “Knowledge is Good” and my first major documentary made with a worldwide release. Here is the synopsis: Join Rachel Sellers and Alan Watts for a journey in scale from the subatomic world to the edge of the cosmos as they open your eyes to the possibilities of the universe as a single organism. Discover the range of patterns that design the world around us and the mathematical properties inherent in the building blocks of everything we know. With this understanding of the world around us we can learn to comprehend our perceived enemies’ point of view and hopefully treat our fellow man a little better. There isn’t much hope for society and civilization as we know it if we can’t get along. We are in the midst of a global societal collapse and it is important to show films like this so we can possibly slow it down and maybe even stop it before it’s too late. STOP HATING PEOPLE BEFORE YOU MEET THEM. Please?

Spend as much money as you can of your own cash and make something phenomenal. Nowadays the only way to break through is with loads of money from an investor or a truly amazing product made with a shoestring budget. Once investors get involved all the fun is sucked out of the project and in general, you lose creative control as is my experience.

I did not use actors, just interviews from real people.

I had the soundtrack made by a friend in Costa Rica and a producer in Venezuela. It was surprisingly easy working from remote locations and I learned that there really is no reason to work with someone locally. I have animators in Pakistan and India and my voice-overs come from people all over the world. It’s truly interconnected at this point.

I was pretty much the only person working on this like I said so I just had to deal with my own self-criticism which was a battle in itself for sure.