Filming a Wildfire Documentary in Spokane with Serif Creative and EagleView

Some projects are about a product. This one was about a place, and about what happened to the people who live in it. We spent time in Spokane filming a documentary for EagleView in partnership with Serif Creative, a production and brand studio based in Columbus, Ohio.

The Story

The fires that swept through the Spokane area damaged or destroyed roughly 600 homes. Numbers like that flatten fast in a news cycle. On the ground it looks like foundations with nothing on them, neighbors who stayed to fight with garden hoses, and assessors trying to make sense of entire blocks at once.

EagleView's work sits at the intersection of aerial imagery and property data, which means their role in a disaster like this starts once the smoke clears and the scale of the damage has to be measured. The documentary follows that thread: what happened, who responded, and how accurate information changes how quickly people get made whole.

Working with Serif Creative

Serif Creative came in from Columbus with the creative direction and the client relationship, and brought us on for local production in Spokane. That structure works when everyone is clear about their lane, and they were. Clear briefs, realistic schedules, and a willingness to adjust when a location or a subject changed on the day.

Documentary work rewards teams who can stay calm when the plan moves. We shot sit-down interviews in offices and on location, ran a two-camera setup with controlled lighting for the formal pieces, and kept a lighter kit ready for the moments that only happen once.

Interviews Carry It

With a subject this heavy, the interviews do the work. Our job was to build rooms where people could talk honestly without feeling performed at: soft key, controlled background, clean audio, and enough time that the second and third answers could be better than the first.

The strongest material almost never comes from the question you planned. It comes from the follow-up after someone pauses.

Local Crew, National Projects

If you are an agency or studio producing in the Inland Northwest, hiring local crew is the difference between a travel day and a shoot day. We know the locations, the permits, the light, and the people. Projects like this one are a good example of how that partnership should run.

Take a look at the work Serif Creative is doing out of Columbus, and at EagleView for the data side of disaster response.