A bald eagle over the treeline at dusk

A film for the Wildlife Sanctuary of Northwest Florida

Weekends, Holidays & Hurricanes

Capital campaign filmTreatmentSeptember 2026Lensea Film

Opening statement from the creative team

Every animal in that building was carried to the door by a stranger. Four thousand one hundred of them last year. Somebody pulled over, put a squirrel in a box, and handed it to Emily. That is the sanctuary's whole economy, and it's the audience for this film.

Your feasibility study already told us what works: people don't give to a building, they give to Amelia. So this film doesn't pitch an organization. It leads with the animals and the people who carry them, and it lets the building make its own argument, which it does the moment you see the water.

This isn't "please support us." Your community already does. It's the film that shows them what they've been part of, and asks them to do one more thing: help move the door.

The idea

Every animal here was
carried in by a stranger.

That's our read of what you do, and it's the spine of the film. The title is yours: weekends, holidays and hurricanes, the hospital has never closed. Five floods have come through the building, four feet of water at the worst, and the doors stayed open. That's the turn the film makes. The doors you never close are the doors the water comes through. Time to build ones it can't reach.

The film

3 to 6 minutes · Documentary · No narrator · Emily inside, Leah outside, the volunteers between them
01 · Cold open

A drop-off

A stranger's hands. A box. The door. Gloves go on before anything is touched. One of these happened in the middle of our tour; they happen all day, every day.

02

The house

A donated home, retrofitted in the '80s. Human kitchen, patient kitchen. The nursery, incubators, forty patients a day in baby season, hand-fed every couple of hours. Emily at work. The numbers land as type, not speech: free. Seven days. 4,100 last year, up from 2,800 five years ago. A hundred dollars an animal.

2014six feet on the land
 four feet in the building
 five floods through one house
03

The flood line

Emily at the wall where the water marks are. 2014 is the highest one. Eight eagles were on the property that night and two could fly; the staff swam the rest out, holding them above their heads. The power was out for days. Orphaned babies were kept alive with hand warmers. She tells it there, in the room. We don't reenact it. The place holds the memory.

The hospital flooded. But the animals lived.

Apollo
04

Apollo

Forty-four years old, blind, here since 1985. He has lived in that building through every one of the floods. A quiet passage. The stakes, without the melodrama.

Concept site plan, Caldwell Architects
05 · The turn

Jones Swamp

"We do not close our doors." Cut to thirteen dry acres, ten minutes away. Leah walks the trail; this is her section, the campaign she's carrying. The architects' concept sits in the landscape so it reads as homework, not a dream: a real hospital with a surgical suite, pools for pelicans and loons, a flight school, a kids center. We say the hard thing out loud: canopy kept, permeable ground, releases on the property itself. And when they move, the old lot goes back to the county as wetland. The place that flooded becomes the place that absorbs the flood.

Walk the concept plan →

Pelican release on the beach, carriers open
06 · Close

A release

The carrier opens. The animal goes. The goal is always release, and the sanctuary is about to do the same thing. Over black:

You carried them here. Help us build the place they deserve.

The people in it

Emily Inside

Fourteen years, started as a volunteer, runs the hospital and the organization. She swam an eagle through a midnight flood. She doesn't need to say she's committed; the film shows her working and lets her tell one story, once, in the room where it happened.

Leah Outside

The first hire who wasn't patient care. She wrote the seven education programs and teaches them, runs the volunteers and the market, and is carrying the capital campaign. Emily is where the sanctuary is; Leah is where it's going. She leads the Jones Swamp section and the classroom, and she's the voice that says "coexistence" and means it.

The volunteers The thread between

Ninety to a hundred and twenty of them a quarter, and a core few who are there several mornings a week with produce in the trunk. We sit two or three of them down: Angie (Audubon board, trained on the glove), and whoever Leah says is the one everyone knows. Their voices carry the middle of the film. They are the supporters this film is asking, talking to themselves.

The stranger at the door Everyone else

Whoever walks up with a box while we're rolling. A release form and thirty seconds. They are the audience, on camera.

Rules we shoot by

  • Gloves on every time an animal is touched on camera, even where staff wouldn't normally. Nobody should watch this and decide to raise a squirrel at home.
  • Never "rescue." The word doesn't appear. The public does the carrying; the sanctuary does the hospital.
  • Your language, not ours. Free wildlife hospital. Open seven days. Coexistence. One of thirty-six biodiversity hotspots on earth, and most people here don't know it.
  • Clean, not staged. Interiors shot after baby season, when the house looks like a hospital and not a flood of squirrels.
  • Your new identity on screen. Every title card and lower third in Barlow Condensed and Roboto, in bark, leaf, sand, and water. The film launches the brand as much as the campaign.
  • Nothing generated. Every frame is real. The only software we build is the map.

How it looks and sounds

Documentary · Natural light · The sanctuary is the score
Princeton A brown pelican on the intake scale Amelia

Light

What's there. Morning through the enclosures, the incubator glow in the nursery, rain on the pond. One small kit for Emily's interview so her face is the brightest thing in a dark house.

Camera

Handheld but composed. Close on hands and gloves, wide on water and land. Long lenses for the residents so nobody is crowded, least of all Amelia. One drone day over the swamp and the new acres.

Sound

Birds, rain on the roof, the door. Emily, Leah, and the volunteers over pictures, not to camera. No narrator. Music arrives late, when the carrier opens.

Cut

Patient in the hospital, quick at the door. Each beat stands alone so it can be a reel, and the master still reads as one film.

What it becomes

One shoot, one story, everything below cut from it
The base

The film

Three to six minutes for the website, the launch, the board room, and any newsroom that asks for clips. This is the thing the campaign points to.

Evergreen

A :30 spot

Free wildlife hospital. Open seven days. Weekends, holidays, hurricanes. On the new branding, so it outlives the campaign.

Daily

Social cuts + a B-roll library

Each beat as its own reel, plus forty clips exported so Leah's daily post has real footage behind it for a year.

On the day

A community day

Leah teaching one of her programs, a volunteer morning with two or three of the long-timers sat down for a few minutes each, a release on a partner's land. The people who already show up, on camera, doing what they do.

Interactive

The intake map

Where 4,100 animals were picked up, plotted across Escambia and Santa Rosa. A picture of the community this film is asking, and the intake-location tracking the new facility plans to do anyway, started early. Built by us, no generative AI, in the spirit of the listening map we made for the Estuary Program.

In the room

A screening night

Eighteen seats in a real theater for the eighteen people who move the needle most. A premiere with a party attached, not a party with a TV in the corner.

Which of these you get is the investment conversation, and it lives in the proposal. The film is in every version. What scales is everything around it.

Three things we can't schedule

Said now, so they're never a surprise

The flood

The biggest storms come in September and October. If the property floods, one of us is there within the hour. If it doesn't, Leah's phone footage from past floods cuts in as texture, and the wall does the talking.

Amelia

She isn't handleable and she reads stress on camera. Her story is told, not shown. A long lens from outside the enclosure, or nothing. We won't trade her comfort for a shot.

The renderings

Caldwell's concept plan exists and we show it as a concept, nothing more. Final renderings run on the architects' timeline; if they land before picture lock, they go in.

Dune and Gulf at first light

What happens next

Launch it on
Giving Tuesday.

A date turns a video into a campaign. December 1 is when your supporters are already deciding what to give; the film should be the reason they give more this year than last.

Sept 16Board. Pick the build.
Late SeptAgreement and deposit. Our crew volunteers a day at the hospital before we shoot a frame.
Oct 12–30Production. Emily's day in the hospital after baby season; Leah's day: a class, the volunteers, Jones Swamp with the drone. Flood standby all month.
NovemberEdit, two rounds of notes, mix.
Dec 1Giving Tuesday. Film, spot, reels, and library in Leah's hands.

You carried them here.

Lensea FilmWildlife Sanctuary of Northwest Florida · Capital Campaign Film · Treatment

Photographs on this page are the sanctuary's own, from pensacolawildlife.com and the 2026 facility plan, used here for the treatment only. Every frame of the film will be ours.