By Laurie Casey

When you click on a screening link to watch a One Earth film this coming season, Garen Hudson is on the other end, making sure all systems are a go. As One Earth’s technical director, he’s literally behind the scenes. But today he gets his moment in the limelight.

Q: How did you start with One Earth?

Garen: I started as a volunteer in 2015 or 2016 when I was a senior in high school. I was good friends with Susan Lucci [a long-time One Earth facilitator and friend of the Fest]. She sort of roped me in. [Laughs.] I helped on a student advisory team and did a little marketing. But I moved to the A/V team when Erin Turney, One Earth’s original technical director, left for California to start her own production company.

My main job at the time was going from venue to venue and testing out films on their systems, seeing what they could handle, seeing what sort of existing A/V infrastructure they had. I did this for 40-50 venues across the city, so a lot of my job was driving around the city with a whole bunch of equipment and making sure that things ran smoothly.

That is a very small part of my job these days. Now that we’ve become virtual because of the pandemic, a lot more of it is on the admin side of things: it’s communicating with filmmakers, letting them know how our distribution system works, getting nerdy with things like file formats and digital rights management.

Q: What are the challenges of being a technical director in a pandemic? I heard one story from last season where a panelist was traveling—I think they were on a train and even in a tunnel at some point. Can you share some of the technical challenges?

Garen: One of the things I’ve been saying since we’ve gone virtual is I wish I had the power to give people better internet. We are piping in our speakers and panelists from all over the country and world. They may not have internet access for a variety of reasons. Or like that traveling panelist you mentioned, sometimes they were on the move. There were so many situations where we had folks with unstable internet connections. Most of the time, if the internet isn’t working, you can still get decent audio connectivity with a cell phone. So if we were having audio troubles, I had to scramble and call people.

An Asus ProArt monitor is flanked by Garen’s audiogear: Yamaha HS8 studio monitors, Focusrite ISA Two Mic Preamp, Wa-76 Compressor, and Presonus 68 Audio Interface.

“One of my favorite parts of this job is realizing there’s a way I can serve this movement that feels organic and natural to me. Personally and spiritually, that’s really big. It means I can show up in the best way I know how.”

— Garen Hudson

But if I were to just have a speaker call in while I’m running a show, we would quickly run into feedback issues—a feedback loop gets created. A solution that I found is this little mixer, a Tascam Model 12. It costs $500. You can hook a phone into it directly, so it automatically takes care of any feedback issues. It’s a really neat device because it feels like an old analog sound mixer that has faders and all of that. There’s a term in audio: “mix-minus”, which is a way to get all of the audio from an event to a speaker, without them hearing themselves and running into feedback. This board allowed me to do that without much hassle. We also use a broadcast software called vMix that allows each panelist to be on their own channel. This is helpful for a number of reasons. Everyone can be “mixed,” so-to-speak, in a totally different way. They get streamed out to Vimeo. We have this stream embedded on our website, but we can also direct people to an alternative link, which we had to do last year a few times. So there’s a lot of moving pieces! It can be challenging at times but there are some really cool moments that come out of this unique setup.

Q: What are some other challenges of transitioning from an in-person festival to a hybrid/virtual one?

Garen: We shifted everything to virtual in the middle of our 2020 festival. In mid-March, word came down that the city was shutting down, and we had to pull the plug on the back half of our festival. We ended up shifting a good portion of the screenings to Zoom. At that point, I had a good enough computer to stream on Zoom. It’s not the best platform for video streaming. There are some real troubles, especially if you have a slow computer or internet connection.

For the next season [our 10th anniversary season in 2021], we were looking to expand what we could do, both for technical reasons and for a presentation and audience experience. So I did a lot of product research on different platforms, and ended up landing on the systems we use now. We needed a platform that could work for streaming the film, panel discussion and audience participation.

We don’t do asynchronous screenings, so that immediately eliminates some of the available options. There are a lot of platforms offering a streaming-service type of model, and that just isn’t what we do. We expect people to show up at the same time. Our festival director, Ana Garcia Doyle, has been adamant about this. I respect and appreciate that, and it makes the festival strong. We’ve managed to maintain a sense of community in the virtual realm. We really encourage people to get there at a specific time, they ask questions, the panelists speak right after the film and answer the questions. We are a community-driven organization, and so our technical setup has to help make that happen.

Q: Tell us about your computer setup.

Garen: I ended up landing on a bit of a “MacGyver” system. The brain of the operation is this computer that I built from scratch. Last year I called it “the Beast.” The latest iteration is “the Stream Machine.” I could geek out about that stuff and the specs on my computer for days. It’s a Windows computer that I’ve turned into a “hack-in-tosh,” so I can also run Apple software on it. It has 48 GB of RAM. It has an Nvidia 3060ti graphics card—that’s really important for what we do. It manages and encodes all of the videos. It was a challenge to get it. Graphics cards are hard to come by—and can prompt a whole other environmental conversation. The processor is an Intel i9-9900k. I do all types of A/V production, so my studio is also full of some really fun bells and whistles: that mixer I mentioned, speakers, acoustic treatment. It really is like a playground in there.

Q: What are the things you love about your job?

Garen: This may sound like a bit of a trope, but in a lot of activist spaces, you hear this thing all the time: they say do what you’re good at, do what comes naturally to you. This movement needs your skills, whatever they are.

I’ve tried to do organizing or other parts of activism. But they haven't been my thing. I love supporting events, but I don’t love planning events and reaching out to caterers, that sort of thing. But I’ve been a tech nerd since I was a kid. That’s always come naturally to me. One of my favorite parts of this job is realizing there’s a way I can serve this movement that feels organic and natural to me. Personally and spiritually, that’s really big. It means I can show up in the best way I know how.

The other thing is that I’ve had such great exposure to the biggest badasses in the environmental space who are making strides and doing work in the environmental justice community. I’m grateful to Ana and the other folks in this fest who are making sure the right voices are in the room. In the 3-4 years I’ve been involved in the fest, I’ve seen this shift of moving toward films that highlight environmental justice issues, highlight the work of BIPOC voices, highlight the issues that BIPOC are facing on the front lines of this crisis. They are the ones we need to listen to. It’s important to see their voices be centered.