The cultural phenomenon know as “the hum” first appeared on my radar several years ago while I was completing “No Needle, Just a Haystack.”  It instantly seemed like something that would make for a good documentary; I did a bit of research but ultimately got busy working on “Remote Viewing Memories” and put the project aside for a few years.

An issue that I run into quite a bit now that we are in the middle of the documentary boom / golden age is that it is safe to assume that when you read about something amazing or interesting in a widely read publication, there is a really good chance someone is already working on a documentary about it.  This has happened to me several times - I’ll find a story, start researching it, and then find out someone beat me to it.  So I was pretty shocked to find that several years after first learning about the hum no one seemed to have made any kind of substantial film about it.

I got back into research mode and quickly zeroed in on Steve Kholhase as a potential subject - he was driven, excited to talk and (importantly for an independent documentarian like myself) he didn’t live too far away from me.  I contacted him and he was more than happy to have me make a documentary about him and his research.  One of the biggest challenges of the film was parsing Steve’s research.  Early on he shared it all with me in the form of a USB stick with dozens of gigabytes of documents, measurements and other data.  I read through almost all of it in order to get a better understanding of Steve’s work.

 I did one day of shooting with Steve in fall of 2017, and then one more in spring of 2018.  The editorial process was quite long and involved - Steve had done a lot of research over the past ten years and paring it down to a manageable length proved to be a challenge.  Another challenge was managing the media for the main interview with Steve, which was shot with six different cameras (ranging from a DSLR to an iPhone to a GoPro to several VHS camcorders).  The interview also features fairly complex VFX work on the main angle - in order to get the widest view possible I shot in 1.77:1 but editing in 2.35:1 and digitally added on the left and right sides of the room (I got the idea to do this from Errol Morris’s “Tabloid” where he did the same thing).

While I don’t personally hear the hum I found I had a lot in common with Steve.  We both spend huge large amounts of time researching topics that aren’t quite of interest to the general public, and the work we put into these projects outweighs any widespread response.  But there are always a few people who connect with what we do, and that ultimately makes it worthwhile.

One interesting side note is that my assumption that no one had made a documentary about the hum was only half-right.  Apparently Dean Fleisher-Camp had started (but never completed) a documentary about the hum that featured Steve a few years prior to me.