In The Mountains — Renan Ozturk

Renan Ozturk, of the production group Camp4Collective, checked in with us to talk about his roots in art and climbing and how those two things eventually led him to become one of the most celebrated mountain filmmakers of our time. When we chatted, Renan was driving from his home in Utah to go check out what the winter in Wyoming had to offer.

What’re you up to in Wyoming?

We’re doing a little road trip, potentially thinking about moving here. We live in Park City right now, but thinking we want to be somewhere a little more remote — in the mountains.

For those who might not be familiar: Who are you? Where are you from? How did you end up on this path?

I was born in Germany but I grew up in Rhode Island, of all places. I went to school at Colby College in Maine for a little while but transferred to Colorado college. They [Colorado College] were on this block program where you only had to take one class at a time, so that gave me time to check out a lot of national parks. One of the guys who lived on my floor, his father climbed with Yvon Chouinard and they had a great relationship with climbing and the outdoors that was pretty deep and nuanced. I got my introduction to the world of climbing through them and it hooked me.

I gave away my belongings after school and hit the road hitchhiking around and climbing with my friends. I just had some friends drop me off in the desert and spent six or eight years doing that: living on the road in parks and rock caves, diving out of dumpsters for food. During that whole time, I was landscape painting and never had a camera or anything. I eventually got a climbing sponsorship from The North Face and started going on international expeditions. When I started going on those expeditions I would take little HD consumer cameras and just shoot stories on the trip, which later became documentary films like Meru. I got into filmmaking and cinematography through that and eventually founded a production company, Camp4Collective. We do all kinds of documentary and commercial work. I started shooting photos as well, and a lot of those expeditions were for National Geographic.

What do you miss most about those times when your buddies dropped you off in the desert?

Society now is hard to avoid. You get those screen time reports at the end of the day on your phone and it’s alarming. I think it was somewhere between 8–10 hours for me yesterday. It’s crazy now. Those were beautiful, simple times where we would go and dive out of Trader Joe’s dumpster. Maybe it was more of a selfish lifestyle, but it was also simpler.

Does Trader Joes have the best dumpsters?

They did for a long time! Until they started building these fortresses around them and now you can’t dive them anymore.

There’s this strong body of portrait work in your portfolio. Why is it so important for you to take these portraits of the people you encounter on your travels?

I’m just starting out in all of it but I definitely like to take the time to shoot portraits. Most of the stories I like to tell are focused on a deep connection to a certain character. That’s how you can really connect with an audience and tell them your story, and have them really invest in a character. I usually try and shoot all my portraits on a 35mm 1.4 lens that’s all manual. It’s hard to get a shot in focus, but when you get it and the person that you’re shooting isn’t annoyed with you, then it’s a good thing to share and hopefully, it honors their story.

What was your vision for Camp4Collective when it was founded? Has it changed over time?

We’re just three directors and hardly much of a big workforce. The vision was always just to create solid work and get involved in projects that we are passionate about — it all just happened out of that. It’s more about finding work that inspires us and collaborating with each other rather than something that was more brand minded.

What keeps you inspired to get up and keep doing this? Why not throw in the towel?

We did a trip to the Congo last year for National Geographic TV for a story following conflict gold. It’s a trip like that that gives a glimpse into the lives that people are living and the depth of the stories that could be told there, and those are the things that keep you going. The more you travel and explore the more you feel obligated to use the skills that you have and the spare time that you have to tell these stories before you don’t have the strength to hold a camera anymore.

On all your globetrotting adventures, what is the one piece of gear you never leave behind? Why?

It’s changed so much over the years. It used to be hand sewn sketchbooks before cameras or a canvas to bring back some art. These days it’s more focused on digital media assets; I’m a little bit of a gear glutton. My friends make fun of me because I’ll pack for what’s supposed to be a short vacation to the desert, but I’ll bring an ALTA and a MōVI Pro — the same production kit I’d bring on a big commercial shoot just in case there’s a story there. I want to be able to show it in the highest capacity.

Getting back to ALTA, you were one of the first people to get to use an ALTA on the Swing Arm City video. Can you talk a little bit about how that came about?

Finding Freefly was easy because you guys revolutionized the industry with gimbal technology, especially for the expedition-type shooting I do. Nobody makes gimbals that are as lightweight and easy to carry around. I’ve worked with a lot of companies now and it’s pretty amazing that I can still hit up Tabb begging for the latest creation and he’ll give me the time of day, plus send a customized video of him explaining the product. For Swing Arm City, I reached out to Tabb about the project, and he believed in it and sent us the ALTA, so it worked out!

Has Freefly changed the way you shoot at all?

All of the technology Freefly has created totally changed the way I and my peers have been shooting. I just got word that the film “Mountain” that we worked on won best cinematography at the Australian Academy, and a lot of that work is based on the gimbals and technology Freefly has created.

What’s something you believe is true that other people may not?

With social media, there’s a lot of negativity and a lot of people believe it is destroying us. A lot of the time I believe it is destroying me, too, but at the same time, I feel like it can be beneficial if you put more positive input into it.

So focus on sharing the positive?

It doesn’t always have to be positive. It can be something that’s really hard to look at, like a poached rhino, that’s seen by the 100 million+ NatGeo followers. That’s not a positive image, but it is the hard reality of things that are going on. So, I guess I guess social media can be used in a really positive way if you’re using it to tell stories for the right reason.

We’ve talked a lot about past achievements, tell me what you see yourself doing in five years from now and is that any different from what you’re doing today?

Besides going back to landscape paintings, I’m producing 4–5 different films — some of them features, some of them shorts — all at the same time right now. We also have multiple National Geographic expeditions that we’re trying to pull off. A lot of them relate back to my connection with Nepal and the Himalayas, so there’s a lot of stories there.