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Michael Dunne: I'm Michael Dunne. Make no mistake, Oregon is pro fungi. In addition to our climate, which is very conducive to their growth and distribution, we're also a state where untold numbers of people go out into the woods to find these delicacies. Yet so little is still known about fungi and their tremendous impact on the environment. Today on the show, you'll hear from two Australian documentary filmmakers who will be screening their latest film, "Follow the Rain," at the Eugene Art House on April 12. The film is both a scientific endeavor and an artistic appreciation of all things fungi. Their groundbreaking time-lapse photographic method lets viewers see how mushrooms literally paint the forest floor, and their work showcases colors and shapes that are almost too vivid to believe. Film producers Steven Axford and Catherine Marciniak, great to hear from you. Thanks so much for coming on and talking with us.
Both: Oh, thank you, Michael. Our pleasure.
Dunne: So, your film, "Follow the Rain," is going to be shown at the Eugene Art House on April 12. Before we even get into the film itself, my first question, and I'll start with you, Catherine, is: Why did you want to make this documentary?
Catherine Marciniak: We've been doing time lapses of mushrooms growing for some time, probably over a decade, and they've appeared in some wonderful documentaries like "Planet Earth Two" and "Hostile Planet." People in the U.S. probably know "Fantastic Fungi" quite well, which features about 20 of our time lapses. Because we go into the forest as soon as it rains, as many fungi hunters do, our experience of the forest was a little different from what we were seeing on screen during full fungi season. We wanted to take people into that experience of being in the forest when the fungi are really on, and also connect what we time-lapse to what we actually see in the forest. We wanted to take people on that journey and also highlight some of the really new thinking around fungi and how it's involved in climate and the role it plays in our ecosystems. Steve and I were gobsmacked when we realized that without fungi, life as we know it wouldn't exist. We wanted to take people on that journey of discovery as well.
Dunne: Steven, tell folks who I'm sure are going to be very interested in going to the premiere at the Eugene Art House what they're going to see.
Stephen Axford: They're going to see us going into the forest and, for various reasons, going out into the center of Australia to the Flinders Ranges, where it's normally very dry but they'd had some rain. We went out there to see the fungi growing. We also go to the Tarkine in Tasmania, which is fairly famous for old-growth forests and fungi. Even closer to home, we saw that a friend had been posting bizarre pictures on the internet. He'd taken the time to look under leaves and found tiny spiders and insects that had been attacked by fungus. He didn't know what they were at first. He saw a spider with 12 legs and knew something was wrong, so he posted it and found out they were Cordyceps, or Cordyceps-like fungi. These are flesh-eating fungi, and there were thousands of them. So we'd go around to his place and look under leaves, and you'd just find this huge variety of Cordyceps fungi. We did it at home as well and found some, not nearly as many, but some under the leaves. You can do it almost anywhere. We were out in New Zealand and a friend found a whole lot under leaves. I read about something in Maryland in the United States where they had a lot of Cordyceps-type fungi under leaves as well. It can happen in all sorts of climates and all sorts of places.
Marciniak: We also explore finding new species and the problems with naming them. There are so many. Anyone who's into fungi knows that the potential to find a new species is really quite high because it's been such a neglected area of scientific research. But getting from "Oh, there's a pretty fungus, I wonder what it is" to actually realizing it's a new species and getting a name for it can take up to a decade, which happened with a particular fungus we talk about in the film. And Steve has been very humble, because of course the other thing you see in the film is his exquisite time lapses. We've really pulled from our 10-year archive and showcased them in this film, so people will see time lapses of fungi like they've never seen before. We also explore how we do them, with a behind-the-scenes look at our studio. And of course the film showcases Steve's photographs. Whenever I make a film for our Planet Fungi brand, Steve is the presenter and photographer, so his photographs are always part of the story.
Dunne: Looking at the trailer, it's gorgeous. The time lapse, in fact, made me think that when I was a much younger man, time lapse was kind of clunky. It just didn't showcase the beauty you see in this film. So, Steve, talk about the patience and precision that doing this kind of modern time lapse takes.
Axford: It's something I've probably treated as an art form. I first started doing it around 2012 because we found luminous fungi on our property here. The luminous fungi fascinate everyone, including myself. So I'd go out in the backyard and photograph the fungi, and then we had this idea to time-lapse them. I set up a studio in a spare shower, blacked out the windows, made it into a little dark room, brought in rotting logs and piled them up, and set a camera up on a tripod. Fortunately, Catherine was very understanding, being a filmmaker. The time lapses came out remarkably well. I think we show the first time lapse I ever took in the film. Things developed from there. We had the opportunity to get a half shipping container, which we brought in, and we use that as a studio now. As time went on I'd replace cameras, and we were fortunate enough to get help from Sony, so we got more cameras that way. It just grew and became almost an addiction. Except addictions are bad for you, and I don't think this one was. I go down every morning and look at what had happened to the things under the cameras. I just did that for years. It was like the old black-and-white darkrooms.
Marciniak: Every morning we get this opportunity to see something new. When you patch it together in the software, you get to see this thing evolving, like pulling something from the developing dish. It's a magical way to start the day. The challenge for us has always been to make those time lapses feel like you are in the forest, to give viewers the experience of seeing a mushroom blossom underneath the leaf litter. Taking those observations we have as modern-day naturalists into the time-lapse work meant it was both beautiful and scientifically accurate.
Dunne: Documentaries have challenges all their own. I imagine if you were making a documentary about a migratory species, there'd be all sorts of challenges in terms of travel and following something like zebras migrating. But talk about the challenges even though your subjects are somewhat sedentary. They're not flying or running, but you don't exactly know what's going to happen, do you, when they sprout up? Talk about the patience of filming something that you don't know what it's actually going to do once it breaks through the soil.
Axford: You've probably put your finger on the most difficult problem. You point the camera at a mushroom, preferably a tiny one about to grow into a big one, but you're never quite sure which way it's going to grow. Whether it's going to go straight up, come out toward the camera, go away from the camera, or go to either side. Or whether it's going to grow much bigger or much smaller than you thought. And there's the question of how long it takes. Some mushrooms might take weeks to grow; another might take three hours. We try to do camera tracks sometimes, because filmmakers love tracks. But that adds another layer: you've got to know not only where the mushroom is going to grow, but how quickly.
Marciniak: We were doing time lapses of a mushroom called Aseroe rubra, a stinkhorn mushroom. It grows out of an egg, and the egg can sit there for a month and not do anything. Meanwhile, when it does come out of the egg, it grows very quickly. It'll burst out and be a full mushroom within three or four hours. So you've got to have the camera ticking away at a relatively fast interval for that entire month. The wear and tear on cameras sitting in the incredibly damp atmosphere of our shipping container is hard. It's not exactly the best environment for photographic gear.
Dunne: Catherine, fungi are sort of having a moment right now. You've been a part of this. You've made films and worked with the legendary David Attenborough on "Planet Earth." All of a sudden it's like people are starting to realize, and just scratching the surface of, how vital mushrooms are. You teed this up at the beginning, but talk more about it. Mushrooms used to be thought of mostly as pizza and salad toppings, and now they're becoming recognized as an integral part of so much of our environment.
Marciniak: That's true. There is definitely a mycological awakening. When we first started doing this, we were a little ripple in the ocean. Now we're riding this wave of people's interest in mushrooms and fungi in general. I think it's come about for many different reasons. DNA sequencing has played a major role in being able to identify species we come across in the forest. All of a sudden we realize there are so many more species than we thought. It wasn't that long ago that we thought there were only 250,000 species of fungi on the planet. Now the estimates range from 2 million to 5 million, potentially up to 11 million, and only about 155,000 of those have been identified. The sense of discovery is really there for people going out into the forest. I also think that people realizing mushrooms are fantastic food has led to more home cultivation, which has brought families along on the mushroom ride. But I also think it's partly because we've all come to realize that without fungi, forests wouldn't grow and plants wouldn't grow. Mycelium stores a tremendous amount of carbon. Without fungi, we'd be walking around under piles of leaves and animal remains and wood that would take millions of years to decompose. And without fungi, we'd have less rain, because their spores end up in the atmosphere and act as little rainmakers. There's been this realization that fungi are an incredibly important organism. Fauna, flora and fungi go hand in hand, and without each other, we would not exist. I think that's really the biggest thing behind this awakening.
Dunne: He's Steven Axford, and she is Catherine Marciniak. They are the film producers for "Follow the Rain," which will be screened at the Eugene Art House on April 12. We really appreciate both of your time.
Both: Thanks so much. Thank you, Michael.
Dunne: That's the show for today. All episodes of Oregon on the Record are available as a podcast at KLCC.org. Tomorrow on the show, a discussion with Oregon Speaker of the House Julie Fahey about the short legislative session results. We also talk with an Oregonian personal finance reporter about how tariffs are impacting Oregon consumers and businesses. I'm Michael Dunne, host of Oregon on the Record. Thanks for listening.
