Meet Tyler Wilkinson-Ray | Filmmaker and Photographer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Tyler Wilkinson-Ray and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Tyler, is there something that you feel is most responsible for your success?
I think our focus on storytelling has been the most important factor in the studios success. We primarily work in the outdoor space and when we started, most of the outdoor films were about climbing the highest peak or the doing best trick. The other production studios weren’t really finding and telling interesting stories. It was pure adrenaline filmmaking. To me that gets boring, so we brought a focus on storytelling and my background in anthropology to our filmmaking, which allowed us to find compelling stories and unique ways of telling them. Fortunately, the industry also moved in that direction in general, so our timing was good.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
Where is the all of the above tab instead of other?! Yes, I am creative and artist at first glance, but unless you are independently wealthy, you also have to be good at the business/professional side. That is what so many good creatives lack, but if you can’t pay your bills with your craft, you’ll have to get another job and then spent less time dedicated to you craft which will develop more slowly as a result.

Our focus as a studio is on crafting compelling stories. We help brands, athletes, non-profits bring their stories to live in an impactful way. We’ve used storytelling skills to help clients as wide ranging as Google (now Meta) to the United Nations bring the messages to life.

I was trained as an anthropologist which I think honed my ability to identify interesting stories and approach old ones with a new lens (pun intended).

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
There is very tight knit group of outdoor filmmakers, many of us are affiliated with National Geographic, and I found that community very welcoming and inspiring when I first started. I remember going to my first Telluride MountainFilm and I still had a day job at a law firm, and having people like the legendary National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen take interest in my work, was really motivating. Hearing about the trips they were taking also opened my eyes up to what was possible as a filmmaker and photographer. At the time, I was just shooting on the weekends as a hobby and working a day job, they were all about to embark on trips to places like Antartica and The Congo (both places I’ve ironically since had the opportunity to shoot in). I also go back to these festival every year or so to show my own work, and am continuously blow away by the work of peers. It’s both humbling and inspiring.

Website: www.thewilderstudio.com

Instagram: @tylerwilkinsonray

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-wilkinson-ray-a6522b43

Other: Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/thewilderstudio

Image Credits
George Watts