Sioux Falls documentary premiering in Las Vegas takes filmmaking to new heights

By John Hult, for Pigeon605

The creative team behind Storybuilt Media was handed a tall order in 2020: Build a piece of marketing compelling enough to hold its own against documentary offerings on Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime.

To pull that off, the Sioux Falls filmmakers had to meet their subjects where they were: several hundred feet above the Earth’s surface. 

“Vertical Freedom” tells the story of six people from varying backgrounds who spend their days clad in helmets and strapped to harnesses, attending to the business of repairing and maintaining the communication towers we rely on to keep our cellphones connected and humming.

“They all have this wide variety of work that they do, but from our standpoint, each of them were very interesting as individuals,” said Storybuilt’s Don McLeer. “They’re all adrenaline junkies, but you can’t stereotype them as just that.”

The film, shot across six states and dozens of locations amid an ongoing pandemic, will premiere this week at NATE Unite 2022 in Las Vegas, the annual conference for the Communications Infrastructure Contractors Association. 

By the time it commissioned the film, the association already had a working relationship with some members of Storybuilt, a group of veteran local media professionals whose first high-profile project documented the March 2020 Lighting Up Sioux Falls event. 

Storybuilt’s Doug Lee had produced training and safety videos for the tower professionals group through his own company, Doug Lee Films, but the clients wanted something more substantial for the next project.

“They’d been doing typical industry videos that might talk about a regulation or a safety development,” Lee said. “I’d been doing that for them for years, but they wanted something new and different … something that would fit right in on one of the streaming services.”

The soaring scenery, much of which Lee shot from as high up as the film’s subjects, offered compelling visuals for the project, but the Storybuilt crew knew they’d need more to hold an audience’s attention for a feature-length film.

“We didn’t want to make a 90-minute film about climbing a tower. That would get old real fast,” Lee said.

The “more” there came from the personal tales of the six climbers. There’s the surprisingly grounded family man from Las Vegas who pulls strength from his faith; the Des Moines climber who keeps things light for his crew by singing at 300 feet up; the former drug addict from New Mexico who found sobriety before finding his path as a climber; the foul-mouthed female engineer from Denver who has made her mark on the male-dominated industry; the Texas health nut who treats tower work as a chance to get paid for an endorphin rush; and the Florida surfer who lost his father at a young age and thinks of his children while strapping in for a climb.

Their stories had an impact on the storytellers – one they hope to pass along to viewers. The Storybuilt team has well over a century of collective experience in media, including documentary short films about individuals, but none had gone quite as in-depth as the “Vertical Freedom” project required. Between the hourslong interviews, return visits and on-site shoots, the Sioux Falls crew got to know each of the climbers on a personal level.

“The six people we featured, they’re all my brothers and sisters now,” said Collin McKenzie of Storybuilt, who shot the lion’s share of the drone footage. “The takeaway is that this is a story about people.”

The work and its importance connects them all, McKenzie said. Their lives and locations are different, but they all deal with the implied risk of the profession, as do their families, and they’ve each found ways to manage the rush and unwind from it. The industry is obsessive about safety by necessity, given the inherent dangers of working so high up, and the weight of that reality forges connections between climbers and crew. 

The film in the end is about what it takes to be the kind of person who chooses to climb towers for a living – a job that a good share of us get chills just thinking about.

“The work that they do is literally connecting all of us,” Lee said.

Sioux Falls residents interested in seeing “Vertical Freedom” needn’t travel to the red-carpet premiere in Las Vegas. Storybuilt aims to shop the film around to various streaming services, McKenzie said, but the team also plans for a big-screen showing in Sioux Falls.