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Director/Producer,
Educator and Scientist
Rob Nelson was born in Denver Colorado in 1979. Since then he
did primary schooling in Texas, completed university work in Miami,
Australia, Oregon, Hawaii and Montana. These, mostly academic pursuits,
have taken him to 6 different colleges for classes, and multiple
tropical and subtropical habitats for scientific study.
Teaching has always come naturally for Rob. He has taught 7 semesters
of undergraduate lab classes in introductory biology, ecology and
marine biology. He has also taught classes through Duke
in Costa Rica and worked as a field guide in Hawaii.
Rob works to improve his teaching style and ability to engage the
students. Outside of school, he has worked as a Scuba
Dive master and a Nature
Tour Guide both which compliment his ability to communicate
the wonder of the outdoors with non-scientists. It’s this
ideology that has drawn Rob into wanting to produce documentary
films.
From an early age, Rob has had an interest in video and story telling.
His first short films were pseudo-action hero videos and adventure
videos, a style which has never really left his videos. As an undergraduate
he saved up money and bought his first 3CCD digital video camera
and began shooting wildlife documentaries. He documented first the
stories of the Oregon wildlife while working as a Salmon researcher.
He then documented two trips to Colorado up multiple mountain ridges.
This progressed into making a video for the Army Corp. of Engineers
about Aquatic
Plants in Texas. After moving to Hawaii, he made several
sports-related videos including the UH Swim-team video and a historical
film entitled, “Hawaii’s Swimming Legacy”. While
working in the Biology Department, the University of Hawaii paid
for the production of 12 2-minute long shorts to be played at the
beginning of biology lab classes. Then in June of 2003 Rob began
the filming of “The
Biodiversity of Mexico”, his biggest and most
costly documentary yet. In 2004 Rob, along with crew member Joseph
Coleman documented a bike ride (Cycling
the Last Frontier) from Seattle, WA to Anchorage AK
whereby they raised money for the non-profit organization SEACOLOGY.
Later that year, after defending his masters thesis in Shrimp-Goby
Behavioral Ecology, Rob and Jonas Stenstrom set off to film a documentary
entitled, “Hawaii:
Biodiversity Forgotten,” a bio-adventure documentary
documenting their journey up and over each of the 7 main Hawaiian
islands and across the ocean channels.
Currently, Rob is a student at the Montana
State University Department of Science and Natural History filmmaking.
Future work will entail work with invasive
species, and online
educational documentaries that teachers can use as
educational aids in the classroom.
Find out more:
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