This little sliver of the planet moves us every day, and for nearly 10 years we’ve been discussing ways to tell its stories through video. In the days before YouTube, we even  thought it might be a local TV station. Thankfully we didn’t go too far down that road!

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(Oh, sorry, I’ve gotten ahead of myself? The “we” here is David Eliot, Brett Kosmider, and me, Myles Dannhausen. You can learn more about us individually down below, or by watching the video up above, but right now I want to tell you about why we’re at this little project in the first place.)

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I was born in Door County, careening around Egg Harbor on a beat-up huffy and worn out sneakers, moving to Chicago in 2012 but maintaining my peninsula roots. Brett Kosmider’s attachment to this place came early on in family vacations, and he’s been pulled to this peninsula’s shores ever since, finally moving here in 2015 after many years living a duel city/country existence. And David Eliot was so inspired by the peninsula’s stories it held that he founded a newspaper straight out of college to give people a place to put them.

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As video moved to the web, we saw an opportunity to tell those stories in a whole new way, to a much larger audience. An opportunity to expose millions more people to the beauty of the peninsula and the quality of its people that goes beyond images of lighthouses, fish boils, and cherry pie (don’t get me wrong, we love those, but Door County’s greatest lure comes in it’s people).

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We wanted to tell the stories of the the cooks, the bartenders and the farmers. Of the volunteers who spend hours on a Saturday picking rocks, chopping roots, and cutting brush to make ski and biking trails through the parks. Of the entrepreneurs who take huge risks to pursue a dream or fill a desperate need in the most challenging of business climates. Of the eccentrics that give this place its character, its soul, and that make it different than a hundred other small towns or tourist destinations.

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And now, because of the evolution of video, the web, and the intersection of three paths, we’re finally able to do this.

So we started Peninsula Filmworks, with Brett behind the camera, Myles ferreting out stories, and David driving ideas forward. Our project is a mix of mini-documentary films that we felt we had to tell, supported by sponsors and commissioned videos about Door County businesses and non-profits, and driven by our passion for the Door County peninsula.