Comedic web series about nature earns Edmonton pair $50K award

Stephen Robinson and Gordie Lucius admit they don’t know a lot about nature but they are huge fans of it.

“We just loved seeing nature and loved looking at all the beauty it has to offer,” Lucius said. “Some of the facts that we’ve learned have just been like: ‘What? Really? That’s insane! I can’t believe this is an actual thing that an animal does!

“‘Plants do this? Moss? Moss is interesting?!?'”

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Needless to say, they were inspired to create a web series that captured that enthusiasm.

Frick, I Love Nature is a web series that highlights weird and wacky scientific facts and presents them in a humorous way.

“My goal for the show is to talk about nature and get people really excited about nature in kind of like a sneaky way,” Robinson, who’s the director, said. “Talking about nature and the cool things that are going on in nature using comedy I think makes it a lot more digestible for people.”

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Robinson and host Lucius describe the show as “relatively low budget.”

“We use stuffed animals to show off nature facts,” Robinson said. “It’s entertaining.”

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And now, it’s also award-winning.

Frick, I Love Nature recently won $50,000 in production funding to bring their series to life. The show won top prize in Telus STORYHIVE’s 2017 Web Series Edition contest, beating out over 215 other entries.

“It’s a really incredible opportunity,” Robinson said. “They’re just kind of giving us a bunch of money to be creative and talk about nature and do fun, silly stuff on camera. I’m really excited about it.

“As a creator online, it’s really rare when you have an opportunity to actually spend money on things and spend the right amount of time that it takes to make something like this and pay yourself for it,” he added. “So, rather than us having to work part-time jobs to pay for this project, we can just put ourselves fully in it and make something that’s really incredible.”

The pair already has ideas for future topics to cover on their show: odd animal mating habits and how animals live in a tidal setting.

“One really cool fact is that (painted) turtles actually hold their breath for six months throughout winter,” Lucius said. “They actually burrow into the ground and just hold their breath for six months. Isn’t that crazy?”

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The show gives the two Edmonton-based creators a chance to meet experts and learn new, fascinating things about the world we live in.

“You didn’t even think people had jobs like a professional falconer and a person whose only job is to be a professor in the study of moss, which is super cool,” Lucius said. “It’s just cool to see all that specification, to see how much knowledge there actually is about these things.”

For now, you can watch Frick, I Love Nature on YouTube on the STORYHIVE channel or by searching the show’s name. The videos already have thousands of views.

“The response has been really awesome,” Lucius said. “People want to see more and are super excited to learn more facts and to watch more funny dumb bits.”