The Wild Texas Film Tour has been making its way across the Lone Star State, and this Thursday, it’s coming to Aggieland.
The tour is a series composed of six short films covering Texas wildlife and conservation such as a veteran who found solace through hunting and the return of the desert bighorn in West Texas. The tour started in Dallas on Jan. 15 and will end on March 1 in Corpus Christi. 
Katy Baldock, an associate producer of the Wild Texas Film Tour and Class of 2017, said the films will be about adventure, wildlife and conservation. 
“It’s multiple short films in a program with speakers, so we’ll show one short film and then it will be a speaker Q&A with someone who was involved with making the film or someone who was a character in the film, and then we’ll show another,” Baldock said.
Hillary Pierce, a producer of the tour, said their team tried to do a mix of both major cities and smaller towns to have a broad base of viewers who may be interested in the topics covered by the films.
“We actually started to come back to a lot of the venues that worked really well the first time,” Pierce said. “We tried to do a mix of getting the major metropolitan areas like Houston, San Antonio, Austin and Dallas while also going to smaller places [like Marfa and Nacogdoches].”
The films help showcase positive stories about wildlife and conservation efforts conducted in Texas, according to Pierce.
“It’s about bringing positive conservation stories to urban audiences and to some of the people where this conservation work in being done in their backyard and in some cases they don’t even realize it, ” Pierce said.
Pierce said it was important to highlight people who work in conservation and the volunteers who offer their support — as is the case in the desert bighorn film. 
“There are groups like Stewards of the Wild, which is a young professionals organization that’s affiliated with Texas Parks and Wildlife foundation,” Pierce said. “They provided a lot of the hands-on, folks on the ground for these desert bighorn relocation projects.”
Ben Masters, wildlife filmmaker and Class of 2012, said the event is a great opportunity to watch films about Texas wildlife and interact with people involved in conservation.
Four of the six films were made by Masters. He said they varied in the amount of production time each took, but he shot them across the state of Texas.
“They involve a lot of different stuff,” Masters said. “One of them is the hunting film, one of them is the wildlife reintroduction… there’s something for everybody.”
Austin Alvarado, Class of 2014, is starring in one of the films and was also in the recent full-length documentary, “The River and The Wall.” Alvarado will be attending the tour stop in College Station. 
“It’s a bunch of Aggies taking over wildlife film making,” Masters said. 
Thursday’s screening will take place in Rudder Theatre at 7 p.m. Tickets and additional tour dates are available online at WildFilmTour.com
Editor’s Note: Katy Baldock is a former social media editor for The Battalion