New cinematic PSA for volunteer fire service has a Colorado connection

BY JO DAVIS JDAVIS@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM

e lm “Odd Hours, No Pay, Cool Hat” became available on video on demand on July 27, and the lm has a Colorado connection. e lmmakers hope to bring more awareness and volunteers to the re service across the country, including to Je erson County re districts.

“Odd Hours, No Pay, Cool Hat” is a documentary about the 700,000 volunteer re ghters across the U.S. Directors Gary Matoso and Cameron Zohoori said that they knew little about the re service when they started the lm.

“When we originally got brought onto the project, we didn’t know very much about the volunteer re service,” Matoso said. “It was Peter Yoakum, our executive producer, who had this idea to make a lm to raise awareness, to let people just tell the story of the volunteer re service.”

Matoso explained that the original idea for the lm was to choose three re departments, three stories and deep dive into them. However, when they put out a call to the volunteer re departments across the country, the directors got a bit of a surprise.

“We just put out some casting calls and calls for via di erent re department resources to see if people had stories or might want to participate in the lm,” Matoso said. “We got ooded with submissions on that. We had, like 800 submissions come through within a couple of weeks.”

Some submissions even came from the area.

“We did have a couple of Denver submissions and Colorado submissions, for sure,” Matoso said. e directors then discussed a submission that almost made the lm but had to be cut.

“ ere was a small-town department that was in the mountains in Colorado,” co-director Zohoori said.

“It has one major highway that goes through. ey’re just constantly responding to accidents on the road.”

Golden’s submission was one that was cut, but the department couldn’t con rm anything involving the submission.

According to Capt. Will Moorhead, the department was probably submitted by a former re chief.

“Our chief has changed since I think since they started shooting the lm,” Moorhead said. “And we just had a few people change over the last year and a half.” at turnover is part of a nationwide slump in volunteerism. ere’s absolutely a need. ere’s a need to capture and to engage people who have an interest, in our case, an interest in technical rescue.”

“Volunteerism is dropping o all over the country,” Moorhead said. “...

Moorhead said that technical rescue is part of what makes Golden Fire a “special case” when it comes to red departments. e department is a “combination department,” which is a combination of volunteer and paid re ghters and sta . e terrain is also di erent than most departments.