Fahad Ahmed
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Ryan Rakes is an award-winning director, editor, and VFX designer, and a long-term vegan strength athlete and trainer. Ironbound, his feature documentary, follows elite plant-based athletes who are rewriting the rules of human performance, a film he has shot and carried entirely on his own across the US, Canada, and Europe for more than a year.
An award-winning editor and long-term vegan athlete spends a year alone on three continents to prove a point about what plants can build.
For more than a year, Ryan Rakes has been a one-man film crew with a passport. Alone, he has carried cinema cameras across the US, Canada, and Europe, chasing a specific kind of subject: vegans who deadlift, press, and pose at an elite level. He shot all of it himself. He is producing all of it himself. And he is doing it, in large part, to settle an argument.
It is an argument he has lived on both sides of a camera. By trade, Rakes is an award-winning director, editor, and VFX and motion-graphics designer, the kind of post-production craftsman brands like Nike and LEGO hire, with a resume that runs into prestige television: Orange Is the New Black, The Americans, Da 5 Bloods, Harriet, Fosse/Verdon. His signature is the finish, the motion graphics, the cinematic color, the sound design, the polish that makes short-form work feel like cinema. By conviction, he is a long-term vegan, a strength athlete, and a personal trainer. For years those were two separate lives. Ironbound is where he finally put them in the same frame. "I decided to merge my passions for weightlifting and storytelling," he says.
The mission is blunt. Ironbound follows elite vegan strength and physique athletes to, in his words, "smash the persistent myth that you need to consume animal products to build elite, world-class muscle, power, and muscular endurance." He wants to show that a plant-based diet can fuel elite strength while staying "a more ethical and sustainable choice." Even the title carries the double life. The athletes are "bound to the heavy iron weights by choice and discipline," he says, and the film reflects "our ironclad ethical boundary to live a life free of animal exploitation." Iron as weight, iron as principle.
The maximalist and his mountain
Conviction on that scale produces footage on that scale. A year of solo shooting has left Rakes with a post-production problem the size of the shoot: around 40 long-form multi-cam interviews, each running thirty minutes to an hour, plus an ocean of training and competition B-roll. He is honest about the toll it takes on one person. After a year behind the camera, "it is easy for me to forget the specific details of what every single athlete said," he says, and "the process of logging and organizing everything is a massive bottleneck." The film he wants is buried inside a mountain of media only he has ever seen, and he is doing this alongside full-time work.
Where the assistant comes in
That tedious middle is where he has started leaning on Eddie, an AI assistant editor. He is candid that he is early with it, just experimenting, but it already takes the ingestion off his hands. Eddie transcribes, tags, and logs the footage into what he calls "clear cliff notes to skim through," so he can jog his memory and find a soundbite "without scrubbing through forty hours of talking heads." It has also been quick at first structural outlines, and at helping him pump out the short-form promos that keep the @projectironbound account alive between shoots. "It acts like a virtual assistant editor that takes over the tedious tasks I do not want to deal with," he says. "Since I am essentially a one-man-band, and I also work full time, Eddie is a massive time saver."
What it does not touch is the part he trained a whole career for. He uses the rough cuts and the logging to refamiliarize himself with the footage, then does the real work himself: "finding the emotional rhythm of the story, and dialing in the MGFX, cinematic color grading, and sound design." The assistant clears the desk. The filmmaker still makes the film.
What he is really after
Strip away the gear and the mileage and Ironbound is an argument made in muscle and pixels: that discipline and ethics are not opposites, that a person can be bound to the iron and bound by principle at once, and be stronger for both. Rakes spent years proving it in his own training, under his own barbell. Now, one interview and one continent at a time, he is building the film that lets his athletes prove it too.
About
Ryan Rakes is an award-winning director, videographer, editor, VFX supervisor, and motion-graphics designer, and a vegan strength athlete and personal trainer. His commercial and post work spans brands including Nike, LEGO, and Samsung, with credits on film and television including Orange Is the New Black, The Americans, Da 5 Bloods, and Harriet. His feature documentary Ironbound follows elite vegan athletes across the US, Canada, and Europe. Find him at ryanrakes.com, on Instagram and IMDb, and follow the film at @projectironbound.