As the Executive Creative Director of Video at Adobe Studio, Dan Cowles works with a multidisciplinary team of designers, art directors, writers, producers, and more to share inspiring stories about creativity.

For a recent film produced at Adobe, Cowles and his crew followed photojournalist Erik Mathy as he embarked on a solo 20-day bike tour from San Francisco to Tucson, with 40 pounds of camping gear and an odd-format vintage camera in tow. On the 1,200-mile journey tracing the historic Butterfield Overland Mail Route — a now-defunct, 19th-century stagecoach service road that predates the Pony Express — Mathy interviews and photographs a host of locals he meets in various communities along the way: an immigration lawyer, members of indigenous tribes, artists, activists, U.S. Border Patrol agents, and more, using X-Ray film and a set of handmade lenses fashioned from rolled-up dollar bills.

What Cowles initially began as a video short quickly grew into the feature-length documentary, Ride Slow. Take Photos., released in 2020 and spotlighted in this year’s splash page identity for Adobe Premiere Pro, in a fitting nod to the craft of filmmaking that happens in-house at Adobe.

Here, Cowles shares his personal journey into filmmaking, and why the creative endeavor is all about collaboration — not to mention meticulous planning, chance encounters, and plenty of editing.

You’ve been a creative director for more than 20 years. How did you first get into filmmaking and directing?

Before I was a creative director at Adobe, I worked in tech as a data analyst, and also went to film school on the side, working on indie films and various projects. I was also a journalist back in the day, and used to write about film for the Bay Guardian, among other places. I basically had two parallel paths, working as a data analyst by day, and making and writing about films in my off-time and on weekends.

Adobe ended up being one of the best places to be a creative filmmaker in the tech world. I’ve had really great opportunities to meet amazing people and tell stories from a brand perspective through really authentic documentary work, really creative commercial work, and all kinds of stuff. It’s as good as it gets in terms of brand creative filmmaking, so it’s hard to leave.

Was it your background in journalism that led to meeting Erik Mathy?

Actually, I was riding by the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley when I saw this guy with a heavily laden touring bike. I rode up next to him, and we started to chat. By the time we got to the top of the hill, he told me all about his adventure and what he was about to do. I told him I worked at Adobe, and that we’d be interested in filming a short profile on him and his photography.

Director of photography Colin McAuliffe (left) and Cowles (right) film Mathy as he rides along the historic Butterfield Overland Mail Route.

How much of your trip was planned out in advance, and how much was left to chance?

I shot the first couple of days myself, just interviewing Erik at his house and getting to know him. We also hired a crew, and I would fly them to critical junctures along the way, where I thought it would be good to capture. But I drove the entire way to Tucson to go and cover some of the stuff where they couldn’t be there, to get some of the atmosphere. I was the idiot who would be there at 5 a.m. in the dark, when Erik was getting out of his tent [laughs], just to get some of the things that make the piece have a richness that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

There was a conscious effort to really let all the people he meets along the way — the artists and the activists — tell their stories and be the voices of their own experiences.

Tell us about some of the artists you met along the way.

Erik and I both saw this as an opportunity, framed through his journey, to hear stories from the people living in these communities. A lot of them are artists, many of them who are expressing themselves around issues of immigration, migration, and more. There was a conscious effort to really let all the people he meets along the way — the artists and the activists — tell their stories and be the voices of their own experiences.

Did you have a sense, going in, of how the narrative would begin, develop, and end?

Erik’s route was super detailed; he had spreadsheets, maps, and a GPS tracker app that told us where he was. But it definitely evolved organically. A lot of it was also just us driving out on the road, getting ahead of him and setting up for the shot, and sometimes just missing him. It was really about gathering as much material that we could, trying to get these key moments and scenes, and then having enough scenes and interviews to build a story around. The good thing about it was that because it’s a chronological story — his trip was linear and temporal — that became the obvious way to tell the story.

At the time, I didn’t expect it to become a feature film at any stretch; I thought it’d be a five-minute creative profile, but I ended up following him on the trip because I had some time off. I drove along as he rode to Tucson, and for a little more than the price of a short video, we documented the entire project. We had all this footage, and it just lent itself to making a feature-length doc. It was a complete accidental feature film.

In a project like this, so much gets left on the cutting room floor. How important is editing to the overall process of creating a documentary film?

This was a heavy post-production project. We shot a lot of footage and had no idea what the story was going to be until we got into the editing room. We worked with an editor named Julien De Benedictis, and then finished it with Jen Bradwell. When it comes to making docs, the editor is often helping to find the narrative arc in the edit room — you’re relying on your editor a lot to be your co-writer, and Julian and Jen brought a ton to this.

Looking back on the experience, what moments stand out to you the most?

All of the artists and people that we met along the way. To me, this movie is as much about them as it is about Erik. I’m just so excited that two of the artist-activists we met, Jaque Fragua and Lucinda Y Hinojos, are on the splash screen. We took those pictures, but really, it’s their art that’s on it — and that’s pretty cool.