Today I’m pleased to announce that Lisa Cooper has joined the lean, mean Beyond Naked filmmaking team as producer. What that means in practice is that Lisa will be a major player in making the film happen, on both a creative and technical level. In addition to typical producer responsibilities, she’ll also be acting as sound recordist, camera assistant, and much more.

“I’m thrilled to be working with Dan on Beyond Naked,” she says. “When I stepped on the scene, this was a ready-made project (title, story, research, website, equipment) and Dan was just three days away from the first shoot. I showed up to hold the boom, and sound. . . speed. . . rolling . . . the adventure began. So far, I can say without hesitation that this is going to be one eye-candy kind of film, and not just the because of the bare-flesh scenes. I had no idea that the Seattle gray could be so damn beautiful. But Dan has a way of making the mundane spectacular.”

Lisa moved to Seattle in 2000 after completing her degree in film, photography and literature at Virginia Commonwealth University. She quickly became part of the Seattle film community by volunteering at the Northwest Film Forum. In 2001, her short film “Kim” was selected to screen at the Bellevue Art Museum Film Festival and at Seattle’s Microcinema Film Festival.

Lisa is also a still photographer who has studied with Mary Ellen Mark. She specializes in pregnancy, family and special occasions.

Lisa recently shot a short documentary about colon cancer, called “Colondar Girl,” after the a friend was diagnosed with cancer. The film focuses on 5 young women who bare their surgical scars in a calendar produced by the ColonClub—an organization founded by a 23-year-old colon cancer survivor who is dedicated to raising awareness about the disease.

In 2006, Lisa was among the top 15 finalists in the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s “Get Screened!” video contest with a film called “Tush.”

She currently divides her time between writing flash fiction and short memoir, and finishing her first narrative screenplay, “Slade Drive.”

I’ll let Lisa have the last word:

“You’re not always sure how the working relationship will pan out until the first piece of equipment is broken and the first few hours of precious footage has crossed-over into the virtual unknown, never to be recovered. Now I know all will be well. We’ve responded to these first minor calamities with a laugh, a quick lament, and a sigh—and are sharing in the excitement of knowing that it’s not real filmmaking until you’ve fucked something up. Initiation over. We’re on our way to making one dern good film.”

Seattle, which practically invented naked bike riding, has in recent years been utterly eclipsed by Portland.

Just one day after this year’s Seattle’s Fremont Solstice Parade attracted a record 500 naked riders, Portland’s responded with the largest naked bike ride the world has ever seen. High estimates reported as many as 13,000, while low estimates put the number closer to 5,000. Regardless, it’s at least 10 times bigger than Seattle was able to muster (albeit the Portlanders rode under cover of darkness).

This was cause for alarm for at least one Portland minister, who posted this sign on a North Portland telephone pole. And it concerns me, too. Because if Seattle can’t field a MUCH larger group of riders next year and show Portland the, um, stuff we’re made of, then what IS this world coming to?

The last time that police tried to stop naked cyclists in the Fremont Solstice Parade was in 1998, when two riders in the Fremont Parade were arrested. Since then, the city police seem to have engaged in a policy of benign neglect, looking the other way when naked riders take to the streets on the Solstice.

But that may be changing. Yesterday, a group of 15 cyclists were stopped by police as they rode into Capitol Hill as part of a World Naked Bike Ride. The cyclists complied with the police request to stop, and no arrests were made. This is a sharp contrast with the WNBR event in Portland, which on June 19th attracted a whopping 13,000 naked riders – with no arrests. In fact, Portland police actually assisted the ride by corking intersections to enable the riders to pass safely.

So the big question on my mind is: what might this mean for next year’s Solstice ride?

Silencedmajority says: “They are ok to ride for the Fremont Solstice Parade because it is expected. This may not have been.”

Last month I had the extraordinary privilege of attending Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School, where the legendary filmmaker told me: “If something is really fascinating, just do it.”

I became fascinated with this signature Seattle event 2003, when I first gathered with  a few dozen other cyclists in my friend Sabine’s basement in Roosevelt, to slap on paint and ride fast across town to crash the parade. It was an exhilarating, scary, transformative experience that I’ll never forget. Since then, the guerilla event has grown to more than 500 riders annually, severely testing the commitment of organizers.

But the biggest test of all, of course, is faced every year by first-time riders who must overcome a deep-rooted fear: being naked in public.

My vision is to make a participatory film in which we go in search of four relatively normal people who have never been naked in public before, and challenge them to ride in the 2011 parade. Will they actually go through with it? What are their biggest fears and where do they originate? In the film we’ll explore these fears through dream sequences, intense conversations, and first-person camera work.

This will not be a journalistic film about the history of the event. Nor will it simply be an event film. This will be an adventure film about how four people transform their fear into action and what happens as a result. If more of us were willing to confront our deepest fears and express ourselves creatively, might the world be a better place?

“I am very suspicious of making the world a better place,” Herzog said. His more modest goal in making films is to provoke “a shift of perspective.” Similarly, my goal in making this film is to take the audience on a journey most will never otherwise take, one that leaves them with a fresh perspective.

And, it will be entertaining. I promise you that.