For Immediate Release
Hollow Bone Initiative · Press
A Feature-Length Music Documentary
He left one path to find another.
Funded by the initiative taking shape through Stephen Sedmak, Craig Rose and Joda Williams, the feature-length music documentary follows Kenny McCormick IV — and the people who believed before knowing what would come next.
From the room / Live at Camp Mary
Kenny McCormick IV.
Shope Creek Wilderness, Asheville.
Take a seat. Give the song eight minutes.
A performance from the journey behind The Deer Trail
ASHEVILLE, N.C. — The Hollow Bone Initiative announces The Deer Trail, a forthcoming feature-length music documentary following singer-songwriter and pianist Kenny McCormick IV as he leaves an inherited path and learns to trust his own.
Developed with filmmaker Jackson Averett, the film brings together Kenny's personal archive, intimate conversations and substantial live performances recorded across two Camp Mary gatherings at Shope Creek Wilderness, the home of Stephen and Mary Sedmak near Asheville.
Hollow Bone funded the film as an early expression of the initiative's purpose: giving people the support, relationships and resources to create meaningful work before its outcome is known.
The documentary is not simply a record of a retreat. It follows the uncertain stretch between leaving a familiar world and discovering how to live in another — and asks what becomes possible when someone does not have to walk that stretch alone.
Craig Rose and Stephen Sedmak organized two Camp Mary retreat weeks, bringing artists, elders, practitioners, families and business leaders together to experience the work that is informing Hollow Bone's development. The gatherings combined time on the land, personal reflection, creative collaboration and live music.
Across the gatherings, the organizers brought together doctors, therapists, acupuncturists, naturopaths, chiropractors, lightworkers and other holistic practitioners alongside musicians, visual artists and storytellers. Joda Williams contributed her work in whole-person support and helped connect the initiative's philosophy to participants' individual experiences.
Three accomplished business leaders also attended, bringing perspectives on building organizations, leadership and long-term stewardship. They were invited to experience the work firsthand — not simply hear a presentation about it. Fathers and sons participated together, adding an intergenerational dimension to conversations about identity, change and belonging.
The gatherings also served a practical purpose: helping Rose, Sedmak and Williams identify the people who could round out Hollow Bone's founding council and board before its public launch. Council participation, board appointments and the initiative's formal governance remain in development.
Sedmak's earlier career provides an unexpected connection to the music at the center of the film.
He co-founded SRS Labs, the audio-technology company whose work included three-dimensional audio enhancement and virtual surround sound. After his business career, he turned his attention toward consciousness, storytelling and the possibilities that emerge when people experience themselves differently. He often describes his role simply as a doorman.
According to Rose, McCormick's recording work on his album, They Call Me Trinity, has included sessions in a Dolby studio. For the organizers, that creates a full-circle connection: an artist developing his music in an advanced sound environment finds himself welcomed by an elder whose earlier work helped expand how people experience sound.
An earlier chapter was about giving sound more dimension. This chapter is about giving an artist room to become himself.
At Shope Creek, Sedmak's questions extend beyond technology: Can people move beyond inherited fear? Can generosity operate without requiring an immediate return?
His definition of sharing is direct:
"Giving without anticipation of receipt."
Stephen Sedmak
Joda Williams is part of the initiative's developing leadership alongside Sedmak and Rose, bringing experience in integrative health, nutrition, life coaching, botanical practices and retreat development. The founder of Human Potential Initiatives, Williams contributes to participant care, practitioner relationships and the design of programs that translate the philosophy into lived experience.
At Camp Mary, she introduced her developing Conscious Biology framework through presentations and individual sessions. She described the gathering as an opportunity to share work she had been developing, explore participants' questions and receive feedback.
Her contribution broadens the initiative beyond arts patronage or a single retreat experience. It brings attention to the person behind the project: their history, daily life, relationships and need for support.
Sedmak contributes the originating philosophy. Rose connects people, creative projects and resources. Williams helps shape the participant experience and the practical structures needed to support it.
Rose brings more than twenty years of experience in nonprofit work, community building and creative collaboration. During Camp Mary, he described having helped start or served on the boards of more than seven nonprofits over twenty-five years.
Meeting Sedmak brought that experience into conversation with a question both had been exploring from different directions:
How do you give before you get — and build something that can keep giving?
Together, they began shaping a different approach to nonprofit support: one that combines immediate generosity with resources capable of serving future participants. With Williams, they are developing the programs and participant-care dimension alongside that financial and organizational framework.
Rose intends to dedicate 10 percent of each of two companies he is building — NUMINA Holdings and Your Health Is Your Wealth — to the Hollow Bone Initiative. The proposed structure would connect part of the value those businesses may create to the mission from the beginning, rather than waiting until after success to decide whether to give back. No ownership transfer is complete; all arrangements remain subject to final legal, tax and nonprofit documentation.
Hollow Bone calls its shared pool of support the Well.
Cash can help fund work today. Voluntarily contributed ownership, royalties and other creative assets may help sustain work tomorrow. The framework seeks to connect those forms of participation while recognizing that artists, practitioners and the people doing the work must also be supported.
"I see a way that people can pay that forward by putting parts of their creation back in the nonprofit so it can continue to spread."
Craig Rose · Camp Mary Recordings
Giving first does not mean the work has no cost. It means creating a way for its value to keep moving.
For Kenny, the journey is not a straight line from struggle to success.
It moves through faith, family, leaving, returning, spiritual exploration, friendship and years of making music. His collaborations with Rose and artist Patricc Reed, the development of Past N9NE, and his experiences at Shope Creek become chapters in a longer process — not a single weekend that suddenly makes him an artist.
Already an experienced performer under the name Kenny Holland, he describes They Call Me Trinity as his debut album under his birth name, Kenny McCormick IV — a name he shares with his father and the generations before him.
The film follows that movement toward self-definition without suggesting that choosing another path requires rejecting every person, song or memory connected to the old one.
Its live performances allow the audience to experience the work directly. Original songs including "Wishing You Well," "Wrapped in Your Love," "Open Heart" and "The Deer Trail" carry the story alongside the conversations. Another chapter appears through Jimmy Flinders, one of Kenny's alter egos, named for the character he played in the Mormon classic Saturday's Warrior. The album LSD LDS was released under that name, reworking music and memory from the faith tradition Kenny grew up with.
"And that gave me so much and it still does."
During a Camp Mary performance, Kenny thanks Rose for believing in him "without any notion of what that might mean or what that future might hold," before explaining how a melody that began during an early retreat developed over six years into a song he could share with the room.
That moment makes Hollow Bone's purpose tangible: someone receives support, makes something from the experience and carries it outward.
Hollow Bone's approach recognizes artists and visionaries as people who can give a movement an accessible, human expression.
A philosophy can be explained. A song can be experienced. A film can introduce people who might otherwise never meet.
The Deer Trail is an early demonstration of that approach — not a claim that every outcome is already known. The support came first. The work is being made. The next step is to invite an audience into it.
The film is part of Start With I Love You. Its Asheville campaign is called Billy Loves Willie, combining rough-cut screenings, live performances by Kenny and opportunities to participate in Hollow Bone as it moves toward its public launch.
A rough cut of the documentary will be screened during the Billy Loves Willie campaign. The campaign becomes part of the film's continuing process: audiences seeing the journey as it takes shape, hearing the music in person and helping determine what comes next.
Screening dates, venues, release details and participating partners will be announced separately.
The goal is not simply to launch a film or an artist. It is to help make the next artist, the next story and the next act of generosity possible.
The Hollow Bone Initiative is a mission and stewardship framework in development through the work of Stephen Sedmak, Craig Rose and Joda Williams. It explores two central questions: Can we move collective consciousness beyond fear? Can we shift the nature of exchange? Through creative projects, practitioner collaboration, intergenerational learning and a developing model of philanthropic participation, the initiative seeks to support people and build resources that can continue serving others. Shope Creek Wilderness provided the setting for the two Camp Mary gatherings and an important beginning for that work.