For the past several months “updating the Reel Water website and blog” has made the to do list on more than one occasion, only to get moved onto another list and constantly pushed down the priority ladder.  The reality is that we have been so busy between field production, development and delivery on projects that even a simple update has been challenging. There are worse problems to have.  Then there is Facebook.  The world’s biggest time suck, I mean networking tool. It has become a more common portal for Reel Water updates and happenings, but somehow it is just not the same as blogging.

There we lots of great behind the scenes stories to blog about over the past few months, but actually capturing the stories was all consuming aside from the odd post here and there.  We will work on that for 2011. Excuses aside, 2010 has been the best year yet at Reel Water. Over the past few years we have grown from a couple making sea kayaking films, to a team of professionals working on a diversity of high end projects.  Looking back in a few years from now, 2010 will certainly stand out as a turning point.  From reaching an audience that we could have never imagined via several highly successful web TV projects with Fitz Cahall to a stream of unique opportunities with National Geographic, it has been a year to remember.  In no particular order of importance, here are a few of the things that stand out from 2010.

THE SEA TO SKY CABLE CAM TAKES OFF

Back in late 2007 we began playing around with the idea of a cable cam.  Matt Maddaloni who was working for Zip Trek eco tours scored some old 3/4″ cable and we decided to try the human version while shooting for 49 Megawatts.  It worked exceptionally well, but it was heavy and hard to get into locations that we wanted to shoot.  So in 2009 we created a remote operated version that has been a work in progress ever since.  We used it heavily in 2009 for the production of the Season and also the Nat Geo Amazing series.  We learned a ton from those projects, kept refining the system and 2010 became the magical year where the system went to work for live events, doc work and television.  We went from spending an entire day rigging to a matter of hours and from playing around in our backyard to flying over big crowds.

The latest demo reel which includes the very best shots over the past year or so.

WORKING WITH THE PHANTOM GOLD

This was an opportunity that all camera geeks dream of.  Kevin Rigney, Tim Loubier and I had the opportunity to go out and shoot on a Phantom Gold complete with a set of Zeiss primes and the highly coveted Angenieux zooms.  Essentially we had 48 hours to come up with as many different locations, athletes and ideas as we could muster and about the same amount of time to shoot it.  Of course we dreamed up a list that would have taken us weeks to shoot, but we managed to pull off an incredible amount of shooting over the course of 2 days. While this was organized primarily to build a library high speed stock, we also decided to cut a short piece for the film festival circuit. Edited by Tim Loubier, “Seconds” was a finalist at the Banff Mountain Film Festival in November.

Seconds…a five minute short that is really only about 30 seconds in real time.

KAMCHATKA…A DREAM COME TRUE

The Kamchatka Project was an expedition that was several years in the making and perhaps the biggest highlight of 2010 for me.  Kamchatka is considered one of the last truly wild places left on Earth and is home to around a quarter of the world’s wild salmon population.  Getting to Russia’s far east required flying across 20 time zones and then the only way around the 600-mile long peninsula was Soviet era MI-8 helicopters.  Add in the largest concentration of brown bears in the world, uncharted class 5 whitewater and active volcanoes and pretty quickly the equation equals “the trip of a lifetime”. It was a project that had an incredible web woven between science, adventure and media. The exploration components were mind blowing and the opportunity to be shooting for National Geographic was a dream come true. Here are a handful of photos, but check out the Kamchatka Project website for more details on what we accomplished.

SHOOTING STILLS FOR OUTDOOR RESEARCH

While I have slowly migrated away from photography over the past 10 years, it was where my roots in the media world began.  It is where I learned the basics of composition, exposure, lighting and most importantly when I first discovered how hard it was to actually get into the locations I wanted to shoot.  While I prefer to work with video cameras, still photography has a simple clean feel that is unrivaled. Outdoor Researchgave me the opportunity the snap some stills with the 5d Mark II this year and I had a blast.  Between the climbing and sea kayaking assignments I managed to capture some decent images.  The adventure involved in getting these shots was on par with anything we did all year.

 

NAT GEO LIVE SPEAKING SERIES

Last year at the Banff Mountain Film Festival I met Greg McGruder who is the head of the NG Live speaking series at National Geographic headquarters in Washington DC.  I pitched him the idea of a humorous, light and fun take on what it is like to be an adventure filmmaker.  I constantly get asked if I “miss being a part of the action as a filmmaker”.  The reality is that there is just as much adventure in the filmmaking itself.  There are an untold number of epics that take place to actual achieve any give shot and that has always been an attraction for me.  Well at least it makes for good stories.  People love hearing about some of the extremes we will go through to film certain sports or locations.  This talk for NG Live came right of the heels of the Kamchatka expedition and I was beyond stoked to have a sell out crowd of over 400 people.  Here is a short post from one of the NG staff attending.

INSTRUCTIONAL WEB SERIES

Reel Water had the opportunity to produce two different instructional web TV series this year, which saw widespread distribution through Canoe and Kayak and Backcountry magazines respectively.  The first project was a three part series on backcountry ski technique and safety while the second was a three part series on fundamental sea kayaking skills.  In both of these projects we aimed to bring high production value to instructional content online.  Super fun projects and I learned how bad some of my technique has become from spending too much time behind the camera.  Both projects dovetailed in with editorial in the mags.  Here is a link to the one of the ski vids hosted by Backcountry.  Below is one the vids from the sea kayaking series.

STARTING PRODUCTION ON THE SEASON 2

In early 2010 we launched the Season web TV series with Fitz Cahall of the Dirtbag Diaries.  It was a 22-episode series following 5 athletes over the course of a single season.  Our existing advertisers were so excited about the outcome of this project, it rolled into a Season 2.  In some ways it almost felt like we never stopped.  As soon as the last episode of the first project aired, we were already spinning of gears on the next round of stories.  This fall we worked extensively with boulderer Thomasina Pidgeon and mountain bikers Kevin Landry and Jeremy Norris.  This winter we will start work with skier Greg Hill who just completed the 2 million vertical feet miracle and fly fisherman Ryan Peterson who we worked with in Kamchatka.  While we will be following a similar format to the first Season, it’s a whole new era of stories and the amount of time we are spending on production has increased significantly as well.

[caption id="attachment_405" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Kevin Landry catching some air before with a dusting of snow late fall."][/caption]

So all that said, 2011 is stacking up to be another amazing year for Reel Water.  We will keep you posted on how it all goes.   If you have not seen it already here is our 2010 demo reel.  A select look at some of the projects above and some others that were equally as fun and important.  Happy New Year everyone from the entire team at Reel Water!

 

Last summer we had an impressive run of shoots for the Nat Geo Amazing TV series that begins airing in a couple weeks. It is pretty ironic that we are off to Kamchatka right now on another National Geographic project and will miss seeing a lot of these shows live. I’m excited to see how they integrated a number of our short stories in this series that they describe as documenting our wacky world.  The Nat Geo Amazing site is expanding by the day and if you cruise around you will notice that we are included as field producers and contributors of stock footage in many of these episodes.

Reel Water Productions produced a total of 7 shorts for this series. It started with a piece on Matt Maddaloni free soloing Young Blood above a giant net. Then we filmed Robin Avery walk a several hundred foot high line between towers 3 and 4 of the Stewamus Chief. Next we shot a sea kayaking expedition to the Butze Tidal rapids just outside Prince Rupert, British Columbia. We then spent 3 days up at the Ashlu River doing some amazing stuff with the cable cam before finishing the summer out with a great trio of mountain bikers on some of the local trails here in Squamish.  Perhaps the most intense shoot was working with three local base jumpers and Randy Schultz’s flying his winsuit from the top of the Chief.  Over the winter we had the opportunity to shoot some ice climbing with John Ferneaux in Marble Canyon.  Everyone of these stories was a team effort, with 2-4 cameras, lots of rigging and some pretty epic days.  Most of the shoots involved the Sea to Sky Cam and we worked on both the Sony EX and RED platforms.  The series begins airing on July 9th and there will be a new episode every Friday for 10 weeks.

Paul Stevens, Chad Hendron and James Mcskimming

Eric Shertzel drops into the triple on the Ashlu.

Robin Avery hundred of feet off the deck

Matt Maddaloni soloing above a giant net.

It has been an amazing year indeed.  Fitz Cahall and I embarked on two seperate web TV projects and along the way made some incredible friends.  Working with athletes across different sports, seeing their motivations and goals and getting to know these souls has been rewarding and inspiring.  I just wrapped up the post production on our latest creation called Tracing the Edge on the cusp of a big expedition myself.  Having gotten to know Colin Haley, Krissy Moehl and Gerry Lopez a little bit through this project, it is hard not to feed off their drive and energy in my own endeavors.  Their is passion in there stories and I hope Fitz and I are able to give you a sense of just how amazing these individuals are.  The series will unfold in the late summer, but cruise on over to Patagonia’s Tin Shed for their current collection of stories.  Check out the One Percent for The Planet video by the boys at Felt Soul, my favorite in this current collection.

 

I think is was late February when I was on a conference call with the folks from In Focus Asia.  National Geographic had just connected me with Dean Johnson (Johno) in regards to the Kamchatka Project and we were discussing some ideas and logistics regarding the tv show they would be shooting for NGT.  As the conversation closed Johno asked me what we were up to and I said we just got back from shooting this ice climbing route called “Icy BC”.  He was keen to see some footage, so I sent him over a link to the demo reel for the Sea To Sky Cam.  I think within a few minutes, I got an email back asking if I wanted to come to Taiwan to shoot cable cam for a documentary that they were working on for Taiwan Public Television.  It was the last thing I expected to be doing with the cable cam, but a perfect application.  I spent the next few days with Matt trying to lock in schedules, budgets and sort plane tickets and excess baggage fees.  It seemed pretty reasonable to get the whole system checked with just a total of 6 pieces of luggage.  Matt kept asking me where exactly we were going and I kept telling him, “A 3000 year old ancient cypress high in the mountains of Taiwan that the Smangus tribe calls home.”  We were both curious for sure.  Never would we have guessed that the cable cam would meet the Asian doc market, but sometimes light simple and effective techniques in adventure film cross apply to the doc market perfectly.

After arriving in Taipai, we quickly made our way up into the mountains to hook up with Johno and the rest of the production team.  Within a few hours of leaving the capitalist mecca of Taiwan, we were on a winding mountain road overlooking lush forests.  It was a view of Taiwan I would have never expected.  Full blown rivers, rugged mountain landscapes and undeveloped wilderness.  Then we arrived at the Smangus village.  Truly a magical oasis in the heart of the mountains.  The demeanor of the people had the overwhelming feeling of content.  This was a place I would have never imagined existed inside of Taiwan.

Our main role here was to shoot a series of cable cam shots over three days.  About 10 years ago when the tribe was suffering from most of the people moving out of root vegetable farming for mainstream jobs in Taipai, some of the tribal elders made an amzing discovery.  While they were out on a hunting mission, they discovered a groove of ancient Cypress trees that would have been missed when the Japanese logged these mountains hundreds of years ago.  A group of 3000 year old trees that stood untouched towering over the elders, just 5 kilometers from the village.  It was a discovery that forever changed the tribe.  It ushered in tourism and with that came wealth.  The challenge has been management, but clearly this discovery has allowed the Smangus to thrive.  Our job would be to create dreamy like shots where the cable came came out of the forest understory and revealed the giant trees.  Shots that would allow the story of the discovery to be told with magnificent visuals.  The first step would be getting an anchor up in Ya Ya, the biggest tree in the bunch.

Beyond shooting the cypress forest scenes we did a scenic shot over a small river canyon and a bunch of work in the bamboo forests.  In total we pulled off 4 different cable cam rigs with numerous angles from each rig.  For us it was a challenging shoot in needing to really focus on the scenery more than subject matter transposed onto the scenery.  We are used to following action, moving quick and providing that sense of speed from adventure sports.  This was an entirely dirrent focus, but we were able to offer angles that could never have been achieved any other way.  It was clear that we not only nailed a few shots, but added a level of production value to this doc that could only be achieved by the Sea to Sky Cam.

A huge thanks to Johno of In Focus Asia and Jessie and Selena from Taiwan Public Television.  While I love to go out and get cool shots, being part of genuine story telling always makes it way more fun.  The story of the Smangus will be out as a co-production from In Focus Asia and Taiwan Public Television next year sometime.  I’m hoping they submit to the Banff Mountain Film Festival, as it would be an unique twist on mountain culture and an opportunity for North America to learn about these people.  I would have never guessed that such a place existed in the modern pace and era of Taiwan.

I get asked a lot how I got started in the production business and making films. Are you self-taught, did you go to school, who showed you the ropes, ect… It always seems to be a curiosity that people have with what we do. It is almost like people are looking for that secret recipe for success. A formula that I’m pretty confident is a random combo of events, but may sometimes look similar across successful producers, directors and production companies. To succeed in this business there is some kinda of tincture that includes education, connections, luck and above all an eye for imagery. For me the eye for angles and imagery began with photography. I learned the basics here and then cross applied them to film. I never looked back, but always had a burning desire to shoot stills along the way. I could never give up that simplicity of capturing a moment. So this year I was thrilled to have the opportunity to spend some time behind the 5d shooting stills for Outdoor Research. As a brand ambassador for OR I have been involved with a number of projects over the past year for them, but shooting climbing and sea kayaking has been a top priority. Have a look at their site and various print materials for some of the images I shot this year. Here are some of my favorites.