‘TheSpec’ – Adventure is their business article
Published on Saturday, March 17th, 2012, under Media
TheSpec –
Sat 17th March 2012 –
by Meredith MacLeod –
Adventure is their business.
Hamilton company travels the world to produce TV shows.
Lots of people dream of travelling the world but Andre Dupuis and Scott Wilson found a way to turn a globe-trotting adventure into a thriving business.
To boot, they get to be on TV.
The pair, founders of Echo Bay Media based in Hamilton, is the force behind two documentary series that are now broadcast around the world.
They are also part of a burgeoning digital media scene in Hamilton, which includes animation, gaming and web development companies.
Echo Bay’s current series, Descending, visits scuba diving sites around the world, including the Caribbean, the Red Sea and New Zealand. The series is about a third of the way through its first season in Canada on the Roger’s OLN.
Descending comes hard on the heels of Departures, a three-season travelogue of visits to 30 countries on all seven continents. The show has won three Gemini awards and earned a total of 11 nominations.
WHERE TO WATCH Descending airs Sundays at 9 p.m. and is re-aired Saturdays at 8 p.m. Departures airs sporadically on Omni and OLN Episodes of both can be viewed at www.oln.ca
Departures is seen in 52 countries and Echo Bay Media is searching for international distributors for Descending. Fans of Departures send emails daily asking when Descending will be available in their countries.
“We wanted people to feel the excitement of travel and convey that in the show,” Wilson said of Departures. “It’s not just touristy stuff or history. We wanted to film everything. We got sick, we missed airplanes. There’s lots of man versus nature. And there’s some man versus man, too. When you’re living on the road eight months a year with people, there’s bound to be conflict.”
Its appeal lies in both its cinematography and its youthful, wide-eyed wonder.
To get just a sense of that, they finish an episode in Antarctica by claiming a bit of territory with a Three Stooges-type handshake and building a snowman to guard it.
But there are sombre moments, too, including a visit to a memorial site in Rwanda where the skulls of thousands of victims of genocide are displayed. Much of the charm of the show is in the coming of age epiphanies explored in the on-camera reflections of Wilson and his cohost Justin Lukach.
Dupuis, who grew up in Carlisle, is the director of photography and is responsible for the breathtaking scenery shots and documentary-style filmmaking that make viewers feel they are along for the ride. Wilson, a Brantford native, is the face in front of the camera and jumps off high bridges, drinks straight vodka with Russian scientists in Antarctica and ventures through the ruins of Petra in Jordan.
Neither had been outside North America until they began work on Departures. Wilson, an admitted “airplane nerd,” has logged more than 300 flights in a spreadsheet he uses to track his trips.
“We just want to show people that if we can do it, you can do it,” said Wilson. “We’re average guys. We hope to inspire people.”
Wilson, 32, and Dupuis, 31, met while studying digital media at Sheridan College. They worked well together on school projects and decided to form a production company in 2000.
While still in school, Dupuis did some work on the OLN travel show Don’t Forget Your Passport where they worked and first met Ellis Emmett. They immediately caught the travel bug.
So the friends used their student loans to film a demo show in New Zealand along with Ellis Emmett as their adventure guide. Then, fearful of the rejection of their dream, they sat on it for two years and concentrated on building their business in commercials and corporate videos.
When they finally got up the nerve to shop their idea to OLN, the outdoors channel based in Toronto, the results were immediate, even though the website delivers a somewhat discouraging message to those pitching new shows.
“UPS delivered the package at 10:30,” said Wilson. “They called us for a meeting at noon. Within a week, we had the green light and we were shooting in a month.”
OLN, owned by Rogers, committed to funding a season Departures in exchange for exclusive broadcast rights in Canada. Then, after viewing the rough cut of the first episode, the network ordered two more seasons.
On a long plane ride halfway through the third season of Departures, Dupuis said he wanted to try a diving show. OLN was begging the pair to commit to a fourth season of Departures but they wanted to wrap the show on a high note.
“They said to us ‘Whatever you’ve got you want to do next, you come to us first,’” said Wilson. But when they pitched the diving idea, the executives weren’t impressed. Too many underwater shows end up being music playing over pretty images of fish and coral. The executives wanted something like Departures, meaning a lot of Wilson and Lukach sharing their reflections directly with the camera.
But Wilson and Dupuis found microphones they could use underwater to communicate with each other and the viewer. They shot a demo of the show and OLN signed on immediately after seeing it.
Echo Bay is waiting to get a commitment for additional seasons.
“We’ve barely scratched the surface of what is out there,” said Dupuis. “We have the skills now to do deeper dives.”
Echo Bay was initially located in Liberty Village in Toronto. And then everyone, including some producers and editors, were commuting from the Hamilton area. There are 18 people, mostly on contract, working on Descending.
“It just got silly after a while,” said Wilson. So, almost three years ago, they found a spot in Hamilton in a renovated former house at Queen and Main: twice as much space for half the cost of Toronto, he says.
Echo Bay Media also produces TV commercials and corporate work, including a niche with local hospitals, including Hamilton Health Sciences and Joseph Brant.
“That provides a steady source of income that funds our passion projects,” said Wilson.
“For us, success is doing what we really believe in. So we have a small team and we do everything in house.”
The adventures
Scott Wilson and Andre Dupuis know they are experiencing things that few people ever get to do.
The founders of Hamilton’s Echo Bay Media, now producing the dive adventure series Descending, are documenting places rarely explored before. That includes a dive in Iceland to simultaneously touch the continents of North America and Europe.
They’ve swum with sharks, including great whites (the divers were in cages) and in the middle of a feeding frenzy of oceanic black tip sharks.
“There were about 30 of them and we weren’t in cages,” said Wilson, the host of the series. “They move so fast but you’re not on the menu.”
They were tethered by aircraft cables and dangled from the side of the boat to swim in dark waters with the Humboldt squid in Mexico. The squid’s beak can sever a finger and their tentacles are rings of barbs. At the worst, a Humboldt squid can drag a human into the deep.
Several episodes of Descending explore shipwrecks, including a number in the Great Lakes and those around Solomon Islands, which played such a vital role in the Second World War.
There have been close calls, including a plane crash for Wilson off an Indonesian island and getting caught in the tail end of a monsoon while on Sea-Doos off the coast of India.
The making of Descending
In Descending, Wilson opens the series with a monologue about mankind’s impact on the Earth.
“We get one lifetime and one planet. This is all we’ve got. I want to understand what we’ve got. I want to see with my own eyes what we stand to lose.”
The sophomore show has a lot in common with Echo Bay Media’s first travel series, Departures, including the stunning vistas, the spirit of adventure and exploration and ever-present humour. But there are differences. For one, Wilson has a different co-host. Brantford native and high school buddy Justin Lukach was Wilson’s high-energy companion in Departures. In Descending, he’s joined by New Zealander Ellis Emmett, a veteran outdoor adventurer.
For another, where Departures was a bit of a seat-of-their-pants, let’s-see-where-we’ll-head-to-next journey, Descending must be heavily planned to ensure diving visibility is good and that the desired underwater creatures will be present.
Neither Dupuis nor Wilson had any diving experience before Departures. As soon as they dived for an episode in Brazil, Dupuis was hooked. He got his diver’s licence and convinced Wilson to do the same.
Dupuis says filming underwater is much more challenging — affecting everything from the colour spectrum to battery life to his own stamina. The underwater lights and cameras are large and expensive. He’s got to think about the camera’s exposure, his own air supply, the filter he should be using, all while watching out for surrounding, sometimes aggressive, wildlife.
Added to all that is the fact that about 60 feet under, divers begin to feel “nitrogen narcosis,” which is a feeling of intoxication from breathing in tanked air.
“When you’re shooting on land, there’s a lot more time to get the angles you need and deal with problems,” said Dupuis. “On some dives, you might have as little as 12 minutes underwater. It all takes a lot more planning and logistics.”
The cameras shoot so much data, the crew can’t possibly travel with enough hard drives to shoot a season.
So every few weeks, they come home and the show’s editors, many of whom live in the Hamilton area, get to work on putting together episodes while the travelling team heads off to the next destination. Two producers at the company’s Queen and Main headquarters book flights and rental vehicles, find travel guides for remote locations and interpreters where needed, secure work visas and filming permits and handle emergencies that crop up while the crew is on the road.
Surprisingly, while they’ve taken their cameras to some dangerous places, such as Libya, Lebanon and North Korea, they have not faced harassment or intimidation by authorities.
“I wandered the streets of Tripoli at night,” said Wilson. “People were just shocked we were visitors because there are no tourists there.”
