By Daniel Frankel, September 25, 2007
In a business overrun by so-called multi-hyphenates, Les Stroud touts perhaps the most unique blend of skill sets. Six years ago, Discovery Channel Canada was perhaps the first to grasp the potential of this unusual resume when the former rock-video-maker-turned-wilderness-adventure-guide delivered his pitch for a new breed of nature series. “I made a complete cold call,” recalls Stroud, who, like everyone else at the time, was mystified by the success of the CBS reality hit Survivor. “I told them, ‘You’ve got a filmmaker and a survival instructor, and you won’t find that anywhere else. I’ll survive alone in the wilderness, and I’ll film the whole thing myself with a bunch of cameras.”
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Stroud has endured frigid location work for numerous Survivorman episodes, including stints in the Canadian Rockies and the Arctic. (Photo by Laura Bombier)
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Stroud’s pitch made an impression, and the Ontario native soon produced two specials for the Canadian cable outlet—in which he positioned himself alone, smack-dab in the middle of Mother Nature’s wrath for seven days, equipped only with his trademark multi-tool and harmonica, along with about 50 lb. of camera equipment.
Those two specials would develop into the regular one-hour series Survivorman, which has propelled Stroud, who turns 45 in October, onto the cusp of global media stardom.
DV caught up with Stroud in late July, as he was making publicity rounds to trumpet what was about to be a notable couple of weeks. Starting July 29, he was set to host the 20th anniversary installment of the Discovery Channel’s iconic Shark Week franchise—about as big a gig as one can enjoy in the global cable network’s universe. (It went well, too, with viewer levels up a whopping 40 percent this year.)
Stroud was also touting season two of Survivorman, which premiered Aug. 10 in the U.S. on Discovery with the digital filmmaker running out of gas in the middle of Africa’s Kalahari Desert. (Other second-season adventures include a canoe trip in the Amazon, dog sledding through frigid Labrador, a contrived hot-air-balloon crash in the South African plains and a simulated plane crash in northern Ontario.)
Just back from the Alaskan wild and set to soon strand himself in the South Pacific, Stroud was in the midst of going back into survival mode, and time was short. Surprisingly, however, access to him to discuss the task of digitally capturing his harrowing survival adventures was easy to get. Indeed, one can only answer so many questions about eating scorpions and what his fail-safe procedures are (he freely admits to carrying a satellite phone in case things get really bad out there, but he’s otherwise isolated from his safety crew).
What folks often miss is that he’s also a filmmaker.
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Trekking across the Entabeni Game Reserve in South Africa with the Sony HDR-HC3—one of five cameras in Stroud’s kit. (Laura Bombier)
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“I’m supposed to be out there surviving—but 60 percent of my time is spent changing batteries, cleaning lenses and setting up camera angles,” Stroud says, with a hint of indignity one might feel when a proud trade is so often overlooked.
He’s also a musician—besides adding his harmonica to the Survivorman soundtrack, he composed the show’s score himself.
“Originally, I was a rock-’n’-roller,” notes Stroud, who upon graduating from Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, worked as a music video producer for Canadian cabler MuchMusic, while writing songs for his band, New Regime.
“I would play around in the editing room at night, and that got me into filmmaking,” he explains. “I found that I had an affinity for things visual and that I enjoyed it.”
On a canoe trip in northeastern Ontario in 1987, Stroud found yet another affinity. He soon switched career trails, opening his own river-excursion company. A relationship with a photographer and fellow wilderness enthusiast, Sue Jamison, burgeoned right along with his bond to the outdoors; by 1994, Stroud and Jamison were on a year-long primitive-living honeymoon in Ontario’s remote Wabakimi region, equipped with little more than some Hi-8 camera equipment he’d brought along to capture their adventures. (The footage wound up in a one-hour documentary entitled Snowshoes and Solitude.)
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Stroud gets a close shot inside his shelter with the HDR-HC3, leaving the medium view to a SLIK Compact tripod-mounted Sony HVR-Z1U. (Laura Bombier)
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Upon returning to civilization, Stroud and Jamison settled in Huntsville, Ontario, opening an outdoor instruction outfit and a small film company, Wilderness Spirit Productions. All was quiet until 2000, when Survivor became a big hit, and Stroud got to thinking.
Production of each Survivorman episode starts with Stroud carefully packing five cameras, 45 digital tapes and other filming essentials into two Pelican cases.
“I take out all the foam padding, and I pack everything so that gear becomes padding for other gear,” he explains.
Standard equipment now includes two Sony HVR-Z1Us, which handle the bulk of the footage, as well as a single Sony HDR-HC3. “We wanted to up the ante in terms of quality,” notes Stroud of his recent high-def upgrade. “We saw our shots from the Amazon, and we knew it was the right thing to do. The colors are so vivid and beautiful.”
Also thrown into the Pelican is a smaller Sony DCR-HC96, the profile and infrared capabilities of which make it easy to “prop up and do time lapses,” Stroud explains. A waterproof lipstick cam, the $300 Viosport Adventure Cam H20, always ends up getting plenty of work, too.
Stroud’s apparent allegiance to Sony is more a matter of necessary uniformity than anything else.
“On one of the shows I did, I had a JVC, a Panasonic and a Sony. When we got into the editing suite, it was an absolute nightmare, because all the white balancing was all different,” he explains.
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Kayaking in Alaska with a Pelican case’s worth of gear strapped across the bow. (Laura Bombier)
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Regardless of the brand, Stroud’s equipment always takes a beating in the field—in fact, given the exceptionally Spartan nature of the production, replacing cameras might be one of the show’s few notable expenses.
“Cameras have almost become disposable to me,” he says, noting that his recent Amazon excursion was so rugged and wet, he ended production with only one Sony still working.
With each episode, Stroud says his camerawork gets a little more refined. In the beginning, he explains, he would routinely just set up one camera at a time and end up with a lot of medium shots.
“But I started to challenge myself by using three cameras,” he says, “making one medium, one wide-angle and one for extreme close-ups.”
The term “challenge” is anything but hyperbolic here, as he shuffles hats between filmmaker, narrative host and “guy just trying to survive.”
Fiddling with camera equipment all day often results in poorly built shelters—“It’s often the reason I’m up at 3 a.m. shivering,” he says.
Conversely, the primary task of survival impairs the production process. “After a while, I become too tired to add another camera angle. And my objectivity as a filmmaker goes out the window,” he admits.
Ultimately, Stroud seems to be balancing his aesthetic with a kind of “Les is more” approach to documentary filmmaking. With tapes costing him “10 bucks a shot,” Stroud has no problem with letting multiple cameras roll and forgetting about them for a while. “Most documentaries operate on a ratio of about 20:1,” he explains. “But I tend to shoot 35-40 hours of rate footage for one hour of Survivorman.”
Upon returning to civilization in Ontario, Stroud hunkers down with his production partner, Dave Brady of Cream Productions, and begins the arduous task of editing down 45 digital tapes’ worth of content into an hour-long episode.
Catching anywhere from two to four hours of sleep each night on location, the solitary nature of Stroud’s work doesn’t allow him to catch up on his winks when an episode moves on to the editing bay.
“I definitely supervise the whole editing process,” he notes. “I have to—I’m the only one who knows the story.”
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