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Adventure Film 101: Planning Your Story

Emmy-Award-winning filmmaker Michael Brown dishes on how to plan your documentary film, step by step.

For years, I worked on a series of films where the basic premise was: find a sport, find an athlete, find a location. Then, go film, cut out the bad shots, and voila! You had a film. These turned out to be nothing more than glorified home movies and it took me years to figure out how bad this method really is and why the films sucked.

Michael rappelling into a moulin for the Emmy Award winning Global Warming What You Need to Know with Tom Brokaw.(Photo by Nicolas Brown)
I am still in the process of learning that the STORY counts the most.

The following are some examples of great adventures that became bad films. You can see from the people in this list— most are the best of their generation— that these should have been top-notch films but somehow, they weren't. We did win a couple of Emmys this way and a very-few festival honors but on the whole, they all lacked a strong story. They were just 'home videos' of the bigger experience... Read Full Story...

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Thursday, October 22, 2009 in: Adventure Film 101
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Adventure Film 101: The Value of Filmmaking Mistakes

Michael Brown reports from Rwanda where he's documenting the efforts of eye surgeon Geoff Tabin.

Hello from Rwanda.

I’m here with Dr. Geoff Tabin, co-director of the Himalayan Cataract Project, who is performing surgeries to restore eyesight to people with cataracts. 

Just 15 years ago over 800,000 people were murdered here in a tragic mass genocide. Today, there are ten million people on a piece of land the size of Massachusetts. Most of them are very poor and, like many parts of Africa, the real jobs are in either government of foreign aid work. 

Tourism is regaining a foothold and the country’s gorillas are one of its best assets. There is another great potential in the country that has yet to be realized: the people are warm and inviting with a resourceful spirit.

In addition to Tabin, I’m also here with photographer Ace Kvale and author David Relin (“Three Cups of Tea”). 

The goal is to study the economic effects of blindness and the affect of restoring eyesight...
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Friday, August 21, 2009 in: Adventure Film 101
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Adventure Film 101: Risk, Tragedy, and Filmmaking

Michael Brown weighs the risks, rewards, and lessons he's learned shooting, literally, on the edge.

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure." Helen Keller

Tragedy reminds us so well that the adventures we undertake while making films can be dangerous. I used to try to argue the point with our insurance agent that if 40,000 or more people die in car accidents every year in the USA, then how could adventure filmmaking be worse?

Sadly, I was wrong.

We operate in a dangerous world but its fragility is what makes it all the richer.

I’ve lost friends in the mountains and what I’ve taken from those loses is that we owe it to ourselves, and our departed friends, to squeeze everything we can from the time we have. Read Full Story...

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Tuesday, June 23, 2009 in: Adventure Film 101
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Adventure Film 101- Visualization and Chaos: Planning Your Film and Capturing the Moment

In documentary filmmaking, you need a plan, but you also need to observe your subjects and make good, on-the-fly decisions. Here's how.

Style Kayaker at Teva Mountain Games 2008 (Tracy Kosinski)
"Vision is the art of seeing things invisible." - Jonathan Swift
In his book, Film Directing, Shot by Shot, Steven Kats describes a boy lying in the grass looking at toy soldiers. The boy is visualizing his own small movie from as close to their level as he can get and, from his point of view, the action surrounds him. The toy soldiers are no longer miniature; they are life-sized warriors in the heat of battle.

This is visualization, and the first skill to develop in filmmaking: the ability to visualize your film before you shoot a single frame. To an extent, we all have the ability to see ahead, but making this vision into a film is another story.

We put this practice into play at Serac with each of our adventure film schools. In Hollywood they’ll develop elaborate storyboards and go to great lengths to create amazingly stylized and art-directed sets.  For documentary filmmakers, it’s a bit trickier, but the exercise is immensely rewarding and always makes a difference in the finished film.
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Thursday, May 14, 2009 in: Adventure Film 101
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Adventure Film 101: Adventure Sports for Film People?

As a filmmaker, the best rock climbers, kayakers, mountaineers and cavers can be your mentors. Pay attention. You'll make better movies.

One of the best aspects of being a filmmaker is that, through our jobs, we get the opportunity to work with some remarkable people. In the proposal stage of creating a film, we seek out athletes with the strongest reputations and do our best make sure that they are being paid for their skill.

The practical reasons are pretty obvious: You get a better and safer result in the film. The less obvious reason is that some of their skill will rub off on those of us who are mere mortals. You’ll  pick up subtle details of form and attitude just by being close to these people. Watch how they do things, how they approach problems, their attitudes about their sport or profession, and the places they go. What you may not realize, is that these people are often delighted to mentor someone who is new to their sport.

I’ve run the gauntlet when it comes to working with athletes and almost every time, I take some thing positive away from the experience.
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Wednesday, April 08, 2009 in: Adventure Film 101
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Adventure Film 101: Getting Started and Paying Dues

Adventure filmmaker Michael Brown drops us a line from Iceland to talk avalanches, glaciers, and paying dues in the film business (which share quite a few similarities).

Komdu Blessaðurfrom from Iceland Air—and more specifically, their flight from London to Reykjavík. I’m on my way to the outlet glaciers that drain the massive ice caps to work on a film with James Balog and the Extreme Ice Survey.

No matter what the weather does, the glacial ice is a strong indicator of climate; it takes a long time to form and melt these giant ice rivers so they are more reliable than a thermometer to see trends of climate change. James's project is to document and record the state of the glaciers over time. One glacier in particular, the Solheimajokull, is accessible by road so James and his team are able to visit every few months to check their time lapses of the glacier. Other scientists have also been following Solheimajokull and the glacier shrinks every year. 2008 was the largest retreat year yet observed. On March 24, another film about James and his team that I directed photography for will air on NOVA.

I am glad to have come off my time in Switzerland in the correct time zone. I should arrive without suffering jet lag. The rest of the team, coming from Colorado, will need a few days to catch up. 

Two weeks ago, I wrote that I was about to get into a helicopter to film ski patrollers tossing dynamite out of another helicopter in the Alps. Well, I’m alive, and it was quite a ride...
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Tuesday, March 10, 2009 in: Adventure Film 101
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Adventure Film 101: Ep. 1: The First, Best, and Most Lasting Thrill in Filmmaking

In his first blog for Backpacker.com, Emmy-Award winning director Michael Brown drops in from Switzerland to talk about how he got his start in the film industry, and where it's taken him— most recently, jumping a helicopter to film dynamite-triggered avalanches.

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Tuesday, February 17, 2009 in: Adventure Film 101
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