Going Extremes

Professional Camcorders Capture “Survivorman” Adventures

Living under a scorching sun on Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula amidst snakes, scorpions and other creepy crawlers. Sleeping on a sheet of ice and snow in minus 13-degree Fahrenheit weather in the Canadian Antic. These are not likely your typical getaways.But for Canadian producer and filmmaker Les Stroud, undertaking extreme environments and living conditions for seven days at a time is the norm on The Discovery Channel’s hit series “Survivorman.” And during the show’s first season, Stroud captured his adventures using two of Sony’s DSRPD 170 professional camcorders.

“Survivorman” depicts how a person might survive in a remote location, with no food and no supplies until being rescued.

Each of the season’s nine episodes features Stroud, dropped-off in the middle of nowhere, left to fend for himself with little more than the clothes on his back, about five cameras and a backpack containing only a few basics like cashews, beef jerky, an energy bar and matches. And, if he’s lucky, there is a piece of uncooked seal-liver.

The season’s 10th episode features a one-hour behind-the-scenes special on the making of the series.

Since Stroud has to be his own camera crew during these challenges, the cameras’s light weight proved to be the right fit, he said.

“The PD 170s were the perfect weight and size for what I had to do,” he said. “I had to carry them on my back, and it was easy to lug the cameras around and set them up. I had to trudge through deep jungles or across the arctic, and the cameras allowed me get where I had to. When I’m out there, I have no food; I have to eat whatever I catch, so I don’t have much energy to carry anything heavier.”

A former rock-and-roller and recording musician in Toronto, Stroud turned into a producer and filmmaker by accident. As a member of an independent band, Stroud needed to make ends meet. So, he got a job helping to produce what was then the latest craze — music videos.

“It was then that I got to see a lot of great cameramen in action,” Stroud said. “I worked on several Canadian award-winning videos, serving as a production assistant for Champagne Motion Pictures in Canada.”

Stroud’s next step took him to Much Music, a Canadian video channel similar to MTV in the United States.

“It was a free-spirited channel with a forward-thinking owner, so I had the opportunity to get my hands dirty in a lot of projects,” he said. “I hung out with the camera guys and started working and learning with Sony Betacam camcorders. My schooling was more on-the-job learning while I was trying to be a rock-and-roller. But I found I had a real affinity for producing, and working with visual elements.”

After eight years, at 25, Stroud decided to pull out of the industry and for the next 10 years became an outdoor adventurer — living in a canoe, learning survival techniques, teaching white-water canoeing, kayaking, hiking all over Canada — and loving it.

But he still didn’t imagine he would one day be known as “survivorman” to people around the world.

Besides the Costa Rican rainforest and the Canadian Arctic, other “Survivorman” locations have included the Sonora Desert in Arizona, the Georgian swamp in the Altamaha River Basin, Canadian Boreal Forest, the Canadian Rockies, Utah’s canyonland, Northern Ontario and the Caribbean Sea.

And through all this, Stroud said the Sony cameras captured beautiful images.

“I have found that mixing and matching cameras is deadly,” he said. “I chose to work exclusively with Sony equipment because I knew all the white balancing would match once I got into the editing suite — meaning all the cameras would handle colors and lighting the same way. The way the PD170s handle white balancing is excellent.”

Before “Survivorman,” Stroud spent a year living in the wilderness in Northern Canada on his honeymoon with his wife.

“I thought this would make a killer documentary, so I took a camera and recorded the entire year,” he said.

But to make this documentary, Stroud also had to learn the new technology that had emerged during his canoe life — non-linear editing, or editing video on a computer versus using several analog tape decks to edit.

Editing his own documentary “Snow Shoes and Solitude,” which won several awards in Canada, rekindled Stroud’s love of film-making, working with cameras and being in the outdoors. The documentary aired on The Outdoor Life Network in Canada.

Then something big happened, which launched Stroud in the United States — director Mark Burnett’s “Survivor,” a reality series featuring contestants in a remote location competing to survive, hit television in 2000. Stroud, known as “the guy who lived in the wilderness with his wife,” was called in to several radio stations to talk about his real survivor experience.

Always up for a challenge, Stroud wanted to produce a movie about survival — but he didn’t want to do a structured film. He wanted to go out, survive and record it all on his own. So he pitched the show to The Discovery Channel in his own country.

After two pilot episodes, which were recorded in a forest landscape near the Albany River in Northern Ontario, Stroud started recording episodes for “Survivorman — Season 1.” The series is now airing on The Discovery Channel and The Science Channel in the United States, the Outdoor Life Network in Canada, and The Discovery Channel in various parts of the world.

To produce a broadcast quality show, Stroud also had to have great sound, he said, which was made possible by the XLR input on the Sony cameras.
“Sound is one of the key things of the show,” he said. `And having beautiful audio is vital to being able to put something on TV.”

First, Stroud used a lavalier microphone, a small microphone that can be attached to a speaker’s lapel. Then he used the camera’s SLR input to get the audio into the camera.

“The professional XLR connection is a strong, high-quality audio connection. The PD170 has a good microphone system. And because it has an XLR input, it also gives me the option to separate the microphone from the camera.”

Stroud recorded 24 hours-a-day, seven days-a-week, and slept for about two hours each night.
“The cameras performed beautifully in low-light during the early morning,” he said.
Overall, he said the PD170 camera is easy-to-use and delivers great images and sound.
Pleased with the results of Sony products, Stroud has chosen to record the next season of “Survivorman” in high definition with Sony’s HVR-Z1U HDV professional camcorders. The show is set to air beginning February.


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