So our Series Produced Bear Grylls Survival School is up from a BAFTA nomination in the children's category. Great show, great team and hopefully a chance for more commissions.
The awards evening is late November and you can see the full list of nominations here:
http://www.bafta.org/children/awards/childrens-awards-nominations-2017#entertainment
Earlier in the year we were lucky enough to Series Direct the latest expedition from explorer Levison Wood - now being broadcast on Ch4. A challenging but awesome experience. Here's some of the reviews:
It’s fair to say, I am not one of life’s more adventurous types. This year, I spent months getting myself into a state of heightened anxiety about going abroad. After all, you can’t get much more remote or undiscovered than Tuscany, right? So I look upon Levison Wood as, essentially, a different species. He looks like me (I mean, he’s younger, more handsome, in better shape, and with a full head of hair, but we have the same number of limbs, noses, eyes etc). But we are cut from wildly different cloth.
Just watching episode one of his new series almost brought me out in a nervous rash. I mean, I know Tuscany was roughing it (the wifi was a bit patchy, and the pool wasn’t even an infinity one) but it turns out that the Caucasus Mountains linking Southern Russia and Iran are a whole different kettle of caviar. They are wild, and remote, and don’t have supermarkets selling chilled prosecco – but geez, Louise, they are beautiful. Not for nothing do locals refer to the area as ‘paradise’.
Levison begins his 2550-mile journey in the town of Mezmay, where he is stripped, part-cooked and beaten with sticks by a man called Rashid. This, it turns out, is an after dinner custom for local men, with Lev’s guide taking him to the bath house for a sauna. Personally I’ll stick with a pint and a game of dominos.
The next day, they set off, through remote, crumbling villages whose population are in seemingly irreversible decline. For all the region’s beauty – and it is simply magnificent – there is a sad desolation to the social problems caused by the young all moving to the cities to pursue their dreams.
These magical lands are also peopled by an unlikely cast of bizarre characters. It’s like the entire Caucus region has been directed by David Lynch. There is the uniformed Cossack who invites Lev and Rashid to a spectacularly alcoholic Sunday lunch, where two rather grumpy-looking secret service officials eye proceedings with distaste. In Ingushetia, there is a jovial government minder with entirely gold teeth, and a heavily-armed mountain man dressed in smart green robes who looks straight out of a Flashman book.
The area is filled with surprises, not least among them Grozny. The capital city was reduced to rubble during the recent war there, and earned the unwanted sobriquet as the world’s most destroyed city. But now, it looks more like Shanghai than Aleppo. Tall skyscrapers covered in dazzling coloured lights stretch into the clouds, while locals gather for festivals in a vast town square. But beneath the glitzy façade, some locals face real poverty.
Then it’s on to Dagestan, perhaps the one place you’d definitely not choose to drop in on as a tourist. The foreign office advises against travelling there “under any circumstances,” thanks to the preponderance of Islamic terrorists in the state. As a rule, I’d say that if you’re visiting a country, and the man at passport control is wearing a balaclava and pointing a gun at you, you probably should have gone to the Costa del Sol.
I may not be about to book myself a return ticket to Dagestan (though, to be fair, I’d rather that than book a single) but I will without doubt be tuning in again. This is a wonderful look at an absolutely extraordinary and utterly unique part of the world, and the characters, towns and landscapes are unlike anything I’ve seen before. It is truly mesmerising. I have only one complaint: Why oh why didn’t they call this series From Russia with Lev?
Following his epic yomps along the Nile, across the Himalayas and from Mexico to Colombia, Levison Wood tackles the Caucasus Mountains, the mighty barrier that separates Russia from Georgia and Azerbaijan between the Black and Caspian seas. It is traditionally a region as volatile as it is spectacular, and Wood starts with what was always going to be one of the trickier bits: visiting the recent battlefields of Chechnya. Andrew Mueller
We had the fortune of traveling to Nepal to take part in the new series of Discovery Channel's Everest Rescue documentary - about those high altitude rescue pilots who spend their climbing season flying helicopters at heights they were never designed for in order to pluck climbers from mountains they, too, weren't designed for.
We're looking forward to the rest of the season in this most epic, brutal, revealing environment.
There are some stories that keep you awake at night - stories that you find yourself right at the heart of. Murders on the Moon is one of them - and ever since UAFMEDIA spent a week shooting contributor stories in the heart of Alaska it remains the project we are most excited about for 2017.
We complete phase one of the edit in the next couple of days - and then will begin gearing up for the return to Alaska in order to shoot the rest of this journalistic tale - which we will be able to talk about in more detail at a later date.
Filmed and edited in a way that celebrates the remoteness and isolation of the Alaskan wilderness - Murders on the Moon will certainly be the documentary to look out for in 2017.
UAFMEDIA have just secured funded development for an exploratory Arctic series with National Geographic - who have pledged to make fewer series than ever before but ensure that they bring Hollywood production values and big names to each and every frame.
An extremely exciting project for UAF to be involved with. More updates to follow as we step onto the cold tundra in search of one of the most epic stories of modern times.
Award-nominated Children's Show
Broadcast have nominated Bear Gryll's Survival School for an award, to be announced later in 2017. The new series is even bigger and better than the first. Excellent kids doing amazing things - learning how to overcome, adapt and unite. A real stunner of a series - culminating with all ten contributors jumping from a hovering helicopter into a freezing Welsh lake.
The usually astute TV reviewer for The Guardian accidentally called our Russell Kane show "poignant" so we'll take it.
A series that was a challenge to make is reaching a surprising number of people both on the BBC's iPlayer and on BBC 2, Sundays at 10:40pm
British comedian Russell Kane has been a revelation - a man of huge patience and wit. This innovative series for the BBC pits smart phone against environment and the only real winner is the audience. A tiny budget but huge ambition is ensuring that this awesome little charm of a series is being sold around the globe and is already being hyped by the BBC public relations teams despite still being in the edit. The 6 part series takes Russell and his internet collaborators across Poland, Italy, Morocco, Norway and Costa Rica in search of survival skills in a truly interactive adventure in which the internet is as much a character as swamp and mountain.
Our most ambitious project yet. 12 feature episodes in 12 days with Bear Grylls for Discovery Asia.
Series Producing across a team of 12 British survival experts alongside almost 200 staff from one of China's largest television companies - Shanghai Media Group. This was a project with some challenges. But viewed by tens of millions throughout the Asian market it was an utterly rewarding one too.
UAFMEDIA had the distinct pleasure of taking part in an emergency last minute shoot for the History Channel. As part of an observational documentary about underwater archaeology in Madagascar the dive crew discovered what is believed to be the lost silver of outrageous buccaneer Captain Kidd.
It made news across the world. At the height of the British elections it was the most read story on the BBC news site. Pictures taken by UAFMEDIA founder Rob Sixsmith appeared in publications across the world.
http://www.history.com/news/has-captain-kidds-treasure-been-found
Discovery Networks International have greenlit development on The Thaw - our brand new factual series alongside co-partners at NERD.
At its heart this is a series about global warming. It tracks a group of explorers and scientists at they head to those new parts of the world only now being exposed through the process of glacial retreat and global warming. It's a perilous world in extremis - survival in -40c, ground breaking discoveries, viruses, reanimated mammoths, frozen battlefields, frozen history.
The Thaw is about the future of mankind as new worlds open up to us. And it is about our past as hidden histories are exposed...