FINDING MICHAEL PRODUCTION.
LONG LOST Spencer Matthews (above) travelled to Mount Everest with a team of experienced climbers and a documentary film crew
B efore you ask, this is not a light- hearted production story about a title character or tritagonist from a series of Disney animated films – there will be no curious and impressionable clownfish or blue hippo tangs with anterograde amnesia. Shine TV’s Finding Michael charts the very real and emotional journey of reality TV star Spencer Matthews ( Made in Chelsea ) as he searches for the remains of his late brother, who summitted Mount Everest in 1999 at the age of 22, but never returned. Of course, making such an intimate, personal and sensitive documentary in some of the world’s harshest conditions requires a lot of thought and preparation. At the same time, it needs to look special. The brief from executive producer Tom Hutchings was for Finding Michael to have a hybrid approach – to look like a cinematic feature but not lose the ‘scratchy ob-doc’ feel. “From the very first time I spoke to Tom, he said: ‘This is a feature doc; it needs to be big and we need to push “What we tried to do on this was maintain a big vision, whether we were up Everest or not”
the envelope of what we’re doing – we want it to look amazing,’” explains DOP Rob Taylor. “We had all those goals, but we had to do it up Mount Everest. I’ve filmed at altitude before; you take the most lightweight camera you can, letting the mountain dictate how you do things. What we tried to do on this is maintain a big vision, whether we were up Everest or not.” That said, the team ‘didn’t scrimp on kit’, and the bulk of the gear for the
RESTING PLACE The ob-doc covers Matthews’ search for the remains of brother Michael (right)
09. MAY 2023
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