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Documentary director Michael Brown on Mount Kilimanjaro with Mount Meru in the background. Michael Brown with an EX1 camcorder, riding on top of a Land Cruiser during a safari at Lake Manyara Wildlife Refuge in Tanzania. Michael Brown filming near the summit of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, the site of his first Serac sessions. Student Trevor Halpiern and instructor Michael Herbener during the Teva Mountain Games Adventure Film School in Vail, Colorado. The Adventure Film School ventured to Peru to trace the Inca Trail in 2008. |
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On the morning of October 5, 1999, director Michael Brown was at an advanced base camp on the 26,000-foot Shishapangma Mountain, in Tibet. He was feeling good and looking forward to a six-mile hike to a lower camp, where he’d pick up a larger-format camera for the film he was shooting with his lensman, Dave Bridges, about a small cadre of elite climbers, including Alex Lowe and Conrad Anker. “They were walking along the base, trying to find a way to get up a band of ice cliffs,” recalls Brown, “and an avalanche started 5,000 vertical feet above them. It came barreling down and it was just massive, so there was no way they could get out of it.”
Upon hearing the news when he returned to camp, Brown fell to his knees, speechless. After some goading from his producer back home, Brown asked the rest of the crew (including Anker, who had survived) if it was OK to take out his handheld camera, because he wanted to film the survivors in the wake of the disaster. “In the end, the film was the only connection people could have to where they were and what they were doing when [their friends] died,” says Brown, referring to his touching documentary Shishapangma: A Celebration of Life. “It actually turned out to be a really useful thing.”
Instead of dwelling on that tragedy—and many others he’s witnessed during his two decades of adventure filmmaking—Brown uses it as an avenue to address safety in the “classrooms” at his Serac Adventure Film School.
Brown began the program in the fall of 2007, with three students climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania (cameras in tow), and has become a perennially sold-out film school that tackles terrain from the Colorado backcountry to as far afield as the Inca Trail. It attracts a broad range of aspiring filmmakers, who vary in age (sixteen to sixty-five), experience (soccer moms to Hollywood producers), and focus (narrative features to documentaries). The only requirement is that they come with a tenable film proposal and a willingness to learn.
And, for the largely self-taught Brown, learning is key. “I never went to film school,” he says. He got a crash course in the business in 1991 when he went to work on two films with his director-brothers, Gordon and Nicholas, and his father, Roger (who shot the seminal 1963 climbing doc Sentinel: The West Face, featuring Yvon Chouinard and Royal Robbins). One project began going haywire, and his father and brothers took off to that film’s location to intervene. Brown was left on his own to secure shooting permits from the Mexican Embassy for the other film. “I was like, I guess I better get plane tickets and buy film and do all the producing,” he says.
This trial by fire laid a solid foundation for Brown, who has since directed twenty-five films (including the award-winning epic Farther Than the Eye Can See, which follows the first summit of Mount Everest by a blind climber and features the first HD footage of the mountain) while earning more than thirty international film festival awards—not to mention three Emmys (in cinematography for Expedition Earth, 1993; Tsunami Rangers, 1996; and Rivers of the Underworld, 1997).
With all that experience under his belt, Brown has had no problem re-creating a boiler-room environment fraught with real-world obstacles in his school. “The real value of film school is a very strong understanding of storytelling and the narrative process,” he says, but “it’s often taught in a textbook kind of way.” He continues, “The actual act of making a film is much more valuable, because you’re doing it and realizing how challenging a shot might be, and how challenging it is to get a good story line.”
“It’s really hard to do, like running a marathon,” says forty-one-year-old Emeka Ngwube, who was one of Brown’s first three students on Kilimanjaro. Although the Nigerian-born banker vomited when he reached the mountain’s 19,000-foot summit, Ngwube heeded Brown’s advice to take out the camera and got the shots needed to complete his short film (A New Yorker’s Guide to Climbing Mountains). He enjoyed the process so much he enrolled in another Serac school at the 2008 Teva Mountain Games.
The reason? Rather than peering over his students’ shoulders and lecturing them on technique or composition, Brown encourages them to learn from one another (like a real film crew) and make mistakes. “It’s really important to have shots that are out of focus or overexposed and where the audio is bad, because by blowing shots and sequences [the students] feel that sting and learn,” says Brown. “They also learn to make it work even when the material is not perfect.”
Virginia-based filmmaker Anthony Claudia, thirty-four, is a prime example of this. His actors fell through on the last night of the Colorado session (he also hiked the Inca Trail with Brown), so in fewer than thirty-six hours he wrote, filmed, and edited a parody about backcountry etiquette using the video function of his point-and-shoot camera. That film, Welcome to the Backcountry, made it into the New Zealand Mountain Film Festival. And it’s not alone: five other films produced at Serac have made it to festivals, and one even took home a prize.
“The thing about Serac is that you’re not in a classroom, you’re lugging equipment,” says Claudia. “It simulates the real world of film and deadlines, and once you have the film, they’ll help you market it, enter it into festivals, put it online.” Ngwube, for one, was commissioned to film work on an orphanage project in Morocco.
“It was definitely a fun outing,” says world-renowned ski mountaineer Andrew McLean, who organized the tragic Shishapangma exhibition and also attended a private three-day Serac workshop in Colorado. “It wasn’t intended to be a career starter, but you could definitely make it that if you wanted to.” That, in a nutshell, is the beauty of Brown’s approach: it appeals to everyone.
Brown finds the process equally rewarding and hopes to keep the school going long after his legs give out. “I won’t be able to climb Everest forever to make films,” he says. So he is planning at least eight schools next year in locations from a Mount Everest base camp to Bhutan. “When we have our film festival at the end of the school and the students get up to introduce their films and the audience just gets whatever they were trying to accomplish emotionally with the stories, at that moment they’re as happy as can be,” says Brown. “For me to have facilitated that, there’s nothing like it.”
Serac Adventure Film School, from $2,400 (plus expenses) for one-week schools to $7,000 (plus expenses) for three-week schools, www.adventurefilmschool.com.
Serac Adventure Film School, from $2,400 (plus expenses) for one-week schools to $7,000 (plus expenses) for three-week schools, www.adventurefilmschool.com.
Michael Slenske is a writer based in New York. His work has appeared in Best Life, Men’s Journal, the New York Times, and Radar.
Photography credits:
- Courtesy Doerte Pietron
- Courtesy Araceli Segarra
- Courtesy Araceli Segarra
- Courtesy C. J. Carter/Serac Adventure Films
- Courtesy Serac Adventure Film School
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