To film a hunter
From the get go I’d like to prepare you dear reader for the ‘all over the place’ nature of this story. It starts with two buddies, and the idea to make a standalone hunting short film/episode. By this point I had self-filmed many amateur YouTube productions with some pretty damn good feedback. But self-filming is more than just hard, walking back and forth, filming myself stalking animals with a bow and arrow is patience testing at the very best of times. Add in in voice over and editing and it becomes a time-consuming process. Nether less I wouldn’t change it for the world. But when broached the possibility of having my skilled cameraman buddy Alex as a filming partner I was more than keen to explore the possibility of filming something of more professional quality. So after a few months of trying to organise a trip from opposite ends of the country, we found ourselves walking up a south island valley in search of tahr, just as any hunting adventure begins.
One thing I’d like to get across is the weird things filming pressure will do to a hunter. Suddenly a hunt is more than just time to get away from work, it’s kind of a job. It’s something ive grown used to from filming myself and working in the pest control industry and I certainly wouldn’t say I dislike it; it adds another complicated dimension to the hunt. Being a creative person rather than a math whiz at school, the tension of needing to craft a good story is thrilling and a tremendous motivator during the hunt. So, on the first day, when a younger but mature bull tahr revealed itself above us, I was more than happy to take it down. A scramble to find it after a rushed shot and follow-up shots, and suddenly the job is done, hunting for meat or recreationally the work is over. The hard part is done and dusted. It’s strangely disappointing to be successful. For any lovers of Star Wars out there, George Lucas (the creator of Star Wars) was a massive advocate and user of the ‘hero’s journey’ in his movies. The protagonist needs to go through some trials and tribulations, find out something about themselves and develop as a character before they succeed. Its not supposed to come easy, it doesn’t create a fulfilling experience or very good entertainment most of the time. It can be hard to recreate Real life situations into a story, Sometimes the way things play out in real life will be more ridiculous and wilder than anything anybody could come up with. I couldn’t help but get the twinge of something being wrong with the way that I was going about thinking about the tahr I had just shot. I’m not a meat hunter nor a trophy hunter, both of those are nice bonuses but ultimately, I hunt to experience the hunt. Doing it to film content certainly has an air of dishonesty. Could I have it all wrong? Why am I doing this? Having been a big consumer of hunting and adventure films I know I needed to prove something, especially to myself. So my hunt was not over yet.
Having camped by a glacial river and endured a day of rain and clag we set out to find a bull that we had spotted, perched high on the valley wall the day before. Thick white clouds were threatening our stalk. The bull had been relocated further down the mountainside. This was it, to tell our story we had to shoot this bull. Few stalks have been more arduous and involved as much sitting and waiting as this one. The bull bedded facing us, although it was still 900m away, I knew if we weren’t very careful, wed be spotted, and he’d disappear into the bluffs. Periodically he began to fed, affording us a few hundred yards at a time. Stalks like these seem to crawl by at the start. The wind was whipping the tussock around me. Waterfalls tumbled to the ground and ran past my feet as I crept forward. Hiding behind glacier carved boulders and peaking over a massive washout of scree and rock. The bull was feeding once more, a meter away from being out of sight behind the foreground before me. Suddenly it was a race, the bull had disappeared and hunter and camera man power hiked our way to a shooting platform. I slipped my pack off and lay my rifle Infront of me. When the bull presented himself, I was ready, squeezing off shot and watching him tumble down a scree slope.
Ive been to a lot of beautiful places in my travels, but beneath those glaciers, with the hacked and chiselled rubble of the mountains spread out like a giant sandpit by eons of glacial turmoil. That is what I wanted to show. The mountains. Rock and ice. The wind running through the coat of a mighty alpine beast. As I butchered it, neatly cutting away chunks of meat and stowing them in my pack I tried to accurately materialize what I was thinking. I’d write the script for the film later on in a riverside campsite being devoured by sandflies but in that moment all I could think about was how much I loved to tell a hunting story. It’s the most timeless story imaginable. . With the tropes and themes remaining largely unchanged for thousands of years. To hunt for the hunt is to create a story, and naturally I wanted to share it. Sleeping on the ground, the limitless horizon, the strange feeling of total solitude and constant company. The daring moves to make a shot or the one that got away, tough, wild creatures and meat over a fire. I am in love with that classic story and I think I’ll repeat it as many times as I can.
Modern hunting is a weird landscape. Add into that the way media has taken such a commanding place within it and its no wonder that a guy like me started picking up a camera. Filming has become a rather integral part of my hunting; it gives me a creative outlet that I can’t seem to satisfy by just recreationally hunting. The trials of figuring out how cameras work and how to film hunts are in so many ways similar to my trials as a beginner hunter.
Hunting media has become a consistent element of the wider hunting industry. From the Instagram hunter to the sponsored and heavily produced tv shows and films made to promote various hunting gear and products. It’s easy to put a negative spin on the nature of the beast. The hunting industry globally has come a long way from the ‘grip’n grins’ and cut off blue jean stubbies of the past. It’d be fair to say hunting has become a much more romantic activity than in times gone by. Before it was pure recreation and meat hunting, but now has become much more commercialised and promotional of our way of life, mainly out of necessity. This has become divisive in the US as new hunters flock from all over the states, to the western regions to get a slice of the ‘wild experience.’ Hipster hunters they are deemed. The onset of social media platforms like Instagram and you tube have given the everyday hunter the ability to share his adventures at the tap of a touch screen. There’s also bin a substantial bleed over from American and European hunting ethics, with mixed results. Reading this it would be easy to mistake my thoughts on the modern landscape of hunting media to be negative. Rather I’d deem it a somewhat indifferent approach to the current situation that we find ourselves in.
Hunting has changed for the better in many ways. Ethics, management, conservation and the portrayal of our hunting psyche have never been more important to define and broadcast to the world. Social media has in many ways rooted out the bad aspects of hunting by betraying them to the wider media, kill shot compilations and those bullet damage photos don’t exactly portray us as anything other than psychopathic killers. Animal rights activists and the (for lack of a better term) anti fire arm side of politics have never encroached on the everyday person’s ability to hunt more than now. So hunting media and films have a place, educating the non-hunting public as well as providing entertainment. New Zealand’s hunting community does find itself in a very difficult situation. Let go of the mistakes of the past along with the thick as grass roots Kiwi culture to evolve into something that is better at promoting and thus defending itself. Or hold onto the things that make NZ hunting what it is and endanger our rights and ability to hunt, from inevitable external politics. The obvious answer is that we need to do both. We can keep a handle on the steering wheel of modern hunting without letting go of our bold and wild history. How hard that will be, I do not know. What I do know, is that I want to be a part of it, and hopefully you do too.
