highdef magazine

AN INTERVIEW WITH VALERIE AND SIMON GRIFFITH, BLUE MOON PRODUCTION
by David Thompson

They first met in Fiji, re-acquainted in Denver, rendezvoused in London, backpacked across Africa, married in Italy, moved to New Zealand, relocated to Denver, and settled in Seattle. That’s how Valerie and Simon Griffith, both avid travelers, became husband and wife and currently the producers of two separate PBS world travel series, Art Wolfe’s Travels to the Edge and Rick Steves’ Europe. David Thompson, Editor of HighDef Magazine interviewed them during a brief break in their schedule.

Tell me about your company.

V – (Valerie): You are looking at Blue Moon Productions as it consists of Simon and me. We are a very small video and television production company here in Seattle, Washington. Most recently we’ve been employed by Edge of the Earth Productions for Art Wolfe’s Travels to the Edge, now in its second season. It’s an HD travel adventure photography program.

S – (Simon): It is just the two of us and we’re both freelance producers. I also have a pretty regular gig with Rick Steves doing a European travel series. I’ve been involved with eighty some-odd shows and still going strong. I do other freelance work as well and I also help on the Art Wolfe series. I help assist Val with some of the technical stuff.

V: We are a very small team. I have a producer role in the pre-production and post production. The only thing that I don’t do is go out into the field with the crew. I hired the crew and, with Simon’s assistance, put together a great team of people. I help set up all the shoots and figure out the complicated travel arrangements. There is a lot of permitting to do along with visas. I am greatly assisted by Chris Eckhoff who is Art Wolfe’s Business Manager. On the series she’s the Executive Producer, wearing lots of hats working directly with Art. We work very closely together on the pre-production stuff. On post, I work with three different editors who edit all of the shows remotely at their homes. We go to various post facilities to finalize each episode. I don’t go on location other than vicariously, partially because our producing season is so short based on budgetary constraints.

S: I’m a freelance series producer for Rick Steves’ Europe and have been with him since 1999. I got my start with Rick when he asked me to go to an area that he was not familiar with which was Egypt and Israel. After that experience Rick wanted to know if I would like to do more shows. I’ve been with him ever since. It’s been a very interesting process because he’s very consistent and probably one of Public Television’s favorite personalities. He produces 13 new shows every two years like clockwork. It’s the same tiny little team including the cameraman, Rick and myself. Rick knows where he wants to go and he knows what he wants to do. In our case it is quite different from the Art Wolfe series. We go out with pre-written scripts or at least very good guidelines that we shoot from. We will often drop elements or add elements, but it is pretty organized. Because of the way Rick is and how he runs his business, we are extraordinarily efficient. We have a very low shooting ratio because we know what we’re after.

With such a tiny crew, I tend to do everything and our roles overlap. We all know what we’re looking for. I carry a ton of gear as well. Part of Rick’s travel philosophy is to teach his travelers to travel light, something he has us emulate. Considering that we are shooting in HD and HDCam with minimal lighting equipment, we are probably one of the lightest weight crews out there.

What are the similarities and differences in your freelance jobs?

V: The pre-production process for both of us is not too dissimilar and the post is very similar. Simon works from a fairly tidy script and the edit kind of falls into place. For Travels we take between 25 to 30 hours of footage and watch it all. Then it’s up to us to find some kind of rhythm and develop a story by pulling out all the best sound bites. We use music in a very innovative way. Then there are Art’s still images which we incorporate into our shows. We have this organic process that just sort of happens in the edit. That’s the part of it that I love the most. It’s all a surprise. Because I haven’t been in the field, I don’t know what we’re going to see. Sometimes it’s challenging and sometimes it is an embarrassment of riches. It just depends upon the location. Sometimes the weather has not cooperated. We shot a show up in Northern Australia in the Kimberly which is very rugged and it consists of beautiful deep gorges and red rock, but the light is only good for about an hour on each side of the day. The crew was traveling everywhere trying to shoot a show in two or three hours.

S: Rick Steves’ Europe is more of a formula show. One show that was a bit of an exception was a one hour special we did on Iran. That was the one case where it was closer to the manner in which Val produces. Usually Rick is a walking encyclopedia because he knows a place and has been there before. None of us knew what was around the corner. We were writing as we went, structuring it in the field. We ultimately put together a great show with extraordinary positive response.

V: The other thing that Simon does with Rick that’s interesting is something they call “scrubbing their script”. They’ll shoot and then they will be driving and they will be refining the script based on what they shot that day, based on what’s going on in Rick’s and Simon’s brain. It’s a constant process of polishing.

S: We also include the camera guy. There is never a down moment for the three of us. You are constantly revising the script. So when we come home we have a script that we can start editing to. When Val’s tapes come home it is just the beginning. Neither Art nor Rick participate in the editing process. They will both view rough cuts and make minor suggestions, but generally entrust the post process to others.

Has Art Wolfe’s Travels to the Edge always been produced in HD?

V: From the get-go it has been produced in HDV with Canon H1 cameras. They are small, light, rugged and durable which is the reason we use them. We use an interchangeable wide angle lens along with a regular lens. The first season we edited native so we stayed in HDV. The second season we reduced render times by using a small converter box to edit in DVCPro HD.

How about the Rick Steves’ Europe series?

S: I was able to convince Rick to change to HD about three years ago. We shoot in HDCam. We have over 40 half-hour shows shot in HD and a huge archive of wonderful HD footage of Europe. Our workflow is different than Val’s. We shoot HDCam, down convert to BetaSP, offline in BetaSp, and reconform in HD, doing color correction as we output to HDCam. It works really well for us and we’re very happy with the final product and the look.

On the Art Wolfe series, at the beginning I was concerned how the HDV would hold up. What we discovered is that if a scene is fairly well lit and well shot, and you are not pushing HDV in terms of wanting to do lots of effects or composites, it does very well. The colorist we use at Victory Studios, Seattle is John Davidson and he has been very impressed with the consistent quality of the HDV footage. With his help, we’ve achieved the gorgeous images that the Art Wolfe series demands.

What are the pluses of using Highdef?

S: When you see a close up of a flower or other things in nature, the imagery is stunning, and wide shots hold up so much better than in standard definition.

V: It’s really important when your show is about a photographer and his images. The video has to look as good as the stills. We use a lot of stills in each episode, somewhere between 35 and 40 images. When you are dissolving off a still to moving footage you want it to be as seamless and beautiful as possible and with HD it does.

What does the future hold for both shows?

V: There are no guarantees, but Travels has been very well received and we’re looking forward to jumping back into production for season three in January 2010.

S: Rick Steves’ just keeps on going and going. He has this extraordinary synergistic relationship between his books, his TV show, his tours and it just all works together. We’re going to Eastern Europe later this spring to do three shows and then on to several Scandinavian countries and the Baltic States after that.