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they attend to animals in the Arctic. According to Echo Bay co-founder Andre Dupuis, who often wears the hats of director and DP, the crews tend to be small, consisting of four or five people, max. "I'll direct and I'll also shoot," says Dupuis. "I usually have a second shoot- er, or that person can function as my camera assistant. And then we have an audio guy — that would be Scott Wilson, my business partner. But he also has his pilot's license and drone license, so he'll also be doing the drone stuff as well. And he'll (also) function as a field producer, and has helped by doing the DIT stuff at the end of the day." The nature of their work often takes them to remote locations, and as such, they rely on SpaceX's Starlink low laten- cy, broadband internet solution. "In my experience — and I have worked on productions where we have huge crews in the field — I just find you can kind of crush the authenticity of the places you're in. So sometimes I think, for documentaries, smaller is better." Echo Bay has used a range of cameras over the years. Over the Horizon was ca- putured using Red cameras, but recently, the studio has developed an affinity for Blackmagic Design's Pocket Cinema Camera 6K. "Those are awesome," he says of the 6K model. "I wish they had a little bit more dynamic range, but they're still great. There's 13 stops of dynamic range. They're small. They're light. We just fin- ished a project last month that was shot entirely on those cameras." The studio will work with outside edi- tors once a show is greenlit, but for their initial teaser, they'll cut it themselves. They've used Final Cut Pro in the past, as well as Adobe Premiere, so the transition to DaVinci Resolve was relatively seam- less, says Dupuis. "It's a very easy jump to go into DaVinci for editing," he notes. "I love the ability to be editing a scene, and because I'm a DP, I really like thinking of color and image all the time. I love just flipping into the color panel and messing with a shot, and then putting that into the edit." Dupuis sees post workflows evolving and says in the past, they would edit in Premiere and then create an XML export for color grading as the final part of the post process. "I started to really like working at the same time. I can jump back and forth. I can jump into Fusion to work on a sky replacement. I can do some advanced motion tracking…So jumping back and forth, I find for me, the way I work, very, very beneficial to have it all in one app." Color grading, says Dupuis, is a key component for delivering a successful travel documentary. "It is the hardest thing to communi- cate," he says of the wind and freezing temperatures the crew experiences during location shoots. "Everyone's watching that show in the comfort of their home, and you're suffering…so you have to augment with all the tools at your disposal, and color is one of the most important tools." Echo Bay makes used of Blackmagic Design's cloud collaboration tools to share footage with the team. Because media is in the cloud, he can seamlessly jump from his MacBook to his iPad to cut dailies or perform a one-light color pass. "I could export them with timecode. I can AirDrop it to everyone on the team. Everyone's very excited to see what we shot yesterday, so it just makes it really easy by having these tools in the field." When he's in the field, he'll use the iPad to work with proxy files. "For me, the beauty of the iPad is it's just the iPad," he explains. "I don't neces- sarily want to have hard drives hanging off of it. I like to just copy it. I've been using proxies in the field like that. (In the future) I could see the benefit of sending proxies back to the home base, where the post team is putting metadata on all of the clips." Once the metadata is added to the clips, he can easily search media for interview topics and dialogue. And be- tween his MacPro and the iPad, viewing 6K media in the field isn't a problem for Dupuis, who says Echo Bay consistently finishes programming in 4K, and more recently, in HDR. "That's another benefit of having my MacBook and iPad in the field," he explains. "If I wanted to do a great HDR (pass), I can tether the iPad to the MacBook as a reference monitor and reference mode. Yes, it's not a proper grading studio to do the final, but I've gotten really good results grading in the field like that." Next up for Echo Bay is a series called Ice Dog, which follows adventurer Oliver Solaro as he tries to ride his heavily- modified BMW motorcycle to the North Pole. REVIEW www.postmagazine.com 33 POST MAR/APR 2023 An Ice Dog shoot in the Arctic. Dupuis will edit and grade on his iPad. Echo Bay's Andre Dupuis, in the field.