Expedition: Backyard

Waiting is a built-in feature to most natural history shoots. Waiting for wildlife to appear. Waiting for wildlife to behave. Waiting for your tea to steep.

There’s a version of this story where Vancouver Island-based Maxwel Hohn just…waits.

He waits for the next big series. Waits for the call to send him on assignment somewhere (ideally cold, remote and watery) to film something extraordinary.

But in an era of slowing commissions and shrinking budgets, what if the story is already right in front of you?

Born and raised on BC’s coastline, Hohn has spent most of his life in and around the ocean - first as a dive guide, then as a commercial diver, and finally as a cinematographer.

He’s filmed around the world - from Indonesia to the High Arctic - with his work featured in high profile series like Our Planet II, Secrets of the Octopus and Island of the Sea Wolves.

The work is undeniably exciting and has brought Maxwel accolades including an Emmy win. Yet every time he would return from these far-flung expeditions, he couldn’t help but look around - at his friends, his neighbours and colleagues on the coast and think - there are a thousand stories here that no one is telling.

In Maxwel’s words: “I just had all these stories in my back pocket that I'd always wanted to shoot."

So last year, when Maxwel was brought on to film a few days on West Harbour Heroes - a series about BC locals whose lives are centred around the ocean, Maxwel knew he was in the right spot. It was time to get these long-gestating stories out into the world.
Coast guard crews. Indigenous land guardians. Kelp researchers. Urchin harvesters. Legendary scuba divers. The people that have been out there the whole time doing remarkable things quietly, without a camera around.

Maxwel pitched the stories, and almost all of them got made. It wasn’t long before he was on board as one of the producers and series directors.

“It just kept spiralling. From a couple of days of shooting to six months, nonstop.”

And it wasn’t just the job titles that changed for Maxwel during production. The experience took him out of the cold embrace of underwater cinematography to dry land, following people, doing interviews, and being more concerned with audio recording than he’s ever been in his career.

But it turns out, Maxwel was just as much in his element here, and the fundamentals of the work weren’t that different from natural history.

He was still finding the story every day. Yes, these are people and stories he’d spent years thinking about. But each shoot brought surprises and forced him to adapt - just like on a wildlife shoot.

(There was likely less time waiting for humans to behave, but probably just as much time waiting for the tea to steep.)

But more than anything, it proved to Maxwel that his hunches were right. These are stories well worth telling.

It reinforces the core truth that compelling stories are often much closer than we think.

Whether it’s the nesting hummingbird in your local park, or the bees in your garden (or helicopter-assisted beach clean-up commando team, as documented by Hohn in West Harbour Heroes), there is value to narrowing your focus to what is close to home.

This idea is central to DenSyte. We have productions from around the world that aren’t looking for generic wildlife footage. They’re looking for material that is deeply specific to a place, species or community.

That local story you've been meaning to document for years may be exactly what productions are looking for next.


West Harbour Heroes premieres June 16 on USA Network and June 17 on Crave.
Follow Maxwel on Instagram.