CALL OF THE WILD
The outdoors-obsessed Pace brothers decided that job satisfaction trumps cashflow so started making stalking, shooting and fishing films in Scotland’s remotest corners, with stunning results, as Byron Pace explains
Modern shooting, stalking and fishing with the Pace brothers
We wanted to facilitate a rewriting of the hunting narrative; to uncover the modern hunter and why hunting is essential
Iremember the moment distinctly. The smell, the sounds, the unequivocal disinterest in the twinned screens of financial data before me. Metrics shifting, risks being analysed, banks and banks of computers scrutinised by critical eyes.
I saw someone lose it once, snapping in a rage of frustration at the neverending grind of an existence he had clearly begun to question. With a verbal tirade aimed mainly at his computer and the hurling of a chair across the office, we never saw him again. He had broken.
I, too, was desperate to find an out. I had an honours degree in economics and was working for the biggest investment company in the world. I should have been happy, I should have belonged, with a fast-track up the ladder and assignments to India and London already undertaken before the end of my second year.
One morning I looked around the office, clocking some of the big cheeses. I realised some day I could have their jobs but I knew I didn’t want their lives. I typed up my resignation letter there and then and put it on my manager’s desk.
Fast-forward six years, a post graduate study in petroleum engineering and two years offshore as a drilling fluids engineer, I find myself here, a place that gets harder to define as time passes.
It started two years ago. My brother had just returned after a year’s commercial diving, having quit his position in the navy as a mine clearance diver. I was still offshore, about to hit the worst oil downturn since the year I was born, in 1987.
Darryl was at a bit of a loose end, doing less-than-fulfilling jobs, and although I managed to keep my job through the crash, the lifestyle I had signed up to, with six months off a year to pursue my love of hunting and fishing, wasn’t really working out any more.
I can’t recall the catalyst that pushed us towards film production. I had done a little filming for YouTube channels, but never to any real standard. My brother had no experience apart from being an avid amateur photographer. We both shared a passion for the outdoors and adventure, and at the time we were seeing the rapid rise in the use of video and film for advertising, often through social media. The landscape had changed drastically in only a few short years within the film production space. Technology, which had been completely out of reach for many people, had suddenly become affordable for smaller companies.
No longer was high quality, slick filming confined to the larger production houses. Drones, Steadicams, 4k cameras and 120-frame-per-second capture was all available for modest sums of money. However, it was blatantly obvious that the output from smaller production houses in the UK within the fieldsports industry were light-years behind our American counterparts.
My brother and I watched the stunning imagery and great storytelling coming out of the States from the likes of Jim Shockey, his son Branlin, Ivan Carter and Donnie Vincent, and we had nothing even close here. Even today, we haven’t quite reached that combination of quality and engaging, relatable hunting stories which resonate with the wider public.
That was where we set the bar; we wanted to tell great stories. We didn’t want to get bogged down in high-volume, churned-out content for a weekly YouTube show. It’s impossible without large budgets to maintain the quality with this model and there simply isn’t enough time in the day for a two-man team. Our aim was high-end production, with great storytelling at the core.
We were very aware of the social shifts upon us, not just domestically, but internationally with regards to attitudes towards hunting. We were on the back foot, and still are, although I think we are beginning to move in the right direction. We wanted to help facilitate a re-writing of the hunting narrative; to uncover the modern hunter, and why despite the changes upon us, hunting is not only relevant, but essential. Film seemed like the best way to do this.
I carried on working in oil for a year to help fund the business while Darryl went full-time. We picked up some work for the local moorland groups, making films about grouse management, hare culling, grouse counting, tweed, honey bees and moorland biodiversity to name just a few. Many of
these featured in national newspapers, with two shown in the Scottish Parliament. To date, we have had four films used for various purposes in Holyrood.
During the first 12 months, we also sourced sponsorship for our own six-part series, Into the Wilderness. Now complete, it is free to view on YouTube. The concept was simple: the story was never to be about the kill, it was to be about the hunt. It had to be understandable to the non-hunter, and importantly, relatable. These were long-form, high production films, which were the exact opposite of what had been coming out of the UK. Despite this, it worked.
Quite a lot of our subsequent business spawned from having set a look, feel and narrative which had connected with many. At the beginning, we knew nothing. Everything was trial and error, testing and application with the help of YouTube. The learning curve has been incredibly steep, and we work more hours now than I ever did in my previous jobs, but never have I felt so satisfied.
We have now worked with a large proportion of the major brands within the shooting industry and added Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Nepal and South Africa to our filming repertoire in 2017. With Uganda, Svalbard and New Zealand already booked in for 2018, we are busy but we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Our business has continued to expand and we have taken on another part-time team member focused on design work, while expanding our photography to include visual effects plates. In 2017, we provided some of the green screen imagery for blockbuster movie Alien: Covenant owing to our knowledge of locations and our ability to operate in challenging terrain.
Moving into a position where we can pick our projects, our focus turns increasingly towards the stories and films which will help to educate society.
To this end, for the last two years, we have also run the Into the Wilderness podcast. We were the first to set up a hunting-, fishing-and conservation-focused podcast in the UK, with our mantra ‘Conservation through education’.
Our discussions are there to help educate hunters and the public alike. We hear from knowledgeable people from around the world, covering topics from exploration to fishing and the complexities of wildlife management and conservation.
The feedback has been incredible and encouraging and as we push on into the rest of 2018 we will continue telling stories of the countryside in a way that can be digested by the greater public, engaging with a society increasingly disconnected with the landscape and the wildlife around us.
The story was never to be about the kill, it was to be about the hunt