A crew from Bamboo Shoots Video Production, out of Saskatoon, was in Prince Albert National Park filming segments of the Saskatchewan Search and Rescue Association of Volunteers (SARSAV) Search and Rescue training May 27.
“What we’re doing is a 13-part series on searching,” Doug Cuthand, one of the producers of the potential series, said in an interview with the Northern Advocate.
“We’re going to be shooting this all summer long and it’ll be aired next year on APTN (Aboriginal People’s Television Network).”
Cuthand, who was a. producer for a year on the series, The Other Side, and the Late Tracker Tom Charles, of La Ronge, “was working on that, but he was also a tracker. We’re very interested in his work as a tracker, so we put this series together … we were planning to produce it. Then, we found out Tome was sick. But we kept the idea alive because we knew there were lots of other people out there. We just had to do more research and find them,” Cuthand said.
Filming on the series will begin in June. The team is also continually exploring different search activity completed in the province and beyond in preparation for creation and development of the series as it evolves.
“We’re going to interview some of the people that were involved and then do a reinactment of it … so to tell a story,” Cuthand said.
They are exploring stories of searches in Saskatchewan and may move it out to Alberta, Manitoba, perhaps even internationally as the series evolves, he said.
So why the search and rescue training?
“We may shoot an actual search but then we’ll throw in a vignette, maybe three or four minutes long, of something that shows how they train,” Cuthand said.
The clips could include, one on fire-building, another on hypothermia wrapping of a person found with symptoms of hypothermia.
“These are interesting things. One of the instructors was showing how to have a kit and what you should have in your kit. Matches, warm blanket and so forth. So, anybody travelling in the north should rig up something like this and throw it in the back of the car/truck. And we’ll show that as the way of making people aware, sort of like a public service – making people aware to prepare for the worse kind of thing,” he said. Otter Lake is one of the areas, Cuthand said, would be part of the series. “We’ll be doing some work at Otter Lake on the searches they’ve had up there.”
